In this painting Salvador Dalí shows his wife Gala just as she wakes up from a daytime nap, hearing a bee; her dream instantly exaggerates the threat--the bee's sharp sting and black-and-yellow striped fur all get magnified into... tigers with claws out. Basically this painting argues small stimuli grow by association into epic dream images--instantly.

Dalí explained in a 1962 interview that in this dream painting he had the idea of "putting into an image for the first time Freud's discovery of the typical dream involving a long story argument, resulting from the instantaneity of an accident causing awakening. Just as the dropping of a rod on the neck of a sleeper gives rise simultaneously to his awakening and to a very long dream ending with the descent of the guillotine blade, here the sound of the bee provokes the sensation of the sting which wakes Gala."

Hmm. So did Gala really dream this and Dalí found her dream embodied a Freudian idea he found fascinating? Or did she just dream she floated by a surreal sea and get awakened by a bee, but Dalí being Dalí just had to spice it up with tigers, elephants & bayonets? Or did he make up the dream entirely? I don't know.

What I do know: Freud did NOT discover these "instantaneous" dreams; the example Dalí mentions is from 1865! In Alfred Maury's dream Guillotine, he was trapped in the French Revolution--and as the guillotine blade came down on his neck, he woke to find the headboard on his bed had come loose and fallen on his neck! He concluded, since he was sure dreams all came from external stimuli, that this proved his entire dream had been whipped up in an instant to explain the blow on the neck.

Maury, Freud, and Dalí are wrong. Dreams don't work like that, especially epic ones. They can be brisk, jumpcutting like film, but basically happen in realtime. This wasn't known in the 1940s but was by the 60s. Apparently instantaneous dreams like Guillotine, Fanfare Foreseen, Whistle or Flayed Column require other (and in my view fairly exotic) explanations--they're wild exceptions to the pace of dream construction, or they rely on super-accurate circadian clocks, or on short-term precognition, or...

Any of which might please Dalí even more, of course. He liked weird for its own sake. Though it was always best if it'd sell, too. So add some beasts and breasts...

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