In 1931, Salvador Dali produced his most famous work, a painting titled The Persistence of Memory, now on display in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. 

The painting shows a spare, coastal scene with rocky cliffs and the sea in the background. In the foreground, we see a rectangular platform with a number of melted clocks and watches on and around it, one hanging from the lone limb of a truncated, bare and seemingly petrified tree trunk. Ants swarm over the watch in the bottom left corner closest to the viewer. In the center of the painting floats a strange, amorphous creature with part human, part fish-like characteristics. 

By now, Dali’s melting clocks have become iconic – standing in for the surrealist movement as a whole or even, in the popular American imagination, the drug-addled 1960s counter-culture. If we connect back to the spirit of surrealism in the 1920s and early 1930s, however, we find that it is not drugs and hallucinations that animate the painting, but dreams. 

The creature occupying the middle of The Persistence of Memory is unrecognizable –it is some sort of blob. One characteristic, though, is clear. The form contains something of a face and head dominated by a large closed eye with disproportionately long eyelashes. The open mouth of the creature, together with the shut eye, suggest sleep – and the floating, sleeping creature in the center suggest that the hyperrealist landscape surrounding it is a dream projection. The isolation of symbolic elements – the tree, clock, and ants – is consistent with Dali’s dreamscape in "Spellbound," and the backgrounds for the two works are quite similar. 

The creature, for all its bizarreness, is not the central feature in the painting. Indeed, the melting clocks, four in number, dominate the viewer’s perception of the work. Time is the central aspect of this study. If clocks symbolize the regulation of life, the ordering of daily experience by an external force, the melting clocks suggest the opposite. For Dali, dreams are a refuge from the domination of “time.” Time is exposed as a mere element of perception – an element, like others, transmutable depending on one’s state of consciousness. The dream state unlocks the dreamer’s freedom to remake the world outside the circumscriptions of socially determined and domineering time – a process that then allows for creative cognitive dissonance and true artistic playfulness, as well as an unleashing of repressed instinctual desires and lurking fears and anxieties. The ants, which swarm over the watch on the lower left, indicate a darker psychic state.