Many consider dreams to be a door into the subconscious mind. The hidden truths they reveal can appear in various forms. Nightmares that evoke disgust, shame, or sorrow or terrify you to your very core are one. Or they could show up as a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime experience you don’t want to wake up from—and just about everything in between. For some, they can even inspire masterpieces, the likes of which the world has never seen. Check out these 10 masterful works of art, music, literature, or film inspired by dreams.

Related: Ten Renowned Artists Who Were Unappreciated in Life

10 “#9 Dream” (1974): John Lennon

After a months-long bout of writer’s block, John Lennon fell into a “half-sleep” and heard a mysterious voice speak to him in a language he didn’t understand. The sound jolted him from his sleep, and the words kept playing in his mind: “Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé.” For the first time in months, lyrics flowed freely. Lennon discussed the process of writing the song in an interview with BBC:

“That’s what I call craftsmanship writing, meaning, you know, I just churned that out. I’m not putting it down, it’s just what it is, but I just sat down and wrote it, you know, with no real inspiration, based on a dream I’d had.”

May Pang, an Apple Corps employee with whom Lennon had a Yoko-Ono-authorized short affair, described the track as one of his favorite songs from his 1974 album Walls and Bridges:

“This was one of John’s favourite songs… because it literally came to him in a dream. He woke up and wrote down those words along with the melody. He had no idea what it meant, but he thought it sounded beautiful. John arranged the strings in such a way that the song really does sound like a dream.”^[1]

9 Songs of Innocence (1789): William Blake

William Blake, an English poet, artist, and printmaker, pioneered a printing method he used to create some of his most famous works. These include Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, two illustrated books of poetry that provide a “profound commentary on the human condition, from the purity of youth [Songs of Innocence] to the harsh realities of life [Songs of Experience].” To create the “illuminated” works, Blake used copper plates for the text and illustrations, then finished each picture by hand with watercolors.

Even more unique than the artworks was the inspiration for the printing process used to make them, which Blake described as a dream in which his youngest brother, Robert, visited. Blake was training his brother in drawing, painting, and engraving when Robert suddenly fell ill during the winter of 1787. As Robert died, Blake claims to have watched his spirit rise through the ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy.” Robert continued to visit him after that, eventually showing him the printing method for which Blake would become renowned.^[2]

8 Waking Life (2001): Richard Linklater

An image near the beginning of independent filmmaker Richard Linklater’s movie Waking Life was based on one of his childhood dreams. In the scene, a 9-10-year-old boy wearing a striped T-shirt holds the handle of the family car when his body suddenly begins to float upward. A mysterious force appears to pull him up and away from the world and its “everyday reality.” Holding onto the car with all his strength, the boy resists the temptation to drift away.

“That’s a very early memory of mine,” said Linklater, “I call it a memory, but obviously it took place in a dream state. When you’re a little kid, you don’t really make the distinction that clearly. As you get older, you build up a solid model of real versus unreal, and you start depreciating the unreal. But that moment was weird. I remember it very clearly because it was scary but kind of exhilarating—a sort of non-gravity, upward pull away from what you felt the whole world was, but at the same time, there was some force begging me to stay. That was some strange memory.”^[3]

7 The Red Book (2009): Carl Jung

Carl Jung’s famous Red Book is a compilation of illustrated journal entries from a particularly dark period in his life when he was “haunted” by troubling visions and heard inner voices. He ultimately considered this time a “confrontation with the unconscious.” Though kept private during his lifetime, the entries were found and published after his death.

Journalist Sara Corbett describes The Red Book as “a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part – the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious—that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.”

Or, in Jung’s own words, “All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”^[4]

6 Frankenstein (1816): Mary Shelley + Other Classics

Mary Shelley wrote in her preface to the novel Frankenstein that her inspiration came from a nightmare she had while staying in Geneva with the poet Lord Byron. When she went to sleep, she wrote:

“I saw—with shut eyes but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion…”

Similarly, Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have developed the storyline for The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after a nightmare where he witnessed “a man forced into a cabinet after ingesting a potion that would ‘convert him into a brutal monster.’”

