Dali's Illumined Pleasures as a record of a dream

Dali's Illumined Pleasures as a record of a dream

World War I and the following few years produced a sense of disappointment among the people. It was felt that the world is far from being perfect and therefore that something must be changed. Such an atmosphere undoubtedly contributed greatly to the development of Surrealism - one of the most revolutionary art movement of the twentieth century. As André Breton (Janicka, 1985: 9), 'the Pope of Surrealism', claimed, the main objective of it was to set people free from all the constraints that hinder their development. The world is full of unnecessary taboos and logic which limit people. Breton (Hughes, 1980: 212) wanted to overthrow the old order and introduce a new morality with the aim of recovering human original powers of spirit. Breton (Hughes, 1980: 212) believed that art had not only the power but also the duty to change the world. Consequently, Surrealism turned to politics and social issues. However, according to Janicka (1985: 69), with their utopian ideas, surrealists soon lost their interest in this field and turned back to the world of art, where they could freely express their idea of freedom.
Surrealism drew on many sources, but the most important of them appears to be the theories of an Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, who developed the concept of the unconscious. Consequently, since the unconscious operates on image, painting can most appropriately describe or show what lies in the deepest layers of our psyche (Zuffi and Castria, 1999: 350). Surrealists seemed to recognise the importance of the unconscious in the process of cognition. It is the unconscious that is free from all taboos, moral limits and censorship. In consequence, with everything it contains, it represents our true nature. As Freud (1900) put it, the unconscious is the true psychical reality.
Through the careful study of the unconscious, surrealists wanted to learn about human nature and consequently about the nature of the universe. They believed that since human beings are a part of the universe, the structure of their mind reflects that of the universe (Janicka, 1985: 158).
They (Hughes, 1980: 227) began to treat seriously child art and the art of the mad. The reason for it was that they believed that in such kind of art it was the unconscious, the id, that spoke. Such works were not censored by the logic and morality imposed by the society. They were the perfect representation of what we really are. Breton did not treat madmen as insane. In fact, he considered them to be oracles and supported the view prevailing in Romanticism that mental derangement gave access to a whole 'dark side' of the mind, the locus of painful but irrefutable truths about society, human nature, and especially art (Hughes, 1980, 213). Consequently, surrealists sought the inspiration inside themselves. They did not consider the external world to be a sufficiently valuable source of inspiration. Since dreams represented the unconscious, they started to be extremely important. Surrealists (Breton, 1934) employed the technique of automatic thought in order to obtain a monologue poured out so rapidly, as possible, over which the subject's critical faculty has no control. It seems that the stream of consciousness technique might have its origins in Breton's pure psychic automatism. It was easy to create poetry in such a spontaneous way. The question remained how to reach the unconscious in painting where the act of creation usually lasts much longer and such spontaneity is often physically impossible. Salvador Dali, one of the greatest surrealists, appeared to find the answer. He (Breton, 1934) developed the paranoiac-critical method, which he defined as spontaneous method of 'irrational knowledge' based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations. Experiencing the states of apparent insanity let him reach the world of the unconscious and than record it in his paintings. For all the controlled hallucinations, he seemed to remain sane. One of his famous sayings was: The only difference between a madman and me, is that I am not mad (Hughes, 1980: 237).
Furthermore, dreams were the obvious key to the process of reaching the unconscious. And it is this parallel world of dreams that Dali, and other surrealists, seemed to depict in their paintings. In consequence, it appears reasonable to expect to find the symbolism of dreams employed in their paintings. After all, Dali himself claimed that what he created were hand painted dream photographs. Furthermore, Breton (1934) admitted that Freud's ideas of psychoanalysis contributed greatly to the development of Surrealism.
We usually remember our dreams as images. Rarely can we recall any sounds or tastes. Freud (1984: 115) seemed to notice it and claimed that it was easier for his patients to draw their dreams than to tell about them. It seems reasonable then to accept the view that dreams take the pictorial form. From this moment on, let us treat Dali's paintings as records of dreams and try to analyse them taking into account both the ideas of Surrealism and the theories of Sigmund Freud. Let us concentrate on one of Dali's paintings - The Illumine Pleasures.
