In his early career, Rousseau struggled to find the acceptance he longed for as an artist in the modern era. According to The Banquet Years: The Origins of Avant-Garde in France, Rousseau’s first public opening of his work took place in 1885, in which two of his paintings were slashed with knives by spectators and later thrown away by gallery curators. As author Roger Shattuck comments, “the first year Rousseau sacrificed everything to start a new life as an artist, he met with public abuse of his paintings” (49). While this moment certainly upset the new artist, who cut out newspaper clippings of the incident from local newspapers and pasted them into a private diary, it reinforced the internal struggle of finding his own style as a modern painter and conforming to standards that would win him recognition and acceptance from spectators and peers. More importantly, however, it too taught him perseverance, even as one journalist remarked in 1891 that “Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet with his eyes closed” (Shattuck 52).
Compositionally, The Dream reflects Rousseau’s internal artistic struggle more than any other work during his career. Many of his jungle paintings arguably contain elements worthy of evaluation in this perspective, yet this final work by the aging artist shows that, whether through imitation or through his own style, he was extremely determined to find acceptance.
	Immediately the viewer is overwhelmed by an extremely crowded scene in a jungle, full of vividly-depicted animals, vibrant flowers, hundreds of individually painted leaves, and the surreal interjection of formal and classical society through the woman on the couch. These artistic choices reflect the life of a man who seems to long for such a natural paradise: Rousseau claimed many times in his life that he had traveled to Mexico and from there he was inspired to paint these Primitivist works, yet  many critics of his time did remark that his virgin forests with their opulent plant life evoke the greenhouses of the Acclimatization Gardens rather than Mexican flora…” (Dorival 17).
While Rousseau may have longed to leave France and explore the very jungles he depicted in his paintings, perhaps the use of this Primitivist imagery in his art stems more prominently from what was popular among colleagues and collectors in his time period. According to art historian Bernard Dorival, there was “this deep-felt need to return to a natural world of virginal quality [in this time period]… that inspired in the successive generations to be raw and direct, naïve, more authentic in the mania of primitive art” (12).
	The most intriguing shift in Rousseau’s work leading up to this work “grew as much out of the circumstances of his unorthodox career as out of any aesthetic conviction. The jungle scenes became popular when they were exhibited and sold better than his other works. His own need and a ready market impelled him to repeat tropical subjects to the verge of mechanical reproduction” (Shattuck 84). 