A bee reborn as a goldfish, two tigers, and a bayonet
In 1914, Salvador Dalí painted Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking. In this “hand-painted dream photograph,” as Dalí called his artworks, two realities merge into one— the peaceful world of a sleeping woman and the nightmarish landscape of her dream.
In the “real” world,
a woman modeled after Dalí’s wife Gala sleeps naked
beside a pomegranate.
In the dream world,
she floats in a full-moon dreamscape above an ocean,
so still it appears to be frozen.
Asleep,
she hears a bee buzzing around the pomegranate.
Her psyche attempts to make sense of the sonic intrusion,
and subconsciously aware of the threat of the bee’s sting,
her dream shifts into a nightmare.
From a pomegranate, a large goldfish leaps out;
from its mouth shoot out two tigers.
In the dream, it’s not the bee she senses,
but the sharp presence of a rifle bayonet,
about to sting her.
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking is Dalí’s tribute to Freud’s theories of long dreams—how a fleeting external stimulus can lead to a dream that seems to stretch on, only to be followed by sudden awakening. Similar to how the falling of a bar on a sleeper’s neck triggers a prolonged dream that ends with the guillotine’s blade descending, the sound of the bee here creates the sensation of a sting that awakens Gala.
The painting was born out of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method, a technique designed by him to access the subconscious through self-induced hallucinations. Dalí would sit in a chair, holding a large key above a metal bowl in his lap, and gradually fall asleep. As he drifted off, his grip would loosen and the key would fall. The sharp sound of the key hitting the metal bowl would pull him from his dream, and in that fleeting, half-conscious state, he would become an observer of the visions that came to him. These unfiltered and often illogical hallucinations would then translate into the foundation of his now so recognizable and loved surrealist art.
Literature:
Alarcó, P. (1970). Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before waking. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/dali-salvador/dream-caused-flight-bee-around-pomegranate-second-waking
Caraccio, M., & Kryger, M. H. (2023). Salvador Dalí: Hypnagogic hallucinations in art. Sleep Health, 9(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2023.01.009
Gordon, D. A. (1951). Experimental psychology and modern painting. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 9, 227–243. https://www.jstor.org/stable/425884