Another example is Bram Stroker’s (1897) Dracula. According to his son, Stoker claimed the book’s inspiration came from a nightmare induced by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper”—one of several theories supported by his notes.^[5]

5 Book of Dreams (1960): Jack Kerouac

Dreams were a consistent source of inspiration for American Writer Jack Kerouac, a pioneer of the Beat Generation of the 1950s. He believed they held a more profound meaning beyond the surface level and eventually published a collection of personal dream journal entries titled Book of Dreams. In it, he writes: “Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” Through his writing, Kerouac presents a fascinating insight into his mind and creative process while encouraging readers to examine their dreams as a powerful tool for self-discovery and artistic expression.

The Book of Dreams defies traditional structures and styles by its lack of organization. Divided into sections, each with its theme, there is no straightforward narrative or plot. Kerouac presents the dreams in a stream-of-consciousness style that reflects how dreams unfold. Also thrown into the mix is a dream that inspired Kerouac’s most famous novel, On the Road, in which he saw himself and his friend Neal Cassady driving cross-country in a car.^[6]

4 Dreamcatcher (2001): Stephen King

In 1990, a minivan smashed into Stephen King as he walked down a country road near his home in North Lovell, Maine. He underwent three operations and endured a months-long recovery, during which he experienced vivid dreams. Some of these dreams ultimately led to the creation of one of his best-selling novels, Dreamcatcher, later adapted as a film directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

“The first really strong idea that occurred to me after the accident was four guys in a cabin in the woods,” said King. “Then you introduce this one guy who staggers into the camp saying, ‘I don’t feel well,’ and he brings this awful hitchhiker with him. I dreamed a lot about that cabin and those guys in it.”

Due to the severity of his injuries, King was unable to type. He wrote the story in longhand in just six months. His vivid dreams were the closest he had gotten to the type of otherworldly phenomena present in so much of his work.^[7]

3 The Devil’s Trill Sonata (1799): Giuseppe Tartini

Giuseppe Tartini’s most famous musical piece, “Violin Sonata in G Minor”—more famously known as “The Devil’s Trill”—contains a dreamlike harmonic vibe and a melody that is hauntingly poignant and deeply dramatic. It is one of the most challenging scores to play, even by today’s standards. Equally stirring is the sonata’s inspiration: a nightmare in which Tartini made a deal with the devil.

Tartini explained in an interview with French astronomer Jerome Lalande just moments before his death on February 26, 1770:

“One night, in the year 1713, I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy.

I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the ‘Devil’s Trill,’ but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.”^[8]

2 Persistence of Memory (1931): Salvador Dali

Spanish artist Salvador Dali considered sleep as a tool that could fuel his Surrealist practice due to its connection to the unconscious mind. He would take many brief naps to enter into a “fleeting hyper-associative state,” enabling him to combine unpredictable associations and concepts to challenge perceptions and evoke dreams. It was a technique that became known as the Paranoiac-Critical Method. In the artist’s words, the technique was a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge” that allowed him to tap into his subconscious and explore the depths of his psyche.

The unusual method relied on self-induced paranoia and hallucinations, allowing Dali to accurately create “hand-painted dream photographs” that were simultaneously rotted in realism and fantasy, deliberately designed to confuse the viewer’s eye. He used this method to make many artworks, including one of his most iconic paintings, The Persistence of Memory. Dali hallucinated the entire scene before painting what he saw.^[9]

1 Avatar (2009): James Cameron

More than one idea for a movie scene has come from what James Cameron describes as his “spectacular dreams.” As he said in an interview with GQ magazine, “I have my own private streaming service that’s better than any of the sh*t out there. And it runs every night for free.”

Not only did he dream of the iconic scene in Aliens where Ripley sees the Alien Queen after standing in a silent room full of eggs, but his fantasy epic, Avatar, also came from his subconscious:

“I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiberoptic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it… And these kinds of lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something.”

When he woke up, he was so excited that he drew it. The drawing later saved him from at least ten lawsuits after some claimed he’d “beamed the idea out of their head.”^[10]

Artistic masterpieces, whether they are in visual, audio, or written form, often require a lengthy creative process that can take many months or even years to complete. That’s why it is so surprising to hear about a popular book being written in a matter of days, a hit song being composed in minutes, or famous paintings done in hours.

