Semansky teaches literature and writing at Portland Community College. In the following essay, he discusses the genesis of Goya's engraving and the role of Buero Vallejo's title, The Sleep of Reason in his play by the same name.

Francisco Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueno de la razon produce monstruos, 1799) has—theorizes Eleanor A. Sayre in her and Perez Sanchez's Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment—at least two possible antecedents. The first is Charles Monnet's engraved frontispiece for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Philosophie, volume two (1793). In Monnet's engraving, reason can be said to issue from the eye of God in the form of light beaming down on the desk and person of Rousseau, philosophermuse of the French Revolution (1789). Rousseau is intensely awake, hand-to-head, deep in active thought as Lady Liberty stands near and splayedopen books and papers lie at Rousseau's feet. While dreams...