Humans Are the Dreaming Animal

Surrealism, the daemon muse, and the mystery beneath reality

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914.

Dear Living Dark reader,

In an age when a superficial surrealism pervades so many of the arts—movies, paintings, books, video games, digital art—courtesy of our collective pop cultural fascination with fantasy and the fantastic, it’s easy to forget or overlook that Surrealism, as a distinct and influential early-twentieth-century movement in art and literature, didn’t originally mean just a weird and warped style of writing or painting. Rather, it proceeded from and made a distinct statement about the nature of reality and our perceptual relationship to it.

This came to mind today when a friend told me about an experience she’s been having in recent months with spontaneously arising poetic lines. She says these lines just emerge in her mind with no effort. She has been recording them all in a phone app, and she says when she reads them all together, she can discern what appear to be interconnected and ongoing meanings. She was a student in the course I taught last year on my forthcoming book on creativity, Writing at the Wellspring, and she told me she relates her current poetic-creative experience to the idea of the daemon muse, the separate and independent source of our creativity, which plays a large part in the book.

Her account of this experience landed right in the middle of my recent reading of a really fine essay on classical Surrealism and its worldview by the essayist and critic Morgan Meis, whose work I’ve enjoyed for years. Meis endeavors to illuminate the field’s philosophical and spiritual meaning by mulling over its pioneers, their expressed motivations, and the content and potential meanings and implications of some of their most famous works.

Passages throughout his essay all but leap off the page at me, both because of their intrinsic interest and because of the way they intersect with some of my own long-running fascinations, including themes associated with my long-time authorial, editorial, and philosophical involvement in the field of weird and supernatural horror.

Here are some key excerpts from the essay, freely selected from the ones that spoke to me most deeply as I read and marked up the text, and bearing a few of my personal emphases in bold. I drop this on you in a formidable block without apology, the better to let it knock you down and flow through you:

Madness seemed to [Surrealism’s co-founder André] Breton to make much more sense of the world, inner and outer, than any other theory, especially theories that stressed the rational nature of human, beast, and cosmos. . . .

Human beings are defined by Breton not, as Aristotelians would have it, as the “rational animal,” but as the “dreaming animal.” Breton is arguing that human beings are fully human insofar as they pay attention to and stay faithful to their dreams. . . .

. . . the attempt to penetrate the outer crust of reality into its inner dreamlike essence. . . .

[T]he key point to keep in mind with all these works [Note: Meis is here discussing Max Ernst’s early-twentieth-century paintings] is that for all their mysterious and dreamy qualities, they are literally an impression of actual objects found in the everyday world, that the everyday world contains far more than we often think it contains. Ernst was not . . . interested in composing works from his own imagination. He was interested in letting himself become a conduit, or a channel, by which a dream-reality that already exists could be brought to the fore.

I’m going to go ahead and call that the fundamental intuition of Surrealism. There is a real world. The real world is hidden within the everyday world that we experience, which is a false or obscured version of real reality. When you gain access to the real world you experience it as structured more like a dream. . . .

We are seeing something, but the something we’re seeing is hiding its true nature, or only reveals itself indirectly. And that mystery, the painting seems to suggest [Note: Meis is here discussing de Chirico’s 1914 painting Mystery and Melancholy of a Street], is the very nature of our experience. What we’re seeing in our everyday lives is not the full story. Normal reality is loaded with something not directly knowable or perceivable, reality beyond itself. . . .

[For] the Surrealists [in contrast to the worldview embodied in Renaissance paintings], the nature of our cosmos is, crucially, unknowable to the rational mind. . . . It’s not that the objects of the painting are disconnected. [Note: Meis is here discussing Tanguy’s 1927 painting Mama, Papa Is Wounded.] They are connected, and we can witness the connection. But we can know no more than that.

It is often said that these kinds of Surrealist paintings create a dreamlike world that blurs the boundaries between the rational and the irrational. There is truth to the point. But the landscapes of painters like Tanguy are, I think, going even further than this. It is not that the boundaries are blurred so much as that a new primacy is established. The world of dreams, of fantasy, of randomness and that which is beyond logic or understanding—this is the true world. The world we think we understand, visually or in any other way, is, in fact, the false world.¹

Such words are like an incantation to me. What my friend describes about her experience with those effortlessly emergent poetic lines—her act of recording them and letting a web or through-line of meaning suggest itself among them and shine through them—reminds me of all this. Both the idea/model/theory of the daemon muse and the core insight and outlook of classical Surrealism hinge on the same sense of an implicit meaning that underlies surface appearances, and that actually expresses itself in them, if we will only pause to look, to notice, to see more clearly the deep well of an unfathomable reality that’s already suggesting itself in what’s plainly seen, instead of living in the combined perceptual and philosophical flatland of Newtonian “single vision” that Blake famously called out.

