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There were 57 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Dreams'.
- "I help them understand it," she said. "They can make their own choices. The goal is to develop an awareness, from inside, of how dual cognitive systems form, how they function, how they respond to hostile or contradictory data. Threats to stability, inequal growth by one member. Cognitive dissonance. I'm sure these concepts are familiar."
Source: As She Climbed Across the Table, p. 87-88 - "I should like," Huddleberry was saying, "I should like to write a detective story -- a mystery story...But one in which no one should know what crime had been committed -- nor who had committed it..."
"That's true of all crimes, isn't it, rather?" asked Charles and watched himself inject a careless laugh, like a hypodermic, into the man's mind. But:
"No one...There should be a dream quality about it all..." His eye lighted; a rising enthusiasm informed his customarily level tones and he waved his long thin hands in wider gestures -- "A dream quality, yes; a brooding sense of Something -- no one quite knowing what -- but Something dread, and menacing, and terrible. A Something that sets all the boasted power of civilization at naught --," he raised his hand as Charles gave evidence of being about to speak, "--at naught, and mocks the puny strength of men..."
Source: The Eater of Darkness, p. 142 - "I'm dreaming of a city / It was my own invention."...At the same time, a city exists. Another lyric from "What a Day That Was" explodes the dream with fierce actuality: "There are fifty thousand beggars / Roaming in the streets." If your gaze was really steady enough to see what's before you, there might be reasons to wish to leave this place.
Source: Fear of Music, p. 65 - "Men, women, statesmen, courtesans, plotters...and yet, in the mind of each the dread questions are constantly impending -- 'What is it that threatens?' -- 'And for whom?' -- 'If Death, then who shall be the victim?' -- 'Who the murderer?' -- 'Where the scene of the tragedy?' -- 'Shall it be I who will strike the fatal blow?' -- 'Or shall I receive it?' ..."
He paused again, staring dramatically at the corner of the ceiling. "And the end -- dramatic, inevitable, but veiled in mystery....'Was there a murder?' -- 'Who was the victim?' -- they shall ask, my characters. And as each sinks shudderingly to sleep -- 'Was it I who killed, last night as I thought I slept?' -- 'Am I, even now, am I dead?'... Ah! Yes! It shall be my greatest work, that. It would go well in the American Mercury, don't you think?"
Source: The Eater of Darkness, p. 144-145 - "See is just a movie in your eyes," said Garth. "It's not out in the world."
"A movie?"
"It's not out there, it's not dark matter or anything else. It's just in your eyes. A movie. And the only difference is that everyone else has the same movie playing. Cynthia, Philip, Alice, their movies agree. So they can see. You and I are watching the wrong movie, so we're blind."
Evan and I were silent.
Source: As She Climbed Across the Table, p. 134 - 'Being realistic' may once have meant coming to terms with a reality experienced as solid and immovable. Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment. We are confronted with what Jameson, in his essay 'The Antinomies of the Postmodern', calls 'a purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will'...How could it ever be possible for us to believe successive or even co-extensive stories that so obviously contradict one another? Yet we know from Kant, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis that waking, as much as dreaming, experience, depends upon just such screening narratives. If the Real is unbearable, any reality we construct must be a tissue of inconsistencies. What differentiates Kant, Nietzsche and Freud from the tiresome cliché that 'life is but a dream' is the sense that the confabulations we live are consensual. The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owes its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.
Source: Capitalist Realism, p. 54-56 - 'How very lucky that I happened to meet him there just this evening! The Unconscious is kind. But there's design in it, too; human design in it. If I hadn't known Komissaroff was given to boating, I couldn't have laid such a trap for him so easily.'
Source: For Maimie's Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite, p. 47 - 'In the dream I’d be going about a normal day's business and suddenly, with no warning, there'd be the sign. We were a member of the National Automobile Dealer's Association. NADA. Just this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada, against the blue sky. I used to wake up hollering.'
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 110-111 - 'You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm.'
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 91 - A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is conscious of dreaming but does not wake up. Although lucid dreams happen spontaneously to some people there are also a variety of techniques for inducing them. But the fact that some special effort is required to have a lucid dream points to the fact that our natural reaction to perceptions in dreams is to regard them as caused by external objects, rather than by our own minds. So it seems that our view of sensory information both in the waking state and in the dream state is generally determined by the principle of externality: in both cases we regard the source of the information to be something that is both external to us and existing independently of us. It requires a particular cognitive effort to question in a dream whether the things one sees are indeed caused by external sources, an effort that appears to be essential in inducing lucid dreaming.
