Already in the years before painting The Persistence of Memory, Dali was engaged in thinking about and visualizing dream space and dream-time. In the short film Dali made in collaboration with the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou, dream-time is portrayed as fractured and subjective. 

The film is composed of short, nonsensical scenes, most of which somehow play out what Dali and Bunuel consider man’s twin primal drives: sex and violence. The scenes are constantly being interrupted and cue cards indicate abrupt shifts in time. The temporal shifts, along with the highly symbolic nature of the staging and the associational thinking, indicate dream logic.