The Post-Gazette's arts critics were asked to select some of the most famous examples of paintings, music, TV shows, plays and movies that contain dream themes. Here are their choices:

Movies

Hollywood used to be called the dream factory, and dreams (and nightmares) factor into many a movie.

Frank Sinatra's character was haunted by nightmares in the conspiracy thriller "The Manchurian Candidate." In the contemporary puzzler "Vanilla Sky," Tom Cruise was a playboy who kept waking up from very lifelike and often bizarre dreams.

In the little-seen "Passion of Mind," Demi Moore played a woman who went to bed as Marie - a widowed mother living in the south of France - and became Marty, a single, childless Manhattan literary agent residing in an artsy loft.

As we said at the time of its release, David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" felt less like a narrative drama than a fevered dream. And in "A Nightmare on Elm Street," a girl pleaded with a young Johnny Depp to stay awake and help her nab Freddy Krueger. He snoozed and went out in a blaze of blood.

Among the many movies dealing with dreams or dreamlike stories:

"The Wizard of Oz" - At the end of this beloved 1939 classic, Auntie Em tries to tell Dorothy Gale, "We dream lots of silly things...." But Dorothy, who is back in her own bedroom after a color-saturated adventure, insists, "This is a real, truly live place. And I remember that some of it wasn't very nice. But most of it was beautiful." Those of us who accompanied her on that gust to Oz know it was real, flying monkeys and all.

"Spellbound" - Director Alfred Hitchcock, plus stars Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. Some reviewers might call that a dream team. This 1945 thriller about psychoanalysis was notable for a surreal dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali.

"The City of Lost Children"- Directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet created this arresting fantasy in 1995. It's dreamlike in every way imaginable: from its gloomy, nightmarish or otherworldly settings to its theme about what happens when a man cannot dream and tap into that sleepy source of imagination. Among its characters is an evil scientist named Krank who lives on a rig off shore and steals the dreams of children to stem his premature aging.

"The Prince of Egypt" - One of the most stunning scenes in this 1998 animated biblical epic occurs during a dream sequence in which Moses learns of the savagery of the Pharaoh Seti, with hieroglyphics on the palace wall coming to life. They depict the killing of children by soldiers in a passage that is animated but nevertheless moving.

"Waking Life" - Richard Linklater directed this 2001 film about a man who enters a dream state that he can't seem to wake from. It was shot on digital video and painted over with computer imagery. It's filled with questions such as, are we sleep-walking through our waking state or wake-walking through our dreams?

-- By Barbara Vancheri

Classical music

No art form better conveys the experience of dreaming than classical music, regardless of whether the expressed purpose of a work is to mimic a dream state.

The music promotes dreamlike mental flights of fancy for listeners. With the varied instruments of the orchestra, composers can draw upon a tremendous range of color to achieve such effects.

In this regard, every opera, symphony or solo work has a dreamlike quality to it, often probing emotion or thought.

But some opuses specifically plumb the subject of dreams. Here are a few:

Hector Berlioz, "Symphonie fantastique": Two dream movements bookend this quintessential musical depiction of opium-induced dreams. Subtitled "Episode in the Life of an Artist," it depicts a protagonist's encounters with the woman he loves. The five-movement symphony begins with "Daydreams, passions," in which he meets his beloved, and ends with "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath," in which he is tormented by their breakup. The depiction feels hauntingly real, especially in the use of a recurring motif coined by Berlioz as the "idee fixe" - a musical version of the obsessive "thoughts" he has about his beloved. The king of dream theory in that era, Freud, picked up the term for some of his theories.

Benjamin Britten, "The Turn of the Screw": On the surface, the opera is a ghost tale, based on a Henry James story, but the libretto and music push for an alternative reading - that the supernatural events stem from the imagination of the troubled Governess while asleep at night.

Felix Mendelssohn; Britten, "A Midsummer Night's Dream": Shakespeare's classic play has inspired many composers, including Mendelssohn (incidental music for orchestra) and Britten (an opera). Mendelssohn's work includes the famous "Wedding March," which has produced nightmares and blissful dreams alike.

Peter Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 1, "Winter Dreams": The great Russian composer labeled the first movement of this early opus "Dreams of a Winter Journey," though commentators over the years have wondered how a Russian winter could sound so, well, warm. Maybe that was Tchaikovsky's point in calling it a dream, rather than a strict description.

Richard Strauss, "Elektra": Nightmares play a central role in this opera, but not in the abstract manner of "The Turn of the Screw." Queen Clytemnestra is continuously disrupted by nightmares that ruin her sleep. She confers with her daughter Elektra about them, which isn't the best idea since Elektra is out to kill her mother (and her mother's new lover) to avenge her father's death. Sometimes nightmares are better than reality, aren't they?

-- By Andrew Druckenbrod

Television

Here are my picks for the top three TV dreams:

"Dallas": A year in real-world time after he was killed off, Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) emerged from the shower and viewers learned the past season of their favorite '80s soap had been the dream of one of its characters, Pam Ewing (Victoria Principal).

"Ally McBeal": The Boston lawyer of the title, played to flustered perfection by Calista Flockhart, often daydreamed herself into fantasy sequences or imagined things (like the dancing baby), but she also had a healthy dream life. It usually consisted of musings about her latest romantic entanglement in her sleep.

"Twin Peaks": While investigating a murder in the Pacific Northwest, FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) often found himself in a dream-like state, sitting in "the red room" conversing with a backwards-speaking, dancing dwarf.

