INTRODUCTION

In 1932, Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory exhibited in New York City. You might know it as The Melting Clocks or Soft Watches. It's a small piece of art, despite its vastness on canvas and its poster-sized reproductions tacked onto the walls of dorm rooms around the world. The Spanish surrealist artist invites us into his in-between world of reality and fantasy, which he called "hand-painted dream photographs."

In the background, there is a vast blue sky and the craggy cliffs of Mount Pani towering over the coastline of Catalonia, Spain, where Dalí was from. This situates us in this world, even if it's at a distance. The foreground features Dalí's famous soft clocks. He called these the "camembert of time," which were inspired by Dalí musing over a plate of soft French cheese melting in the sun. There is a figure in the middle of the painting. It seems to be a person's profile with the long, feathery lashes of a closed eye, a pointed, beak-like nose, and open mouth. Is it Dalí? Is he asleep? Could this all be a dream?

It's a mix of permanence and impermanence, of light and shadows, of this world and another. Dalí was tormented by a fear of insects and sensations of imaginary bugs crawling along his skin. On the back of a pocket watch, there is a swarm of ants, which Dalí often used to represent death and destruction. Here, time decays in the sun. It's a timeless, boundless place. The surreal and the real are brought to life with the same razor-sharp attention to detail, making the landscape of his childhood just as real as his dreamscape. The familiar and recognizable are juxtaposed with the fantastical and seemingly impossible. It's a trick of the eye, which creates confusion and wonder. Objects seem to hide in plain sight. As with all of Dalí's works, the longer you look at it, the more you see. And the more you see, the more you feel. Much like a dream.

In the early 1920s while studying art in Madrid, Dalí discovered the writing of Sigmund Freud, known as the father of dreams. For Dalí, The Interpretation of Dreams was "one of the capital discoveries of my life," he wrote. "I was seized with a real vice of self-interpretation, not only of my dreams but of everything that happened to me."1 At the same time, Dalí was drawn to the surrealists, artists and writers in Paris who brought the subconscious to life on the canvas and on the page. It was a time of artistic transformation and discovery. Dalí developed his surrealist style, bridging the waking and dreaming worlds with his magical dreamscapes.

In the early 1930s, Dalí crafted his "paranoiac critical" method. He invoked a state of paranoia to tap into the subconscious and explore the concept of identity, using hallucinations as inspiration for his art. He took bizarre found objects in his subconscious and brought them to life on canvas through strange juxtapositions, hidden or overlayed images, and optical illusions. He wanted to "materialize the images of concrete irrationality."2 Surrealists explored the "surreality" of subjective experiences, and Dalí found that dreams offered unique personal experiences, and as inspiration.

There were many ways that he tapped into the creativity of his dreams. Possibly the most famous is his "slumber with a key" method. Think of it as a power nap. Here's how it works. Imagine Dalí with his characteristic mustache, which lengthened and twisted upward over the years, sitting in a "bony armchair, preferably of Spanish style," which he recommended. With his head tipped back, his hands suspended midair, below the arms of the chair. In his left hand, he held a key "delicately pressed between the extremities of the thumb and forefinger."3 Underneath the suspended key was a plate. The moment Dalí fell asleep, floating between this world and dreams, he let go of the key, which fell onto the plate, waking him up. In the magical first moments of sleep, Dalí discovered a wild montage of images for his art. His inner self was his muse.

In recent years, scientists have shown physiologically what Dalí knew to be true: sleep onset, when we first fall asleep, is a "creative sweet spot" that lets us make unexpected and original connections among abstract ideas.4 For Dalí, and for the dreamer in all of us, the science facilitates the art of dreaming.

A Traveler's Guide to Dreams

When I try to trace back my fascination with dreams, a certain memory pops into my head. I was nine years old, sitting in the kitchen of my childhood home in Oshawa, Ontario, that's about an hour's drive from Toronto. My feet snaked around the legs of a creaky wooden chair. My parents hadn't renovated the kitchen yet, so I was surrounded by faded blue-flowered wallpaper. I pulled my long hair off my face and tilted my head back. Our German shepherds Pepper and Spice circled the room, then paused to take a closer look. My father wrestled with a tangle of colourful wires and a pot of sticky white paste. He consulted an official-looking book, then glanced back at me over the large round rims of his glasses, determining where to place the electrodes.