But—and this is crucial—that deep meaning is ultimately one that can’t be stated outright. All the notionally discrete elements of experience that appear to express it, whether my friend’s poetic lines or the physical objects and sense impressions appearing in the room with me or you right now, both reveal and conceal it. The thing in itself is something all objects, both separately and together, collectively point to, gesture toward, whisper of. In a sense, they fully display it while never actually showing it, simply because it is incapable, in its essence, of being shown, known, or spoken of as such, as an “it,” an object of direct perception or cognition. Literally everything in experience speaks of it while never actually stating it.

This all distinctly recalls the sense of palpable meaning that infuses and saturates a dream. When we dream, we swim in an omnipresent suffusion of meaning that we can almost taste in the very texture of the dream itself, a meaning that emanates from every shape, color, surface, person, setting, circumstance, and event, even as it remains permanently and maddeningly concealed behind the veil of those appearances and beyond the corner of the mind’s eye, lurking perpetually in hidden immanence.

I have talked about this before, in my stories (see especially “Chimeras & Grotesqueries” in my To Rouse Leviathan), my essays (see, for example, “The Deeper Magic of Reality” and “Initiation by Nightmare”), and my interviews (see “Through the Magic Eye”). So did the late nondual writer-teacher Peter Brown, in his many wonderful verbal pointings to “this fundamental strangeness, this fundamental weirdness that is always right here” in the fact of our experiential field—which is all we ever actually see or encounter—and its ceaselessly morphing quality.² So does the current nondual writer-teacher

John Astin

, who points out in various ways the immediately verifiable fact that “we can’t ultimately resolve what anything is. The determination of everything ultimately eludes us. What’s here is pure mystery. The knowledge of what things are is like an ever-receding horizon.”³ So has

Dena Evans

, who points up the common fallacy of believing the waking state is solid and stable as contrasted with the fluidity of dreams. “With only a little bit of acute observation of our direct experience,” she writes, “we can discover that the waking state only seems solid and constant. It’s actually a dynamic flow of experiential qualities that’s quite similar to the transient, illusory nature of a dream. . . . [W]aking and dreaming are simply two modes, two perspectives, of the one Reality, and the differences we perceive between them are not fundamental but interpretive.”⁴

Significantly, many masters of weird and cosmic horror fiction have called attention to the same fact and phenomenon. Consider, for example, Thomas Ligotti and his powerful overturning and undermining of the reader’s sense of a stable conventional reality in favor of a vision of all things subsisting under the inescapable sway of the great Chymists, the dreaming gods, the deep and inscrutable (and terrible) forces of reality that are forever dreaming the world and the unfortunate conscious beings within it (us) into new and unforeseeable shapes. Or consider the weird in one of its classic television incarnations, shining darkly in the opening and closing credits of the 1980s supernatural horror television series Tales from the Darkside. The narration during those credits announced and invoked a furtively pervasive shadow realm, an ominously numinous underside to things that lies just beneath “the sunlit world of what we believe to be reality,” an implicit and ever-present “underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit,” and that at all times has the potential to reach out and draw us in without warning, since it “is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us.”

How interesting to consider all these things: the darkside, weird/supernatural horror, the daemon muse, Surrealism, and our own lives and the universe we perceive ourselves to be living in: that primal dyad of self-plus-world, forever revealing and concealing the real in a projected dream of duality where the truth (of us, the world, everything) both lies behind and beyond the appearance and stands embodied and embedded in and as it.

How helpful to be prodded, encouraged, called back to consider all this, to inquire directly into the source of the whole panoply. And maybe to recognize at last, if only for instant, before we perhaps forget it again, who we really are and what is actually going on.

Warm regards,

1. Morgan Meis, “Surrealism: A Discovered Space,” The Easel, November 29, 2024.

2. Peter Brown, Liberation Beyond Imagination (Nisarga Yoga, 2024), 3.

3. John Astin, In Every Wave, the Entirety of the Sea (2024), 44.

4. Dena Evans, “Waking Life Is Just Another Dream,” Notes on Radiant Presence, September 5, 2025.