Sometimes the motivation for this accelerated creativity is tied to money, which is to be expected considering so many artists, even those who go on to become hugely successful, struggle financially prior to their breakthrough.

Here are 10 masterpieces that were churned out super fast.

Related: 10 Literary Masterpieces So Bad They’re Actually Pretty Good

10 Visage: Head of a Faun

Some professional painters have been known to create marketable work in just a couple of minutes, like the record-setting Morris Katz, who came up with a process called instant art. Using this quick-fire technique, he is said to have done 225,000 paintings.

Pablo Picasso had a reputation for being prolific as well, “estimated to have completed some 13,500 paintings in his life,” according to Artsy. In 1937 he produced his famous Guernica mural in just three weeks, and according to an oft-repeated anecdote, he once responded to a request for a portrait from a lady who approached him in a café by sketching her likeness on the back of a menu in five minutes. However, one of his most impressive quickie works is “Visage: Head of a Faun,” which he did for the 1955 documentary Le Mystère Picasso by Henri-Georges Clouzot. It was created in five minutes as the camera was rolling. The time constraint is due to Clouzot’s limited supply of film stock.

“Visage: Head of a Faun” was recently featured as part of the Picasso and Paper exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. During the few minutes Picasso spent on the drawing, he repeatedly transformed the piece, “taking it from flower to fish to chicken to face and builds up from a monochrome drawing with bright, saturated colors,” says Open Culture.^[1]

9 A Study in Scarlet

Although the majority of Sherlock Holmes tales are short stories, which were first published in magazines, the series author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, did write a few full-length novels led by the famous detective. The first of these was A Study in Scarlet, involving the discovery of a corpse at a rundown house.

Originally printed in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, it was later published in book format. Not only did this mark Sherlock Holmes’s debut as a character in literature, but it also describes the first meeting of Holmes and Watson. Additionally, it has the distinction of being the first Holmes story to be adapted to film. While the novel is relatively short, it is still impressive that Conan Doyle was able to write it in only three weeks, especially since this was the beginning of such an enormously popular franchise, which is still going strong more than 130 years later.^[2]

8 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The story of how Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic 1886 horror novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was created sounds like a kind of horror story in itself, especially to anyone who has ever tried to write a book.

The author, who was suffering from tuberculosis at the time and may have been under the effect of medicinal cocaine, had been toying with the basic concept of a story about dual identity. The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde idea came to him in a dream one night, which caused his wife Fanny to awaken him when she heard Stevenson screaming. He is thought to have written the original draft in three days. However, Fanny was so critical of the story that she burned it. Stevenson spent another three days rewriting the draft. Or, that’s how the story goes. It likely took him about six weeks, still a feat for such an impactful book.^[3]

7 “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”

Singer/songwriter/producer Terius Youngdell Nash—better known as The-Dream—may have just been kidding when he announced after arriving at the recording studio one day that he was going to write a song that would be the next big single for Beyoncé. But the results were anything but laughable. A single off Beyoncé’s 2008 I Am…Sasha Fierce album, the catchy, highly danceable, ultimatum-themed song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” took him 17 minutes to compose and made it all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Charts.

Insider quoted The-Dream as saying: “Usually those songs that take the small amount of time are usually the bigger ones because you’re not thinking about it.”^[4]

6 Gismonda Poster

Compared to some of his truly speedy fellow painters, the length of time Czech artist Alphonse Mucha spent on his first Sarah Bernhardt poster, almost one week, may not seem that impressive. But in light of the work’s prominence, it is a very short time. Primarily remembered as a very popular decorative and commercial artist who often used mythical and nature themes in his work, Mucha got his big break in December 1894 by being in the right place at the right time.

Bernhardt ordered a new poster design from Parisian lithographers Lemerciers for the play Gismonda. Savvy when it came to marketing, the legendary French actress wanted something different and was in a hurry. Since most of the designers in Paris were on vacation at the time, the workshop manager was in a tight spot. He asked the young, virtually unknown Mucha, who just happened to be there working on something for a friend, if he could design the poster for Bernhardt.

