"...from the honeycomb of his memory he built a house for the swarm of his thoughts" (Walter Benjamin on Proust)

Surrealism is What Lies Within All of Us

Dreaming

I’m standing on a small concrete island just large enough to cover my feet. Around me man made streams weave their way chaotically with water speeding gushing snaking for as far as I can see. Out of nowhere a friend I haven’t seen for 20 years, a fundamentalist Christian. I was in love with him in my middle teen years, one of several I was obsessed by. His hair cut in a way that mirrors his suburban identity and Bible belt upbringing, his smile beautiful at the sight of me.

He is wearing a denim jacket done up half way. I become transfixed by the small yellow red flame that is growing in size coming from inside his jacket. As it grows time is stretched… a minute becomes many and his walk slows right down so he looks like he’s hardly moving. The flame starts licking around his torso and I am deeply moved by its beauty, the elegant way it gently moves, the passionate way its taking hold. I want to stay here forever, this moment is intensely moving.

Time startles me as it snaps back to its normal pace, and I become aware of the consequences of ignoring the flame as my friend hasn’t noticed it. I silently gesture to him as I would a friend who has spinach between his teeth. He nonchalantly moves his hand over the flame which is head height now and it is snuffed.

This dream is intensely surreal, and deeply engaging on many levels. It allows me to dine on its rich imagery or perhaps float away on the art of introspective interpretations. It could provide me with elegant insights into parts of my unconscious I don’t know exist.

We all dream every night, we rarely remember them as they fade quickly and most are forgotten before we wake. Most dreams are surreal and can be seen by some as gifts from the unconscious; the rare invitation to look at what’s hiding underneath. We all have surrealist moments every night that come from a very deep place from where most of us have lost the keys.

Memory

Memories are also surreal in nature. Guy Madden’s films seem to mirror the way we actual remember quite accurately. We’ve all been taught to enjoy the linear way books, stories and most music are presented. This however is not how we really think and feel.

Memories are largely influenced and encoded with embedded emotional material. We often recall something when it has a strong emotional resonance. When I bring up an early memory of my mother, I experience a quick flash of a photo I’ve seen and feel a warmth and happiness, a strange shape is then in front of me, some colours, anxiety, then a flash to a distorted view of her finger pointing in anger, swollen with pallid horror and a crunching noise watching her gnarled knuckles. This is if I allow myself to enter the layers just hiding beneath the surface.

Memories are rarely accurate representations of exactly what happened. They are layered very deeply under emotion, other similar events and themes that are encoded in a similar space. When thinking of an early image of a parent, it is very difficult to get an accurate and clear image of a face. If you spend time closing your eyes and focus on this image, it will distort, mutate and become something else very quickly. You may in fact get images stored in your memory from photos you’ve seen rather than a memory of the actual moment.

So memory itself, the thing that the self is built around is a surrealist feast!