The walls and niches of the caves were not the only surfaces used for paintings at Mogao. The sloped ceilings were also utilized, often with brilliant imagination, to depict a wide variety of themes, including jeweled canopies, lotus blossoms, illustrations of jataka tales and other Buddhist stories, flying apsaras (heavenly beings) and celestial musicians, to name but a few.

The ceiling painting of Cave 285 appears to be a depiction of the heavens over Mount Meru, the "World Mountain" that, according to Buddhist cosmology, stands at the very center of the universe. The sky is populated with celestial beings, demi-gods and mystical creatures (see detail) drawn from a wide range of religious traditions. These include the expected array of bodhisattvas and apsaras dancers and musician, but also the figures of the asura king Vimalacitra (Buddhist), Garuda, the king of birds and mount of the Hindu god Vishnu (Brahmanical), Fuxi and Nuwa, snake-bodied progenitors of the human race (Chinese mythology), and a range of air spirits, animal-headed humans and human-headed animals and other fantastic creatures (probably a conflation of the Brahmanical tradition and Central Asian and Chinese folk religious traditions). This eclectic mix of sources reflects the Mogao cave site's strong connections to Indian, Central Asia and China in the first few centuries of its history. In later centuries, this mix of cultural and religious sources would give way to more orthodox Buddhist iconography and the dominance of Chinese stylistic modes of sculpture and painting.