Source: Twelve Examples of Illusion, p. 54 - All this may have been a collective hallucination although nobody has yet explained to me what a collective hallucination actually means. The monstrous Queen Bee slowly revolved over the water, beating her crystalline wings so rapidly that they emitted a pale light. As she faced me I was thrilled to notice a sudden strange resemblance to the Abbess. At that moment she closed one eye, as big as a tea cup, in a prodigious wink.
Source: The Hearing Trumpet, p. 117 - Anubeth growled and reached up to get a very strange animal from the ceiling for my inspection. It was a tortoise with a baby's wizened face and long thin legs which were frozen in a gallop. "Anubeth says that this kind of collage she made for fun when the keeper of the principal morgues in Venice gave her the present of a dead baby. The legs originally belonged to some storks that died of the cold. It really is very clever. I sometimes wonder if she ought to paint. I am sure she has talent."
Source: The Hearing Trumpet, p. 152 - Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie. But it was Surrealism that first opened our eyes to them...The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.
Source: The Arcades Project, p. 13 - Bety had been talking almost as if there had been two lives, each a kind of dream to the other.
Source: All Hallows' Eve, p. 78 - But why is it that lo real maravilloso becomes such an important category in the consciousness of literary schools from the 1940s onward after 400 years of myth making and magic in Latin American culture? This awakened sensitivity to the magical quality of reality and to the role of myth in history is perhaps an indication of what Ernst Bloch called "non synchronous contradictions" nd is ready-made soil for the sprouting of "dialectical images," in the terminology of Walter Benjamin, for whom (and I quote from Susan Buck-Morss's essay on his notes for his Passagenwerk)
"the dreaming collective of the recent past appeared as a sleeping giant ready to be awakened by the present generation, and the mythic power of both [the recent and the present generations'] dream states were affirmed, the world re-enchanted, but only in order to break out of history's mythic spell, in fact by reappropriating the power bestowed on the objects of mass culture as utopian dream symbols."
Source: Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, p. 166 - Certainly surrealism must also be treated as an artistic and literary school (this is even where one must begin): as such, it is founded on automatic writing. It gives a decisive value to this type of thought, analogous to dream, which is not subordinated to the control of reason. In so doing it extricates the human mind from any end other than poetry.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 58 - Dreams, dreams, dreams, with each step the domain of dreams expands. Dreams, dreams, dreams, at last the blue sun of dreams forces the steel-eyed beasts back to their lairs. Dream, dreams, dreams on the lips of love, on the numbers of happiness, on the teardrops of carefulness, on the signals of hope, on building sites where a whole nation submits to pickaxes. Dreams, dreams, dreams, nothing but dreams where the wind wanders and barking dogs are out on the roads.
Source: A Wave of Dreams, p. 31 - Fearing his bed would cool, he hastened past the emptiness of the hall, where a handsome girl stood poised without her clothes on the brink of a blue river. Napoleon peered at her in a wanton fashion from the dark of the other wall.
Source: At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 32-33 - For there is no doubt that the heroic phase, whose catalogue of heroes Aragon left us in that work [Paris Peasant], is over...But at the time when it broke over its founders as an inspiring dream wave, it seemed the most integral, conclusive, absolute of movements. Everything with which it came into contact was integrated. Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous flooding back and forth. Language only seemed itself where sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called 'meanings'. Image and language take precedence. Saint-Pol Roux, retiring to bed about daybreak, fixes a notice on his door: 'Poet at work'. Breton notes: 'Quietly. I want to pass where no one yet has passed, quietly!—After you, dearest language.' Language takes precedence.
Source: Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, p. 48 - From ancient times the witches had danced in the cavern through wars and persecutions; many a time when I was pursued I would hide with the witches, and was always received with courtesy and kindness. As you are no doubt aware, my mission through the ages has been to carry uncensored news to the people, without consideration of either rank or status. This has made me unpopular with the authorities all over this planet. My object is to help human beings to realize their state of slavery and exploitation by power-seeking beings.
