As multifaceted and multilayered as Buero Vallejo’s play is the history of its critical reception. Unlike controversies surrounding some plays, The Sleep of Reason does not fire controversy, but research and analysis. Shortly after The Sleep of Reason first appeared in 1970, Ricardo Domenech, in ‘‘Notas sobre El sueno de la razon,’’ points out that the epoch of civil discord under Ferdinand VII resembles the period during and immediately following the Spanish Civil War; the play is therefore both historical and contemporary. Domenech also draws parallels between Ferdinand and Goya: Ferdinand embroiders and Goya paints, and both use spyglasses to view each other across the Manzanares River running through Madrid. In the same year, Juan Emilio Aragones, in ‘‘Goya, pintor baturro y liberal,’’ calls the work the first spectacle of ‘‘total theater’’ by a Spanish author. ‘‘Total’’ refers to the play’s use of audio and visual projections, and the depiction of Goya’s inner and outer life. In ‘‘El sueno de la razon de Antonio Buero Vallejo,’’ Angel Fernandez-Santos notices that the play contains elements of each of three major forms of contemporary theater—participation, distancing, and the absurd—all of them combined in satiric and macabre scenes like the dispute between Leocadia and Gumersinda. In 1970, John Kronik points out that Goya’s criticism of a reality which does not correspond to ideals is the result not of hate, but of love. Two years later, in a more lengthy analysis of The Sleep of Reason, Robert B. Nicholas continues the observations of Domenech on the parallels between Ferdinand and Goya. Nicholas views both characters as dominated by fear. John Dowling subsequently picks up on Nicholas’s motif of fear but places it in the black paintings in which terror and irrationality are combined.

The most important text in English on Buero Vallejo’s life and works is Martha Halsey’s Antonio Buero Vallejo. She observes a thread running through Buero Vallejo’s work until the early seventies: ‘‘In The Sleep of Reason, as in the preceding two plays [A Dreamer for a People and Las Meninas], Buero Vallejo dramatizes certain negative moments in Spain’s history to illustrate problems whose essence and reality are still present today and to point out the need for tolerance and intelligence. In these plays, no less than in Story of a Stairway, Today’s a Holiday, and The Cards Face Down, we see the tragedy of present-day Spain.’’ Lastly, in the introduction to Buero Vallejo’s Three Plays: The Sleep of Reason, The Foundation, and In the Burning Darkness, Marion Peter Holt writes that ‘‘Buero Vallejo’s Goya is a visionary. Not only is he an artist of genius but he sees beyond the present reality to a more enlightened future, though his associates view his musings on benevolent flying men as another manifestation of dementia.’’ Holt sums up The Sleep of Reason this way: ‘‘no modern work for the stage has dealt more compellingly with the effects of terror and intimidation on the creative mind in a repressive society.’’