The Dream (The Bed)

The Dream (The Bed) (Spanish: El sueño (La cama)) is a 1940 self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

It shows Kahlo asleep in a wooden bed that appears to float among clouds, wrapped in vines and leaves, while a papier-mâché skeleton wired with sticks of dynamite lies on the canopy above her. Commentators have connected the imagery to Kahlo's chronic pain and long periods of enforced bed rest following a near-fatal bus accident in her youth, and to her preoccupation with the line between sleep and death.

The year it was painted was also marked by her remarriage to Diego Rivera and the assassination of her former lover Leon Trotsky. The auction house, Sotheby's noted that the painting was one of few of its calibre remaining in private hands and emphasized its psychological intensity and signature surrealist imagery.

In November 2025, the painting was sold for $54.7 million at Sotheby's in New York City as the star lot of the Exquisite Corpus evening auction of Surrealist art. The price set a new auction record for a work by a woman artist, surpassing Georgia O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (sold for $44.4 million in 2014), and also exceeded Kahlo's own record for a Latin American artist set by Diego y yo in 2021.

The Exquisite Corpus auction featured more than 80 Surrealist works by artists including René Magritte and Salvador Dalí.

The painting had been unseen publicly for nearly three decades until prior to its sale, when it was exhibited in London, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Paris, and New York City. The motif of the bed reflects periods of immobility in her life following a near-fatal bus accident.