"When I Dream of Michelangelo" is the eighth track on Counting Crows' 2008 album Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings (the second on the more reflective "Sunday Mornings" half of the record).

Although it was not released as a single, it was featured as the B-side to "1492" on a free downloadable "digital 45" that preceded the release of the album. In December 2008, it would also be serviced to the Adult Alternative (or Triple A) radio format as the third airplay single this era, following up the chart-topping "Come Around". On 21 March 2009 issuing of Billboard's Triple A chart, it was at #11 in its eighth week on the chart.

The track shares a lyric from the band's earlier single "Angels of the Silences", from which the song's title originates: "I dream of Michelangelo when I’m lying in my bed".

Duritz acknowledged in a 23 April 2008 interview via Leo's Music Cast that the song is among the first he ever started writing:

Duritz explained the song's evolution more elaborately in a March 2008 interview with James Campion:

Finally, what the song is really about for me is that while you're spending your whole life stretching out from something you can't touch, you forget to touch everything else around you, and that I had become so divorced from the world through this disorder that the only thing I ever focused on was the music and it was the only touchstone I had on earth, and I had lost touch with everything else, and that is what that song was about, and now I knew how to write it.

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