-- Rob Owen

Art

Dreams have inspired visual artists throughout time, and continue to do so today. But the group of artists who garnered the most attention for their use of dream-like imagery were the Surrealists, inspired by Freudian theory and most active from the 1920's to the 1940's.

Among works of art that project visions of reality gone awry are:

Salvador Dali's 1931 painting "The Persistence of Memory" which, with its slumping clock faces, distorted foreground figure and spare landscape, is probably the most well-know Surrealist work. Find it at: www.mystudios.com/treasure/dali/dali.html

Similarly ingrained in popular culture is Surrealist Rene Magritte's 1953 painting "The Fall," a shower of solemn, standing men in black-coated and bowler hats descending through a pale sky over a row of plain-fronted town houses.

Find it at: www.abcgallery.com/M/magritte/magritte62.html

Less likely to be reproduced on posters and popularized then the Surrealists' works, but more probing and powerful, is Francisco Goya's print "The Sleep of Reason," in which a man who's nodded off in a chair is surrounded by demons and winged beasts. It's part of Goya's late 18th century Los Caprichos series, a criticism of political and social ills. Find it at: www.abcgallery.com/G/goya/goya135.html

While Goya's print doesn't adorn dorm rooms in mass numbers, it did inspire an evocative video installation, also titled "The Sleep of Reason," by contemporary American artist Bill Viola. The viewer stands in a carpeted gallery where a monitor on a dresser shows a man or woman sleeping. Without warning, the surrounding walls erupt with flashing nightmarish images and sounds, only to die down, and repeat.

The 1988 work is in the Carnegie Museum of Art collection. Find it at: www.sfmoma.org/espace/viola/dhtml/content/viola_gallery_fp/BV03.html

--Mary Thomas

Theater

Like most things, it all goes back to Shakespeare. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," says Prospero, "and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

So life itself is a dream.

If that dismays you, here's a simpler proposition: All plays are dreams of a kind, products of the partly sub-rational imagination. Freud has a few things to say about this, but Shakespeare was there before him. As Theseus puts it, "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact," and since he says it in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," we understand there's a fourth member of that crew, the dreamer, who is clearly also a creator of imaginary worlds. In essence, "Midsummer Night's Dream" tells us that imagination (art, dreams) is essential to refreshing our waking life - without it, we turn brittle, bureaucratic, static and violent. Artists have always known more about the power of dreams than scientists, though in research on the value of REM sleep, science has been catching up with "Midsummer Night's Dream."

But as Theseus' inclusion of "lunatic" implies, the dreams of art are not guaranteed to be positive, no more than the dreams (nightmares) of life. "To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub," Hamlet worries: "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come -- must give us pause."

Indeed. You might dream like Kafka, whose "Metamorphosis" and "Mouse Singer" have been turned into plays that teeter toward nightmare. Some of today's most accomplished, adventuresome masters of stage magic play with hallucinatory states, probing reality through dream images -- Theatre de la Complicite, Robert LePage, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson. You even find this in popular stage art, in the creations of Cirque du Soleil.

More obviously, there's the kind of story that turns out in retrospect to have been a dream all along - "The Wizard of Oz," for example, and "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge," both movies. I can't think offhand of plays like that, but there must be several. What about all the plays based on "Alice in Wonderland"? There's also "The Taming of a Shrew," the mysterious Elizabethan analog to Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," in which the drunken Sly wakes up and thinks the whole story has been his dream. Or J.B. Priestley's "An Inspector Calls," where the whole story turns out to have been a ghostly precursor to the real thing.

There are plays and even more musicals with dream inserts, like Laurie's dream ballet (really a nightmare) in "Oklahoma!" or (differently) the brilliant hallucinatory excursions in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." And Pittsburgh's TammyRyan has just written a play, "The Confluence of Dreams," where four characters' dreams overlap and intertwine.

At the simplest level, there are plays with "dream" in the title, including 40-some on the Internet Broadway database (www.iBdb.com), among them the well-known "Dreamgirls," "Bombay Dreams," "Pipe Dream," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and Edward Albee's "The American Dream" -- which is no dream at all.

Here's my list of five representative, significant dream plays:

Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," 1595. "I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was," says the generally witless Bottom, and indeed, the exact dimensions of the dreaming in this great comedy are perplexing us still.

Calderon, "Life Is a Dream" ("La Vida es sueno"), 1631. A famous philosophical comedy about a royal heir brought up in a dungeon, then brought to power, then returned to captivity, then restored, each time being told that his previous life was a dream. Even in the throes of a happy ending he fears that he may be dreaming still.

Strindberg, "A Dream Play" ("Ett dromspel"), 1902. A pilgrimage play in which the daughter of Indra comes to view life on earth and finds nothing but suffering and despair -- but promises to speak up for us poor mortals when she gets home.

		Dreams: Day 1 INDEX

Christopher Durang, "The Actor's Nightmare," 1979. Just what you'd expect: Which play am I in and why don't I know my lines? A very frantic comedy.

Paula Vogel, "The Baltimore Waltz," 1991. A loving sister and the brother who is dying of AIDS take off on a surreal trip to Europe - fantasy? dream? metaphor?

After all this, let's give Puck the last word: "Think you have but slumbered here, while these visions have appeared, and this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream." "Nothing but" a dream, indeed!

-- Christopher Rawson