Source: The Hearing Trumpet, p. 145 - From the courtroom to the executioner they will drag me kicking and weeping, bewildered as the day I was born, clinging to the end to the faith that no harm can come to the guiltless. "You are living in a dream!" I say to myself: I pronounce the words aloud, stare at them, try to grasp their significance: "You must wake up!"...I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.
Source: Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 94 - Half in the world of reality, half in a dream, the Zany ran on, pursued by dogs and by spears of fine rain.
Source: El Senor Presidente, p. 19 - Harvey had been dreaming that his interrogator was one of those electric typewriters where the typeface can be changed by easy manipulation; the voice of the interrogator changed like the type, and in fact was one and the same, now roman, now elite, now italics. In the end, bells on the typewriter rang to wake him up to the phone and the doorbell.
Source: The Only Problem, p. 403 - He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own. This wasn't through any rigorous daytime analysis of content, but just because he knew.
Source: Gravity's Rainbow, p. 13 - He is a great man that never gets out of bed, he said. He spends the days and nights reading books and occasionally he writes one. He makes all his characters live with him in his house. Nobody knows whether they are there at all or whether it is all imagination. A great man.
Source: At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 99 - Himes's transformation into a "French" writer is characterized not by what his fiction loses in translation but by what it gains: namely, an involvement in French, and particularly surrealist, thinking about modes of writing that frustrate instrumentality through their irretrievable lapses and excesses of meaning.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 247 - How can we be sure that a poem or a painting accomplishes the 'sovereign operation' without which each of us serves the established order? On this score I see only a boundless opposition, and a severity of method applied without respite, as taking up the stake. The least weakness and, far from escaping the laws of the servile world, our works will serve it. It is not only seriousness and restless anxiety which constantly threaten to wipe out the odds. In point of fact, from the beginning, 'the sovereign operation' appeared rather like a dream.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 50 - I am swinging gently in the air, bumping against the ladder, flailing with my feet. The drumbeat in my ears becomes slower and louder till it is all I can hear.
I am standing in front of the old man, screwing up my eyes against the wind, waiting for him to speak. The ancient gun still rests between his horse's ears, but it is not aimed at me. I am aware of the vastness of the sky all around us, and of the desert.
I watch his lips. At any moment now he will speak: I must listen carefully to capture every syllable, so that later, repeating them to myself, poring over them, I can discover the answer to a question which for the moment has flown like a bird from my recollection.
I can see every hair of the horse's mane, every wrinkle of the old man's face, every rock and furrow of the hillside.
The girl, with her black hair braided and hanging over her shoulder in barbarian fashion, sits her horse behind him. Her head is bowed, she too is waiting for him to speak.
I sigh. "What a pity," I think. "It is too late now."
I am swinging loose. The breeze lifts my smock and plays with my naked body. I am relaxed, floating. In a woman's clothes.
Source: Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 120 - I sleep all day and all night, barely disturbed by the chop-chop of picks behind the wall at my head or the faraway rumble of barrows and shouts of labourers. In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal. I sigh and wet my lips. "What is that noise?" I ask when the guard brings my food. They are tearing down the houses built against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me: they are going to extend the barracks and build proper cells. "Ah yes," I say: "time for the black flower of civilization to bloom." He does not understand.
Source: Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 79 - In our cities, the avenues running parallel from north to south all converge in an empty lot made up of our jaded detective's eyes. We no longer have any clue as to who asked us to solve this murky case. The uncovering of the plot, the right no longer to think and act as a herd, the unique opportunity we still have to regain our raison d'être--of all this, nothing survives the course of our dream but a hand closed save for an index finger imperiously pointing to a spot on the horizon. There, in utter purity, the air and light are beginning to incite the proud uprising of all the things that have been thought yet barely framed. There, restored to his original sovereignty and serendipity, man preaches to himself alone, it is said, an everlasting truth that is strictly his own. He has no notion of this hideous arrangement of which we are the latest victims, of this foreground of reality that keeps us from budging.
Source: Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality, p. 143 - It was hard to force Evan and Garth to notice my questions, but I learned a few things. They'd lived in the Dada-ready-made reality for about a week, wading through the ball bearings and wool, feeding on ice cream and barbecued duck. Then they'd climbed back over the table, into Lack, and emerged here, where they settled unquestioningly. Sure, they argued about whether they were alive or dead, whether they'd woken from a long dream or fallen into one, but they also argued over the location of specific fire hydrants, and about the chances of judging the amount of ink left in a ballpoint pen by weighing it in your hand. They were happy here. They were home.
