Salvador Dali: Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening is a surrealist painting by Salvador Dali. Well, before I start analyzing and reviewing the painting, I must say that Dali could have give this masterpiece a bit shorter name. Since Dali didn't do that, his fans gave it a shorter name Dream Caused by the Flight of Bee. He painted this painting in 1944 while he and his wife, Gala were living in America.

The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee by Salvador Dali

The painting itself is as complicated as the title. Dali defined this painting as "hand-painted dream photograph". In the painting, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters. The naked lady amidst the horizon is his wife Gala. Next to the naked body of the sleeping woman, which levitates above a flat rock that floats above the sea, Dali depicts two suspended droplets of water and a pomegranate which is a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection. Above the pomegranate flies a bee, an insect that traditionally symbolizes the Virgin. In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is an elephant with long flamingo legs, found in his later compositions such as The Temptation of St. Anthony. The elephant carries on its back an obelisk.

Famous Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a very strong influence on Dali's mind which can be seen through his idiosyncratic artwork. In this painting, Dali's attempted to explore the world of dreams in a dreamscape. The bayonet, as a symbol of the stinging bee, represents the woman's abrupt awakening from her otherwise peaceful dream. In 1962, Dali said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala." To many people including myself, the painting also seems like "a surrealist interpretation of the Theory of Evolution." It shows the evolution of creatures but in a randomized surrealist manner in which any creature can evolve to any creature. Nevertheless, this weird surrealist masterpiece perfectly shows Dali's intense imagination while portraying a logical point of abrupt awakening from a dream due to an external chance event.