Designed by surrealist Salvador Dali, the dream sequence in Spellbound is highly symbolic – with each character and object possessing a symbolic meaning, all of which come together to create a cohesive, parallel story. The literal, nonsensical story is the symbolic shell containing the actual, real narrative of events -- in typical, if simplified, Freudian style. The symbolic realm is absurd, fractured, and incomplete – it exists not as a replica of reality but the housing or staging for the symbols.

The dream begins in a gambling parlor, which is surrounded by the curtains with the painted eyes (in place of walls), creating a stage-like appearance. On the stage, there are tables full of men playing cards. While the men play, another man is walking around with a large pair of scissors slicing the curtains and the eyes into pieces. With the surrounding eyes, the stage-like hall and the man with the enormous scissors, the opening dream scene is revealingly absurd. The mind is adeptly hiding the “real” story.

The scene shifts from the general view of the parlor to the table of the dreamer, whose perspective we, as viewers, now occupy. He is dealing cards to his opponent at the other end of a table of exaggerated length. The cards, too, are much bigger than normal cards, emphasizing their importance as meaningful symbols. Strong shadows cut across the long, wide table, adding a sense of mystery or threat to the scene. The man at the other end of the table draws a card that gives him twenty-one. Right after he declares himself the winner, the faceless owner of the gambling house storms in and accuses the man of cheating. The conflict leads to an abrupt and seemingly nonsensical shift of scene. 

The dreamer next finds himself staring across the way at a house with a steeply slanted roof. The imagery here is pure Dali – roots growing from the chimney, a strange disembodied head jutting out from an abstract mountain of rubble, a deep, sparse background leading to a distant horizon. The dreamer sees his adversary at the card table standing at the edge of the roof and watches as he falls off. From behind the chimney, the owner of the gambling house appears holding a small bent wheel. He drops the wheel and the dream focuses in through the hole in the wheel where the axle goes. Clouds emerge, again shifting the scene.

The following scene is more abstract. A man, the dreamer, runs down a sleep incline. He is wearing a suit and being chased by a great winged creature, the shadow of which we see closing in on the running man.

Size distortion, surreal landscapes, stage-like unfinished spaces all work to guide the dreamer/viewer/interpreter toward a focus on individual images like the eyes, the cards, the faceless man, the rooftop, the wheel, the slanted incline, the winged creature. Dream space for Hitchcock and Dali is not a fully-fledged alternative reality like Wonderland or the sanatorium, but a book of symbols like Blake’s Job illustration #11.