Source: As She Climbed Across the Table, p. 203 - Like Freud's depiction of the dream-work as the condensed and distorted projection of unconscious wishes, Desnos's poetic and cinematic marvelous eluded the conventional censorship of commercial narratives. It described instead a space beyond good and evil that Desnos attempted, in turn, to reconcile with the real. This reconciliation, he argues in a 1924 essay, is the "revolutionary" goal of surrealism, and, more specifically, of surrealist ethics as "the sense of life and not the observance of human laws." Yet whereas Breton argued for the inextricability of socioeconomic revolution from a surrealist liberation of the mind, Desnos's understanding of revolution privileged the latter aim...Desnos writes:
"They are a gang -- from the priest to the professor -- who invoke the spirit, who make a living from it, and who make it serve the lowest ends. It's against them, and against this deformed spirit, that the surrealists mean to fight. 'You claim to ruin bourgeois painting and yet you make paintings. Go and destroy the Louvre,' people told me on the way out of the surrealist exhibition. If we destroyed the paintings in the Louvre we would be individualists. Likewise you don't just go out and shoot fascist delegates. But you fight the capitalist spirit. Right now it's less a matter of carrying out revolution than of preparing for a battle of opinion."
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 128-129 - Monnerot argues that "the slightest dream is more perfect than the best poem because it is by definition concretely adequate to the dreamer for whom it is an individually historical fact." Toward the realization of this dream, he claims that what will be required is something akin to Georges Bataille's theory of heterology, a means of pursuing the ways in which "directed thought, science, and industry will be able to serve as vehicles for dream."...Indeed, having read Bataille's work from the early 1930s, Monnerot began to work toward an extensive sociological study of forms of sacred experience that bring forth such "waking dream states" as group phenomena...Monnerot's emphasis on the collective experience of a poetics without language would help to bring about the eventual reconciliation of the surrealists with Bataille in the mid 1930s.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 172 - San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities -- storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 137 - She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to -- an odour, colour, pure piercing grace note sounding his seizure. Afterwards it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipal wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 71 - She fell asleep almost at once, but kept waking from a nightmare about something in the mirror, across from her bed. Nothing specific, only a possibility, nothing she could see.
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 76 - She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take. For she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them, this having been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places only death had had the power to cure, and this Berkeley was like no somnolent Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or Latin American universities you read about, those autonomous culture media where the most beloved of folklores may be brought into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments chosen -- the sort that bring governments down.
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 77-78 - Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up. My memory is full of all sorts of stuff which is not, perhaps, in chronological order, but there is a lot of it. So I pride myself on having an excellent faculty of miscellaneous recall.
Source: The Hearing Trumpet, p. 23 - So she...entered the city again, the infected city. And spent the rest of the night finding the image of the Trystero post horn...What fragments of dreams came had to do with the post horn. Later possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed...In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbours' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours. The night was empty of all terror for them, they had inside their circles an imaginary fire, and needed nothing but their own unpenetrated sense of community. They knew about the post horn, but nothing of the chalked game Oedipa had seen on the sidewalk. You used only one image and it was a jump-rope game, a little girl explained: you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang:
Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three,
Turning taxi from across the sea...
'Thurn and Taxis, you mean?'
They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.
Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 88-90 - Sometimes such a visitor, influenced by fashion, would declare himself for Idealism but all I could see was yet another shame-faced realist, like so many well-meaning men these days, subsisting on a compromise between Kant and Comte. By abandoning the commonplace notion of reality for the concept of reality within they believe they have made a great leap forward -- but their idol, the Noumenon, has been exposed as a very mediocre piece of plaster...[T]here are other experiences that the mind can embrace which are equally fundamental such as chance, illusion, the fantastic, dreams. These different types of experience are brought together and reconciled in one genre, Surreality.
Source: A Wave of Dreams, p. 16-17 - Soupault's modernist update of the dime novel franchise recasts Carter, the white American detective, as the agent in an oneiric narrative of pursuit in which Carter dies.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 101 - That night she dreams the usual Manhattan-though-not-exactly she has visited often in dreams, where, if you go far enough out any avenue, the familiar grid begins to break down, get wobbly and interwoven with suburban arterials, until she arrives at a theme shopping mall which she understands has been deliberately designed to look like the aftermath of a terrible Third World battle, charred and dilapidated, abandoned hovels and burned-out concrete foundations set in a natural amphitheater so that two or more levels of shops run up a fairly steep slope, everything sorrowful rust and sepia, and yet here at these carefully distressed outdoor cafes sit yuppie shoppers out having a cheerful cup of tea, ordering yuppie sandwiches stuffed full of arugula and goat cheese, behaving no differently than if they were at Woodbury Common or Paramus.
