In much the same way that the camera possesses these powers
in the real, physical world, the hand painted dream photograph must exercise
authority over the representation of the unconscious as well. In
portraying the unconscious in La Persistencia De La Memoria Dali had to turn on
the inward camera and invoke its powers (maybe less fraudulently than Mumler),
both to convey a realistic representation of the unconscious, and to
illuminate it. By displaying the humanoid form in the foreground, symbolic of
the unconscious, in La Persistencia De La Memoria, Dali illuminates and
unequivocally grants it center stage in this painting, and assigns it the
greatest importance, of all other forms in the painting. To illuminate the unconscious
and assign a measure of significance to it would hopefully awake in the
observer of the ‘photograph’, knowledge of the value of the unconscious, and
its importance. This corresponds with the Surrealist preoccupation with the
unconscious in the first place, as a fuel for creativity and a powerful source for
self-expression.

In turn, as Walter Benjamin made clear, profane illumination
would provide an avenue for revolution, which Andre Breton pinpoints as the
focal point of the Surrealist movement. Walter Benjamin ascribed revolutionary
connotations to the transformation of consciousness that the surrealist movement
advocated. Profane illumination, and the resulting transcendence from ordinary
to extraordinary, as Benjamin opined, very much relates with the transcendence
from the conscious state to the unconscious that the surrealists delineated as
crucial to the adoption of a new, entirely different perspective from that of
the rest of society. This, in effect, is a form of revolt, the courage to
demonstrate alterity and embrace it in spite of the contrasting views of the
rest of society.

 Thus, in illuminating
the unconscious in the painting through the technology of hand-painted dream
photography, Dali potentially recruits the observer to the Surrealist revolution.
He possibly engenders in the observer’s psyche, a knowledge of the value of the
unconscious, advocating the adoption of the perspective that accessing the unconscious
typically evokes, in stark contrast with that of the rest of society.