In The Illumined Pleasures we can see a large desert-like plain and a number of objects and people placed on it in a very chaotic way. This does not seem to make any sense. But this is how most of our dreams are organised. They seem to be very obscure and indecipherable for us. One can hardly find any logic in them. This stems from the fact that they are the product of the unconscious which the reason has no direct access to. As Freud (1913) put it, for all their being strange and absurd, all dreams have a hidden meaning. Similarly, Dali (R. and N. Descharnes: 1993) believed that the fact that he did not understand the meaning of his paintings while painting does not mean that they do not any sense. In this way he wanted to stress the role of the unconscious in his works. The problem with Surrealist paintings (and similarly with dreams) is that, as René Magritte (Hughes, 1980: 244) pointed out, they are not what they represent. The fact that in the painting we can see some people and objects casting shadows on the plain does not mean that The Illumined Pleasures is a painting depicting the plain and these objects. Furthermore, Magritte (Hughes, 1980: 244) suggests that looking at such paintings we enter a quite different world where things lose their names or, keeping them, change their meanings. The same thing in the analysis of dreams is called by Freud (1984: 189) the thickening (zgeszczenie) of meaning, where the overt shape of a dream does not seem to be so rich in meaning as it, in fact, is.
Although most of what the painting presents could be 'real' (a landscape, some objects and people), one can feel that something is wrong with this reality. According to Hughes (1980: 237), Dali achieved this dream-like kind of reality as follows:
[…] Dali discovered that realism, pressed to an extreme of detail , could subvert one's sense of reality. Instead of presenting a painting as a surface, with all its inherent tensions, Dali went to the opposite extreme of treating it as a perfectly transparent window.
As Hughes (1980:238) states, one cannot imagine oneself walking in this landscape, or even touching it, for it is all illusion. In fact, Dali (R. and N. Descharnes, 1993: 17) believed that this oneiric world is much more real than the world that surrounds us.
According to Hughes (1980: 221), flat surfaces became a popular background of many Surrealist paintings, they were a neutral place where incompatible things met in clear light. The unconscious is a neutral place because, as Breton (1934) believed the unconscious is a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, are not perceived as contradictions. Since the unconscious is not controlled by reason, it is possible for a monster at the top of the painting and a number of men on bicycles in the bottom right hand corner of it to meet freely. Furthermore, in the painting the landscape of the unconscious stretching endlessly seems to have no limits and in this way to relate to the size of the unconscious, which, according to Freud (1940), is incomparably bigger in comparison with what is conscious. The desert-like plain shows also another tendency in Surrealism, namely - the fact that, as Hughes (1980: 241) put it, nature hardly mattered to the surrealists. What they were fascinated by was the object.
Dali painting The Illumined Pleasures seemed to record a dream, a fragment of the unconscious. According to Freud (1940), our internal world is ruled by the id, which is a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. As Freud (Young and Brook) put it, it is full of obscure primitive and instinctual forces. The id is only interested in satisfying its desires and instincts. According to Freud (Boeree, 1997), it works in keeping with the pleasure principle. It does not recognise any values or morality, worse still, in the id there is no such an idea as negation or the notion of time (Freud, 1940). It is the ego that then censors these desires before they reach the conscious. Surrealists wanted to learn about the forces that are inside us. That is why they were so preoccupied with the unconscious. They wanted the instincts represented in paintings by objects to meet in clear light so that they could identify them. Hence, it is no coincidence that the title of the painting is The Illumined Pleasures and the sky is clear so that the objects could be clearly visible.
The painting is organised in the same way as the id seems to be, namely - there seems to be no notion of time. The elements of the painting exist one next to another and it seems as if the time stopped, or even never existed. What attracts our attention is the notion of space. One can get the impression that the air that fills that oneiric world is perfectly clean or that the dream world is a vacuum and the air has been pumped out of it. As Breton believed (Janicka, 1985: 162), such a dream reality, or sur-reality, connects all the parts of the world, as well as, the past and the future. The elements are placed in a very chaotic and illogical way, they do not make any whole. It seems that they should be treated separately. Each element appears to be part of something else. However, as it has been pointed out, it is the unconscious that allows for such meetings. It is a place where earthly laws simply do not apply, where everything is equally possible, where things stand for other things. Similarly, according to Freud (1984: 137), each element of a dream is only a surrogate for something different, of which a dreaming person is not aware.
Facing the problem of making dreams decipherable, Freud worked out the meanings of a number of elements appearing in dreams. He (Boeree, 1997) claimed that all human behaviour is motivated by the unconscious drives or instincts and the most powerful of them is the sexual instinct. In consequence, he interpreted most of the dream elements as sexual symbols. Moreover, he (Freud, 1900) claimed that:
[…] that symbolism does not appertain especially to dreams, but rather to the unconscious imagination, and particularly to that of the people, and it is to be found in a more developed condition in folklore, myths and legends.