Source: Bleeding Edge, p. 196 - The Discourse on the King of Meditations, a fourth-century Buddhist text, remarks the following on the topic of mirages:
Know all phenomena to be like this:
At noon in midsummer,
a man tormented by thirst, marching on,
sees a mirage as a pool of water.
Know all phenomena to be like this:
Although a mirage contains no water,
confused beings will want to drink it.
But unreal water cannot be drunk.
Source: Twelve Examples of Illusion, p. 56 - The manipulation of frames for purposes of creating collective terror has to be directed to the imagination. There is no sense of the "untrue" or "unreal" when one is submerged in dream or fantasy.
Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 30 - The Surrealists' demands for a society based on the psychological needs and desires of mankind rather than imposed by the dictates of utility, logic and mindless economic determination, are still profoundly relevant. So too are their efforts to overcome the divorce between the artist and society and to improve the spiritual quality of life. The Surrealists, says André Masson, had to dream politically or cease to be. But they were unable at the same time to act politically. Perhaps it is unjust to blame them for this failure. As Victor Crastre writes, and his remarks about Breton may be applied to the Surrealists as a whole:
The debate between politics and mysticism is an eternal one: the pure revolutionary and the creator of new social forms are never the same man...The man who combined the two vocations would be a sort of monster (of perfection). From this point of view what might be considered as Breton's failure has been on the contrary the condition of his salvation.
From chapter: The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36 by Robert Short.
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 36 - The vagueness, the dreaming, the doubtful hanging-about are permitted only on the borders of intellectual life, and in this world they were rare. Neither angels not insects know them, but only bewildered man.
Source: All Hallows' Eve, p. 46 - They all drew in solemn silence.
As each man unfolded his scrap of paper with trembling fingers, they turned to see who had drawn the one lot bearing the accustomed legend, 'Death to the traitor.'
Stanislas Benyowski held it up, unmoved, listless as ever, between his thumb and finger.
'The Unconscious has selected me for the task of vengeance,' he said quietly. 'Komissaroff shall be removed at the earliest opportunity. I will report progress to the next meeting.'
Source: For Maimie's Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite, p. 32 - They all knew of his weakness, of course, but didn't know where it originated -- only Käthe, he had told her all about it, yet even she didn't know that it was the same with cigarettes as with the milk soup: that taste, that smell, that Virginia aroma -- he never found it again, never found it, kept looking for it, probably smoked to find it again, and never did.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 35 - Walking down Waterloo Place, he saw a shabbily dressed man a little in front of him, making his way in the direction of Charing Cross foot-bridge. Benyowski started.
'This is a strange accident,' he thought to himself silently. 'The Unconscious has delivered him at once into my hand. Hartmann is right. It sometimes strangely approaches design in the marvelous patness of its opportune coincidences. The old-fashioned mind would have seen in this the finger of Providence. We see in it rather the working of the Unconscious. Both are inscrutable, divine, mysterious.'
Source: For Maimie's Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite, p. 46 - We're working on a task that's enigmatic even for us, in front of a volume of Fantomas fixed to the wall by forks. Visitors, born in faraway climes or at our own door, are helping us design an extraordinary machine which is for killing what exists so that what does not exist may be complete. At 15, rue de Grenelle we've opened romantic lodgings for unclassifiable ideas and revolutions in progress.
