In art history, one can easily argue that Salvador Dali is the father of surrealism. Surrealism is the art of writing or painting unreal or unpredictable works of art using the images or words from an imaginary world. Dali’s art is the definition of surrealism.

Surrealism is the stressing of subconscious or irrational significance of imagery, or in more simplistic terms, the use of dreamlike imagery. Dali’s absurd imagination has him painting pictures of figures no person would even dream of creating.

How was Salvador Dali able to conjure up these extraordinary images from his subconscious that he used in his surrealistic paintings?

Dali was intrigued with the images which occur at the boundary between sleeping and waking. They can occur when people are falling asleep, or when they are starting to wake up, and they tend to be extremely vivid, colorful and bizarre. He experimented with various ways of generating and capturing these fantastical images.

Salvador Dali’s Creative Thinking Technique

His favorite technique is that he would put a tin plate on the floor and then sit by a chair beside it, holding a spoon over the plate. He would then totally relax his body; sometimes he would begin to fall asleep.

The moment that he began to doze the spoon would slip from his fingers and clang on the plate, immediately waking him to capture the surreal images.

The extraordinary images seem to appear from nowhere, but there is a logic. The unconscious is a living, moving stream of energy from which thoughts gradually rise to the conscious level and take on a definite form. Your unconscious is like a hydrant in the yard while your consciousness is like a faucet upstairs in the house. Once you know how to turn on the hydrant, a constant supply of images can flow freely from the faucet. These forms give rise to new thoughts as you interpret the strange conjunctions and chance combinations.

Following is a blueprint for the technique:

• Think about your challenge. Consider your progress, your obstacles, your alternatives, and so on. Then push it away and relax.

• Totally relax your body. Sit on a chair. Hold a spoon loosely in one of your hands over a plate. Try to achieve the deepest muscle relaxation you can.

• Quiet your mind. Do not think of what went on during the day or your challenges and problems. Clear your mind of chatter.

• Quiet your eyes. You cannot look for these images. Be passive. You need to achieve a total absence of any kind of voluntary attention. Become helpless and involuntary and directionless. You can enter the hypnogogic state this way, and, should you begin to fall asleep, you will drop the spoon and awaken in time to capture the images.

• Record your experiences immediately after they occur. The images will be mixed and unexpected and will recede rapidly. They could be patterns, clouds of colors, or objects.

• Look for the associative link. Write down the first things that occur to you after your experience. Look for links and connections to your challenge.

Ask questions such as:

What puzzles me?
Is there any relationship to the challenge?
Any new insights? Messages?
What’s out of place?
What disturbs me?
What do the images remind me of?
What are the similarities?
What analogies can I make?
What associations can I make?
How do the images represent the solution to the problem?

 Click for examples of people using Dali’s method

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