We have already encountered a dream work by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali, for he contributed to the staging of the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film "Spellbound." Far from tangential to his artistic endeavors, dreams had been a central interest of Dali for decades. Deeply influenced by the work of the Sigmund Freud, Dali created highly symbolic works – symbolic not in a classical sense but of the deep and hidden world of the human sub-consciousness. For Dali, as for Freud, the subconscious was the home of the human’s instinctual being, the id, which was kept in check by a socially constructed sense of self. Dali sought to lift the symbolic language of the subconscious out of the murky depths and to develop a language to express it. In doing so, Dali sought to confront the social consciousness with glimpses of the deeper self. The realm of dreams offered the perfect template for such an artistic experiment. One of the key divergences Dali meant to visualize between social consciousness and the individual subconscious had to do with the perception of time. For Dali, the structures of time represented a powerful organizational principle for the human consciousness – bending all people into conformity. The dream world, on the other hand, offered a stark counterexample – a realm, like Schulz’s Sanatorium, of temporal anarchy.

André Breton: First Surrealist Manifesto

A Surrealist Manifesto: Declaration of January 27, 1925

E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor: The Principles of Scientific Management

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Gérard Durozoi History of the Surrealist Movement

André Breton: Manifestoes of Surrealism