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 oil painting on wood by Salvador Dal'i, completed in 1944 and measuring 51 by 40.5 centimeters. It shows a sleeping woman, generally identified as Dal'i's wife Gala, levitating above a floating rock in a seascape, surrounded by symbolic imagery including a pomegranate, a bee, suspended water droplets, a fish bursting from the pomegranate, two tigers, a bayoneted rifle, and an elephant with elongated, flamingo-like legs carrying an obelisk. Dal'i described the work as an attempt to render in images Sigmund Freud's account of the lengthy, elaborate dream narrative that can unfold in the instant before a sleeper is woken by an external stimulus, with the bee and its implied sting standing for the moment of awakening. The painting is held in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/