"to open with the most profoundly personal of his dreams, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (fig.

"to open with the most profoundly personal of his dreams, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (fig. 8). The image, which has the self-searching poignancy of another engraved masterpiece, Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I, verges likewise on the autobiographical, showing the artist overwhelmed by the torments of his own mind. Having survived the still relatively recent hallucinatory fevers that brought him near death, Goya could envision himself the anguished draftsman, besieged by diabolical night creatures and forced to succumb to the hideous darkness of the irrational. The artist's revelation of his own shadowy descent properly sets the stage for his extended pictorial indictment of society's lapses."

Text describing Goya's sketch "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" from the book "Goya in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" by Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein.
http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15324coll10/id/69569