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 ...that explored the realm of dreams and the unconscious mind. It was heavily influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud.
Freud had taught that we repress our real, primal desires into the unconscious part of our mind. These urges then manifest in odd behavior patterns, slips of the tongue, and especially dreams.
Freud’s first and most influential book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was the result of three years of self-induced psychoanalysis spurred by the death of his father. Freud found that although he had been emotionally removed from his father for many years he was strangely moved by his death. Long repressed feelings of animosity and resentment began to surface in his dreams. This led him to see dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious.” He said that in dreams the ego is like “a sentry asleep at its post.”
The Surrealists were especially interested in the conflict between the ego (our rational patterns of behavior) and the id (our primal instincts and desires). They sought to approximate the nonsensical quality of dreams by painting realistically in the classical tradition, but juxtaposing objects and images in irrational ways to shock their audience.
Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” (Andre Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto)
The most famous Surrealist was the Spanish painter Salvador Dali. Dali called his creations “hand-painted dream photographs.” They featured unreal dream-like images and hallucinatory characters, including the recurring images of burning giraffes, melting watches, and people with half-opened drawers protruding from them.
 He was an extreme egoist with a talent for self-publicity. “Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.” (The Surreal World of Salvador Dali, Smithsonian Magazine. 2005) He actively cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism. At the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936, he appeared in a diving suit; he claimed it was the source of his creative energy. When he appeared on the Tonight Show years later, he brought a leather rhinoceros with him for a chair.
Dali’s creative output was not limited to painting. He also worked in the mediums of fashion, theater, sculpture, photography, and film, creating a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) and collaborating with Walt Disney in the short cartoon Destino (released posthumously in 2003).
Palsy forced his retirement in 1980. He spent the last years of his life in the tower in his own museum and died from heart failure on January 23, 1989.
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