THE WORLD DREAM BANK: TOPIC: SURREALISM

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SURREALISM

Surreal dream imagery--eruptions of strangeness into a known world: discrepancies of scale, or time, or context. The surrealist movement accorded such dreams a place of great importance, but rather than learn dream's own language, they were more interested in the mystery and strangeness for its own sake--and for its power to jar middle-class minds. To me, their taste for dreams looks a bit like the Romantics' taste for Gothic madness, wilderness and ruins, when (or because!) their bourgeois contemporaries extolled good sense and geometric gardens.

The surrealists' favorite technique, collage, with its weird juxtapositions, sometimes poetic, sometimes creepy, often bewildering, resembles two types of dream: hynogogic images (the vivid, plotless jumbles many people see when falling asleep), and also the disjunctive, bizarre, unsettling REM dreams I call surf-dreams, for they resemble a chaotic surf-zone between our world and the dream-sea. That may sound to many readers like a description of all dreams, but it isn't; experienced dreamworkers often have coherent dreams of other lives, other worlds--as if they've swum out to the sea beyond the surf zone, and found stable islands in that sea: other phenomenal worlds as real as ours. In my own dreamwork (and this site) I don't focus on either hypnogogic or surf-zone dreams so much as those stabler shamanic dreams. Still, I admit that seething borderzone where the worlds meet and clash does have power, especially in opening rigid minds... and now and then, there's spendor in the clash.

RELATED TOPICS: hypnogogic images - dreamwork in general - lucid dreams - transformations - I'm Just Not Myself Today! - weird dream beings - other worlds - See also the full INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

The World Dream Bank has 1500 dreams and dream images plus 500 other pages on dreamwork and shamanism, creativity, genius, art, surrealism and fantasy. Unless otherwise noted, all material copyright Chris Wayan, 2001-2006.