Source: A Wave of Dreams, p. 41 - What Benjamin came to advocate was a sort of surrealist technique using what he called "dialectical images" -- an obscure yet compelling notion better left to example than to exegesis: what his friend Theodore Adorno referred to as "picture puzzles which shock by way of their enigmatic form and thereby set thinking in motion." Picture puzzles is of course how Freud referred to the manifest content of dream imagery, and if it was to the manifest and not to the latent level that Benjamin was drawn, that was because of the way such images defamiliarized the familiar, redeeming the past in the present in a medley of anarchical ploys. Unlike current modes of deconstruction, however, the intent here was to facilitate the construction of paradise from the glimpses provided of alternative futures when otherwise concealed or forgotten connections with the past were revealed by the juxtaposition of images, as in the technique of montage -- a technique of great importance to Benjamin. Indeed, Stanley Mitchell tells us that "Benjamin came to regard montage, i.e., the ability to capture the infinite, sudden, or subterranean connections of dissimilars, as the major constitutive principle of the artistic imagination in the age of technology." The understanding we are led to is that the "dialectical image" is in itself a montage, both capturing the aforementioned connections between dissimilars and also that which is thereby captured. What was at stake then was the issue of graphicness in Marxist method, and with that the whole way not only of representing history but of changing it.
Source: Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, p. 369 - What we have forgotten in modernity, by dint of constantly accumulating, adding, going for more, is that force comes from subtraction, power from absence. Because we are no longer capable today of coping with the symbolic mastery of absence, we are immersed in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images. Now the image can no longer imagine the real, because it is the real. It can no longer dream it, since it is its virtual reality. It is as though things had swallowed their own mirrors...
Source: The Perfect Crime, p. 4 - [A]n illusion is not something that does not exist, but something that is not what it seems.
Source: Twelve Examples of Illusion, p. 7 - [From a semi-autobiographical novel written by Crevel:] "I accuse memory. Evil comes from what we ignore...so that memory is in reality a hallucination."
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 72 - [On why science fiction or fantastic-ness so often fails to deliver on its unlimited promise]
Well, it's hard. It's hard to live up to that promise, as it is in surrealist painting, ninety percent of which is like a little trompe l'oeil trick or something, and then every now and then you really are Max Ernst will make, or Dick Errico (?) makes an image that does take you to another experience. Those are hard materials, hard methods to maximize...When I've worked without those obvious [unreal] gestures, and I did it a number of times, I mean Motherless Brooklyn is the first time in some ways, but the Tourette's, the neurological trippiness of the language to me was like the fantastic element in that book. And what I've come to see is that I like to work with a baseline prosaic reality that we all can -- the consensual world, and really evoke it, and really make you feel a lot of mundane stuff, like recognition stuff, oh yeah, it's really like that. And then also have this field of the dream life, the distorting field of the visionary material in some form that is an equal pressure on the characters' experience. Something intangible, something esoteric, that they believe in as deeply as they believe in this prosaic world...The real contains the unreal. So for me, in a book like Dissident Gardens, just as the neurology and the language was the field of distortion in Motherless Brooklyn, so I didn't need a rocket ship or a werewolf or something in that book, I feel the same way about Dissident Gardens, that ideology, the utopianism, the desire to live in another world that's so, the passion, we all glimpse it, but to live oriented that way so totally that you sign onto the communist party, that is another one of those fields of distortion. It's like the characters are tripping on their [vision]...The idea that you're a vessel of this gigantic intangible movement, that's happening, that you are part of a revolution, even if no-one else will believe you, that it's about to come, to me that's as tripped out as any fantastic vision I could ever have offered, so it did what I wanted done to these characters' lives without my having to do those other things.
Source: Interview by Reihan Salam, p. - [T]here are fundamental ways in which the ahistorical "marvelous" is specifically understood as "la femme." In a lengthy passage from the second point of the manifesto, Breton discusses the premium he places on the dream state over the awakened one. He points out how the dream state always disrupts the awakened state and how the awakened state rationalizes away the effects of the dream state.
Source: Disruptive Testimonies: The Stakes of Surrealist Experience in Breton and Carrington, p. 93 - [T]here exist strong common references in theory between early forms of professional PR (or propaganda)...and surrealism, which also strived to influence public opinion. Surrealism arose in Paris in the first half of the 1920s, a time when on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, in the United States, Edward Bernays developed his concept of propaganda, which was finally put on paper in his canonical book Propaganda by the end of the decade (Bernays, 1928). For PR researchers and practitioners Bernays usually counts as one of the founding fathers of their professions, and it is well known that he, being the nephew of Sigmund Freud, developed his theory of PR campaigning partly on the basis of his uncle's psychoanalytical theory. It is this same basic source of inspiration in psychoanalysis that surrealists share with Bernays.
Source: Surrealistic communication as symbolic terrorism: The example of Marcel Mariën’s theory of political campaigning, p. 195-196