In fact, surrealists seemed to recognise the power of sexual instincts in the unconscious. Therefore, as Hughes (1980: 249) maintains, sex was one of the great surrealist themes.
For all the obscurity of The Illumined Pleasures, one can risk a short analysis of a few of its elements. Firstly, a man’s trying to abuse sexually a woman who wants to escape is an obvious representation of the sexual drive. The fact that the man fails to notice that the woman tries to free from him is a perfect example of how the id works. The id does not accept any refusal. It wants something and demands it immediately. Since the ego which censors the impulses from the id is absent in dreams, such desires are possible. Secondly, a naked man is probably spying on somebody or something through a hole in a big box which might as well be a room. Apart from the overt meaning (spying on someone), it should be noticed that Freud (1900) treated some objects as sexual symbols, for instance, a room in dreams represents a woman, any kind of hole represents the female organ. Furthermore, according to Freud, landscapes represented genitals and knives and hats the virile member. To support his views and stress the universality of these meanings, Freud (1984: 181) pointed out that there were cases where the woman was represented similarly in the Bible and the Talmud. This would confirm the existence of Jung's collective mind in dreams and therefore in some paintings (representing the unconscious).
Moreover, one can see a hand holding a knife which is stained with blood (probably trying to commit a suicide), the other hand holds the hand with the knife and tries to stop it from further self-destructive action. This may suggest the struggle between the instincts present in human beings. Freud (1996: 212) believed that apart from life or sexual instincts, in the unconscious, there is also an instinct of death or destruction. Referring to the Buddhist idea of Nirvana, he (Boeree, 1997) saw the death instinct in our desire for peace, for escape from stimulation, our attraction to alcohol and narcotics, our penchant for escapist activity, such as losing ourselves in books or movies, our craving for rest and sleep. Since Dali spent his whole life engrossed in painting, which especially in case of Surrealist painting is an escapist activity, one should not be surprised by the fact that such elements appear in his works.
There are also other elements which could be read in terms of Freudian symbolism. However, with their being very obscure, all these elements can have multiple meanings and further analysis would be pointless. The proper naming or identification of the elements of the painting is not so important. What is crucial is the recognition that these elements stand for instinctual forces or desires which the unconscious is filled with. Since the elements are the desires of the id, the painting corresponds to Freud's idea of wish-fulfilment. Freud (1900) claimed that the dream (here a painting) represents a wish as fulfilled (e.g. spying on someone). What cannot find way to the real world can have its expression in art and therefore become known to an artist. Freud (Boeree, 1997) claimed that the main purpose of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. In this way painting could also be treated as a kind of therapy.
To sum up, it seems that The Illumined Pleasures can be treated as a record of a dream. It has all the features that describe dreams, from its form and internal structure to the most important factor - it is supposed to depict the unconscious. Consequently, its aesthetic value is of minor importance. What matters is its cognitive value, the fact that it makes the unconscious conscious. Furthermore, such paintings make it possible for tamed wished to be fulfilled, at least in a work of art. Dali entered a completely different world, a world of dreams, and then painted what he could see there all with the aim to learn about the deepest layers of the psyche.

Bibliography
Boeree, G. (1997) Sigmund Freud. Available [Online]: < >
Breton, A. (1934) What is Surrealism? Available [Online]: < > .
Descharnes, R. and N. (1993) Salvador Dali. Edita: Lozanna.
Freud, S. (1940) An Outline of Psychoanalysis: The Structure of Unconscious. Available [Online]: < >
Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. Available [Online]: < >
Freud, S. (1913) Totem and Taboo. Available [Online]: < >
Freud, S. (1984) Wstep do Psychoanalizy. PWN: Warszawa.
Freud, S. (1996) Civilisation and Its Discontents. In: From Modernism to Postmodernism. Ed. Cahoone, L. p. 212-218. Blackwell Publishers Inc: Massachusetts.
Hughes, R. (1980) The Shock of The New: Art and The Century of Change. BBC: London.
Janicka, K. (1985) Swiatopoglad Surrealizmu. Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe: Warszawa.
Young, Ch. and Brook, A. (2001) Schopenhauer and Freud. Available [Online]: < >