Definitions of Dreams and Dreaming: A Surrealistic Freud and the Freudian Dali

Abstract

The inescapable impression of lay readers regarding the source of pervasive nature of dreams often lies with the idea of it as a portent, but the history of structural analysis of course lies with Freudian study of Interpretation of Dreams. Dreams as wish fulfillments also are considered to be potent corollaries to the process of creation and no aesthetic movement of the modern times would be as integrally connected to the land of dreams as Surrealism.
For the Surrealists the idea and meaning of art was to evoke some illuminating signs which would in a formal manner define the process of thinking, at the nearest with the conscious process and at the remotest with the glimpses of the twilight zone, the unconscious . The integrating relationship between art and dreams are never straightforward but has to contain always the conflicting, prohibitive and the most metaphorical. What is so restrictive and prohibitive has been proven to be just the opposite by the validity of the latent which relegates to the rear or suppressed. Hence the artistic expression was never on a straight line, not even the naturalistic portraits. When Freud himself interprets the lot of Oedipus and also Hamlet by bringing in the analogues of Oedipus Complex, he as a pioneer psychoanalyst also differentiates between the manifest in Oedipus and the latent in Hamlet in his artistic analysis. The dynamic theory of dream formation as indicated by Freud in his Second Introductory Lecture of Psychoanalysis would simultaneously accommodate wish fulfillment and dream censorship.
For the surrealists like Duchamp , Max Ernst , Francis Picabia ,Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali perhaps art is the forms of trepidation, fluctuating moments working in stasis , romantic and lyrical as dream images , creation of incoherence and terror with the language of unconscious . Taking Dali’s representative work as the bridge between land of the dream and the real , fascinating reading of the metaphorical and the literal, and manifest and the latent would be possible and perhaps we could have glimpses on the hermeneutics of aesthetics and life with the tangents of dream work. This line of assumptions would also hold that the visual enactment of Freudian dream work in Dali’s art would be a fascinating reading , but at the same time a reciprocatory perspective needs to be focused on the aesthetic and moralistic limits of psychoanalytic interpretation.