Publications.
"Childhood Dreams & Surrealism: An Essay"
for Project Synergy
Project Synergy is a digital magazine focused on vibrance, life, arts, and culture. "Through collective and creative efforts, Synergy facilitates the creation of meaningful connections among young people from all over the world" (Project Synergy, 2021).
Our first issue, titled Origins, was published in June 2021. My essay explores a connection between a recurring dream I experienced as a child and Salvador Dalí's unparalleled Surrealist genius.
Read my essay below:
Childhood Dreams & Surrealism: An Essay
I am swinging on the swing set on the rear end of our backyard, just next to the little hill where my sister and I often roll down on. I am sitting on the blue one, my favorite—and swinging front and backwards, trying to gain more impulse as I go so that I can go higher. That is the goal. I am suddenly losing control, and finding myself falling. Lucky me, I haven’t fallen on the floor. Instead, I am falling into something. I feel heat, almost too much heat. All I can see is the color orange, and all I can feel is that inescapable falling sensation.
In reality I lie asleep in my bed, and this is a dream. This is a dream that I’ve had several times before—ever so often, I find myself falling into this active volcano after swinging on my childhood swing set. This is a dream, but it feels real. I can feel my bed falling into that obscure, inevitable oblivion.
This recurring childhood dream was as absurd as dreams come. I can’t say that it haunted me, because as strange as it was it intrigued me—for it was a dream and not a nightmare. Each time it came back it only felt more and more familiar. My five, seven, and ten year old self became fascinated by the bizarre complexity of going to bed at night and having these movies, if you will, play in my head and show me these alternate realities that felt like real life.
Having taken various art history courses, I had, of course, heard of Salvador Dalí: the masterful 20th century Surrealist. I had seen some of his most renowned work, but I hadn’t really seen it. Upon a recent trip to New York City and a rushed visit to the MoMa, it was there, on the fifth floor: “The Persistence of Memory”. The work that I had seen so many times before, yet hadn’t really observed. At first glance, what came to mind was how small this work actually is, a mere 9.5” x 13”. A couple of steps forward and I began to really see it.
In this artwork, objects are distorted to an extent in which they appear to melt. Alluding to the theme of this issue, I found that Dalí was a great appreciator of origins himself—he opted to paint the golden cliffs on the coast of Catalonia, his home, in this piece. Alongside his wife, Dalí underwent great economic distress while residing in Port Lligat, a fishing settlement near these cliffs. Ironically, it was during this time of despair in 1931 when he created the piece that would grant him ultimate fame and mark his name as one of the greatest in art history.
Upon observing this piece, I realized it started to become much too familiar: it inevitably reminded me of that recurring childhood dream. Interestingly enough, none of the elements in “The Persistence of Memory” coincided with the elements in my dream, but the ambiance, atmosphere, and dreamscape quality was the same. As a painter myself, I have tried to visually depict or at least try to honor that outlandish dream that visited me so many times. But alas, I can’t quite get it right. Part of Dalí’s genius, apart from his exquisite precision and rendering technique, was the ability to portray these organic, intangible, and abstract things that are dreams.
By nature we are curious beings, so it comes as no surprise that many sought to explain his work. Some suggested that the clocks in “The Persistence of Memory” allude to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, to which Dalí almost mockingly denied, stating that a Camembert cheese he observed melting under the sun actually inspired it.
As a young adult, I have attempted to dissect that childhood dream as well as other dreams I’ve had that have surpassed any level of bizarreness I have ever known. Perhaps that is the problem—trying to assign meaning to things that are far beyond our understanding. After the aforementioned artwork was passed on to the MoMa by an anonymous donor, it is said that Dalí gave a lecture in which he stated, “...The public could rest content with their difficulty in understanding the work, since the artist himself did not know what it meant either” (Radford, 1997).
It is in our best interest to simply enjoy the oddity and peculiarity of our dreams. It is far too complicated and unnecessary to aim to understand why and how we experience dreams the way we do, that is why even science is yet to explain the wonders of the unconscious mind. We know that emotions, memories, and information that is absorbed throughout our lifetime may play a role in what we dream, but the why is still in question.
My recurring dream never visited me again after I grew up, but I will never forget it—it is always with me. I encourage that we use our dreams at night as an escape and as an inspiration, just like many Surrealist masters did. After all, regarding sleep Dalí once said: “I work constantly in the moment of sleep. All of my best ideas come through my dreams.” And it’s not hard to tell.
Dali, Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. 1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Radford, Robert. Dalí. 1st ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1997.
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