The Gentleman's Dream (also known as The Knight's Dream or Disillusion with the World; Spanish: El sueño del caballero) is a 1650s vanitas painting by the Spanish artist Antonio de Pereda.
The work is a vanitas—a genre of still-life painting intended to symbolize the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. The painting depicts a young gentleman asleep, his head resting on a table beside objects that carry symbolic meaning. Above him, a banner bears the Latin inscription: "Aeterne pungit, cito volat et occidit" ("Eternally it stings, swiftly it flies and it kills").
The painting is held in the collection of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, Spain, where it has been since 1816.
