2 / Dreams and Visions

By rendering scenes of dreamlike irrationality with seemingly incongruous precise and naturalistic form, Dalí gives substance to subconscious visions, making his often strange content more palatable to viewers, while at the same time challenging them to consider the relationship between internal and external realities.

Dream purportedly depicts Gala, Dalí’s wife, in the midst of a dream. The bee and pomegranate of the title hover below Gala’s body. The fish, tigers, and rifle all seem poised to attack her, but they clearly stand as symbols of unconscious desires. Dalí’s explicit focus on a dream as the stated content of the painting grounds his chaotic vision firmly in the Surrealist tradition.

Dalí and many other artists in the Surrealist group were extremely interested in psychology and the unconscious mind. They were particularly fascinated by the odd and even nonsensical juxtapositions that occur in the dream state. Many of the Surrealists were adherents to the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whom Dalí met in the late 1930s. Following Freud, these artists understood the imagery of dreams to have multiple possible symbolic meanings and created paintings like this one that explored those complexities. Often, as in Dream, Caused by the Flight of a Bee, sexuality was a central theme in these works.