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	AFTER A LONG ILLNESS: by Nicholas Christopher; 1990?, a dream poem A surreal dream of a levitating man reeled in like a kite, the night after I’d flown from New York to Hawai’i...
	THE AIR BURUNDI PAINTINGS: by Wayan; 210K, 7 illus., 2007/1/20, a dream of art and courage Weird paintings cover a hill town in Africa, demanding I paint them when I wake. Paintings on courage, flight... and defying tradition.
	BABY, I'LL BLOW YOUR MIND: by Wayan; 1995/3/21, a surreal nightmare Allied submarines attack the giant Nazi toddler who's hunting us with sonar, occupying my playroom... CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND GUILT
	BLUE HOLES: by Wayan; late 1950s. Nondream sculpture by preschooler.. This was my first sculpture. I was around four. The rest of the preschool class made bunnies and snowmen. But I'd been peeking at Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore in my mom's art books, so...
	BRIDGE, MOON, PROFESSOR, SHOES: by Dorothea Tanning; 2003? Poem of a flying dream The moon invites me to go flying, but I get tired of magic and just want to go shopping...
	CAPRICES: by Wayan; 2.5 MB, 2006-, a trio of nondream virtual worlds: Bizarre alternate Earths--geography turned inside out, seas siphoned away by master soup-makers, or abysses turned into continents...
	CLOWN: by Naguib Mahfouz; early 1995?, a surreal dream. My town transforms into a circus--trapeze artists, elephants, clowns. At first I loved it, but when I went home...
	CORNER TORSO: by Wayan; 1996? A surreal sculpture. A surreal statue of a naked body spilling out of the wall as if someone's caught between dimensions... CAUTION: NUDITY
	CRAG: by Wayan; 1999; foot-high sculpture of a daydream. Who sculpts landscape? So I tried a crag with a pool in a hollow on its knee, windows like red eyes...
	CUTTLEBONE: by Wayan; 1999, sculpture, 7", plaster/acrylic; a nondream improv. If you can't tell what it is from the thumbnail, cheer up. It's indescribable full-size, too.
	DALI SKETCH: by Wayan; 1983/12/12; a surrealist nightmare. I dreamed I saw what looked like an ink sketch by Dali of a horse--but I was dead wrong... CAUTION: YUCK
	FACE CROSSING: by Wayan; 1990-91. Nondream but surreal digital painting.. Slightly altered to remove the familiarity, but this is quite real...
	FIGURE DRAWING: NOW HOLD THAT POSE: by Wayan; 1989 digital sketch of model clowning.. A model who created absurd, impossible poses, and held them heroically... CAUTION: SILLY NUDITY
	FLUID DREAM CONNECTIONS: by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2003/11/8 and 2007/3/14; linked dreams of pods A pod of whales in the sky and a circle of children dressed like seed-pods both beg me to interpret them...
	GIRL WITH A PROBLEM: by Wayan; 1997/4/12, a surreal dream. I date a girl with a mysterious syndrome, but soon I become a monkeyfaced con-man. And SHE becomes...
	GRAVE: by Wayan; 1999, a poem of everyday life, if this is your everyday life. So I looked out my window and saw this guy burying a tiny robed woman in a trench in the street...
	INUIT MEDITATION: by Wayan; 1989/11/16, a surreal dream-comedy. I'm the first tuna to get a scholarship to Stanford. Naturally I sign up for a course in Inuit Meditation...
	JELLY REBELLION: by Wayan; 2008/8/19, a poem of a diagnostic dream, Dreamverse #9 I interview my own metabolism. Trouble in Cellville! I've got strikers and usurpers. But at least no invaders...
	KICK THE PRESIDENT: by Wayan; 1999/6/1, a dream on consequences. I win a free game of Kick the President. But what if everyone can see your kick-ass Prez but you? CAUTION: THIS DREAM IS MONITORED BY THE SECRET SERVICE
	LIFE FORCE: by Patagia; 2006/8/9 & 8/31, three career-advice dreamlets Out of a Campbell's soup can poured life force: someone's last breath...
	MARINE GEOLOGY'S NOT IT: by Wayan; 1984/6/2, a dream farce. After finding marine geologists in my chocolate pudding, I'd rather be a Frenchman and insult my wife... CAUTION: DECADENCE
	THE MUSICAL AMOEBA, by Hermester Barrington, spring 1979, a possibly predictive dream inspired by The Incredible String Band I'm hiking through the Catskills when a gigantic amoeba comes slipping over the hills...
	OLD HAT: by Wayan; 1988/1/5, a "normal" (i.e. incoherent) dream. The Goddess gave birth in my workplace. Her fever-dreams become real around us... CAUTION: BIRTH SCENE, LIBRARIANS' ORGY
	OVERKILL: by Wayan; 640 x 680, 1991. Digital picture-poem-poster. Now the Evil Empire's dead. We're all safe, safe at last. And all the bombs are gone... right?
	OWLOVERS: by Wayan; 1992, digital painting of vivid daydream. This image bewilders me; my dreams mix sex with warmth, grief, even silliness, but what is THIS telling me? CAUTION: WEIRD ORGY
	PIANIST: by Wayan; 1985, a nondream ink caprice. Love that hair, girl. A very seventies bar-monster...
	POLTERGEIST: by Wayan; 1983/11/17, a confusing dreamtale. A living camera edits us all: the dappled hawk-man, the slutty candidate, the blue businessmen who give such bad advice when you pull the thorns from their feet. And my sweet sad hell-hound...
	THE RAINBOW SLEEPER: by Wayan; 107K, 2000/9/20, sculpture of a dream ABOUT a sculpture. In Rainbow Food Co-op, a huge statue of a sleeping woman emerged from the floor, shedding shoppers...
	SEX FLOWER: by Wayan; 480 x 640, 1996, unfired clay sculpture painted with acrylic, 9" tall. Robe or petals? Head or lilybud? Face or tongue or clit or slit? An eerie hybrid of person and flower... CAUTION: SOMETHIN' HAPPENIN' HERE, BUT WHAT IT IS AIN'T EXACTLY CLEAR
	THE SHRINKING POPE: by Sorcha; 2005/4/1, a Jane Bond dream I’m the only one who can stop the plot to kill the Pope--but if he keeps shrinking like that, will it matter? CAUTION: RECOVERING CATHOLIC
	TANGUY: by Wayan; 1965? Childhood surrealist drawing. Not a guy with a tan. Yves Tanguy was a sailor who became a Surrealist. When I was nine or ten, his work inspired me to try my first landscape drawings...
	TARTAN ACID SPIDER TORPEDO: by "Thomas Mountain"; 2008/1/31, a cliffhanger dream. I get speared by Irish warriors, slipped an LSD dose, chased by giant spiders, torpedoed--but hey, I'm not bored!
	TRIBUTE TO JOAN MIRO: by Wayan; 1984/2000. Erasable crayon, 14 x 17", nondream Nearly abstract but not quite. The snake, the quill pen, the secretary bird, and the rose.
	TWISTED!: by Wayan; 510K, 2003/6/23, 18 images; a nondream experiment I twirled pinups into surreal not-quite-abstracts, to see just how twisted sex could get... CAUTION: NAKED PRETZELS
	THE VEGETABLES OF SHADOW: by Wayan; 125K, 1999. Nondream surrealist art technique. Make silhouettes of your beloved vegetables; then listen to the spaces between... CAUTION: LEWD SQUASH
	WINGVOW: by Wayan; 101K, 1994. Digital collage of dream figures Here's an incantation to induce flying dreams. "Bring me wings NOW, or forever hold your peace..."