It’s a small work. Pencil on paper, crowded with scratchy detail. At the centre, a figure cowers on an iron bedstead, sheets wrapping him like a shroud, as demonic creatures convene on his back. All around, organised in planes and panels, are vignettes of horror: chickens turn cannibal; a leering boy trips up a blind priest; the belly of a rat, garrotted by the string of a balloon, splits to reveal a mass of maggots — a vision straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.
William Kurelek’s “Nightmare” was not made for public display. Visitors who view it in Between Sleeping and Waking, a new exhibition about dreams at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in south-east London, would be advised to form a queue and perhaps squint at it with one eye, as the artist did as he drew it. Psychosomatic eye pain was one of Kurelek’s symptoms when, in 1953, he reproduced the monsters he saw in his dreams, so his doctors might see them too.