“Within a week, Mucha produced a poster for her that is now considered a cornerstone of the Art Nouveau movement,” according to Marie Vítková of the National Museum in Prague. The poster of Bernhardt dressed as a Byzantine princess, set against a gold background with palm leaf, is still among Mucha’s most famous, along with such designs as Zodiac and the Sarah Bernhardt poster for La Plume.^[5]

5 “Yesterday”

As well-loved as The Beatles’ music has been for more than 50 years, some of their more simplistic bubblegum pop songs might sound as though they were dashed off in just a few minutes. Ironically, it was one of the group’s most poignant songs, “Yesterday,” which was written at lightning speed. In addition to its artistic merit, this 1965 single from the group’s Help album is so popular it holds the record for being the most covered song of all time.

According to NME, the melody for the 1965 song came to Paul McCartney in a dream and took less than a minute to write. “I have no idea how I wrote that. I just woke up one morning, and it was in my head. I didn’t believe it for about two weeks,” explained McCartney.

The lyrics took much longer, a couple of months. The song was credited to McCartney-Lennon; however, John Lennon made it clear, a few years later, that he had not co-written “Yesterday,” giving all the credit to Paul McCartney.^[6]

4 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

What started out as a class assignment in 1960 became the basis for what is now considered a literary classic. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about an unconventional school teacher/mentor in 1930s Edinburgh. To some degree, a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of her adoring students, this short novel was written in just one month.

Author Muriel Spark explained: “We were given to write about how we spent our summer holidays, but I wrote about how [my teacher] spent her summer holidays instead. It seemed more fascinating.”

The book was later adapted to film, becoming a very memorable 1969 movie with Maggie Smith winning an Oscar for starring as the title character.^[7]

3 “Your Song”

The timeless and endearingly unpretentious 1970 Elton John classic “Your Song” didn’t take long for John to compose or for his lyricist Bernie Taupin to write. As was their habit, the two collaborators worked on it separately, but this 1970 ballad was quickly created, both musically and lyrically. Still one of the pop star’s best-loved songs, this track became John’s first hit single in America.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Elton John remembered: “It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in, and we both knew. I was 22, and he was 19, and it gave us so much confidence.”^[8]

2 The Boy in Striped Pyjamas

Even with the knowledge that author John Boyne barely took time out for food or sleep, it is still mind-boggling to imagine him writing the first draft of his highly acclaimed 2006 Holocaust novel The Boy in Striped Pyjamas in just two and a half days. The speediness of this process is an exception to how Boyne previously worked, typically taking a number of months to write a book.

It is astonishing to think that any full-length volume could be written in a couple of days but particularly a weighty and emotionally compelling story such as this. The book tells the story of an innocent nine-year-old Bruno who strikes up a friendship with another young boy Shmuel, an inmate at a concentration camp, where Bruno’s father has recently been put in charge.

The book was turned into the commercially successful but somewhat controversial 2008 film, released as The Boy in Striped Pajamas in North America, starring Asa Butterfield.^[9]

1 Rocky

Sylvester Stallone was one of many artists motivated to work fast due to money being tight. He was so broke just before writing the screenplay for Rocky, he was trying to sell his dog, which he could barely afford to feed. Stallone found inspiration in a fight he had recently seen between super-star heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali and the little-known Chuck Wepner, aka “The Bayonne Bleeder.” During the fight, Wepner actually managed to knock Ali down. Stallone said, “I thought if this isn’t a metaphor for life…” The result was his original Rocky screenplay, which was completed in just three days.

This story about underdog boxer Rocky Balboa taking his shot at the title was not only a massively successful Oscar-winning movie, but the 1976 classic launched a multi-film franchise and made Stallone a major star overnight. Obviously, much more than a sports drama, Rocky is widely considered a cinematic work of art that also turned out to be one of the most inspiring films of all time. It is almost beyond comprehension that a screenplay for a motion picture of this magnitude could be written in just a few days.^[10]