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Blake announces in the first chapter of Jerusalem that the inspiration of his “more consolidated and extended work,” its theme appearing repetitively in sleep, is generated in the process of dreaming:
Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life.This theme calls me in sleep night after night, &ev'ry mornAwakes me at sun-rise, then I see the Saviour over me Spreading his beams of love, &dictating the words ofthis mild song.1
Fuseli declared in his 231st Aphorism that dreams were one of the most unexplored regions of art. However, dreams were certainly not a region Blake left unexplored, for he frequently links dreams to truth, wisdom, prophecy, vision, and artistic inspiration. The Four Zoas was originally subtitled “A DREAM of Nine Nights,” and Blake's designs for the dreams in the Bible and in the work of other artists like Milton, for example, bear testimony to an abiding interest not only in dreams, but in interpreting them.
That the significance of dreams in Blake's art was radically different from their importance to the theories of knowledge and sensation then current in neoclassical thought is hardly surprising, for neoclassical theories held not that dreams provide “gleams of a remoter world” from which an artist might nourish his imagination, but that they constituted odd nocturnal concoctions of waking thought. For an artist whose first works of engraved art, “There is No Natural Religion” and “All Religions are One,” attack sensationalist