Cinematic nightmares and dreamlike walks in art.
There is something irresistible about the moment when two seemingly irreconcilable worlds meet. On the one hand, Alfred Hitchcock, master of control, narrative order, and almost obsessive precision; on the other, Salvador Dalí, prince of chaos, metamorphosis, and dreams that stretch into reality like a melted clock.
It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the two would meet. And that this encounter would take place on the most unstable ground of all: dreams.
The year is 1944. Hollywood is a feverish world that has just discovered psychoanalysis as a new religion. Freud has become a fashionable name, dreams are narrative material, and studios are filled with real and fake analysts, ready to interpret everything from a screenwriter’s creative block to the impulses of an overly anxious producer.
Hitchcock, who sniffs out obsession like a bloodhound sniffs out fear, decides it’s time to make a film that puts psychoanalysis center stage. That film will be Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. But to really do it, he needs a dream. Not just any dream: a dream that looks like a Dalí dream.
The Invitation to the Surrealist
It was David O. Selznick, the film’s producer, who suggested the idea. Selznick was fresh from his experience with Gone with the Wind and loved anything that had an aura of “grand event.” Hitchcock, on the other hand, wanted something more radical: a dreamlike sequence that would break the visual rules of Hollywood cinema and take the viewer inside a disturbed mind.
And who better than Salvador Dalí, the most famous artist of dreams, to give shape to the unconscious?
The two met in Hollywood, at Selznick’s villa. Hitchcock was impassive, measured, almost ironic in his British aplomb. Dalí arrived dressed in white, with a shiny moustache and the conviction that he was not an artist, but a machine for visualizing the invisible.
Hitchcock himself later recounted:
“I wanted someone who could render the dream with visual clarity. No fog, no fading. Just sharpness and madness.”
Dalí took the request literally.
The scenes of the subconscious
In just a few weeks, Dalí conceived a series of sketches that seem to have come out of a hallucination laboratory: eyes floating in the sky, curtains opening like eyelids, figures dissolving into geometric shapes.
One of his most famous drawings for Spellbound shows a man walking on a floor made of giant playing cards; in another, a human face opens like a shell, revealing another face, smaller and more disturbing.
Some of these sketches are now in the archives of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres and in private American collections. They are quick but intense drawings, full of the dreamlike logic that only Dalí knew how to handle: precise details that, when put together, produce disorientation.
Hitchcock was struck by the disturbing precision of those drawings. He said that Dalí “had the mind of an engineer and the imagination of a prophet.”
But not everything went smoothly.
The Battle of the Dream
As soon as filming began, tensions between art and production exploded. Selznick found Dalí’s visions “too disturbing.” Hitchcock defended their visual power, but the budget grew and the schedule lengthened.
In the end, the dream sequence was drastically reduced: from twenty minutes to just over two.
Many of Dalí’s original drawings were never filmed.
Yet what remained was enough to make history: the protagonist (Gregory Peck) dreams of a faceless man, a casino with eyes instead of decorations, curtains that move on their own, a blade approaching an eye—a clear homage to Un chien andalou, the 1929 surrealist film that Dalí had made with Buñuel.
In the dream sequence of Spellbound, Hitchcock and Dalí created something unprecedented: a visual experience of pure psychoanalysis, in which the image becomes both symptom and revelation.
The Filmed Mind
The underlying idea was bold: to make the viewer experience the logic of Freudian dreams, in which nothing is random and everything refers to something else. Hitchcock wanted a dream that was not “blurred” but ruthlessly clear—just like real dreams.
Dalí understood the intent perfectly. In his letters to his assistants, he wrote:
“The dream must be lucid, geometric, almost painful in its clarity.”
It was a very modern insight.
In 1945, while cinema still used fades and smoke to suggest the dreamlike, Dalí and Hitchcock anticipated what we would now call hyperrealistic surrealism: fear that arises not from darkness, but from too much light.
A dream cut short
After the film’s release, the dream sequence was met with mixed reactions.
Many viewers found it “strange” and ‘disturbing’; the more daring critics called it “an unprecedented visual experiment.”
But Hitchcock himself admitted years later that much of Dalí’s imagery had been lost in the editing process.
“The dream was too long for the audience, too short for Dalí.”
Yet that experiment paved the way: from then on, dreams in cinema would no longer be hazy. Think of the dream sequences of Bergman, Lynch, or Kubrick: all of them, in some way, owe something to that collaboration between the surrealist and the master of suspense.
Traces in museums and letters
Today, we can still follow the traces of that encounter in various archives:
- The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí preserves the main sketches, often exhibited in retrospectives on Dalí and cinema.
- The MoMA and the Harry Ransom Center have photographs and letters that testify to the contacts between Dalí and the production.
- In a photo from the set (now in the public domain), Dalí can be seen discussing a set design with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck: the actors are intrigued and attentive, while he gestures as he explains the project. Dalí has a book about his life under his arm.
A little-known gem: in 1945, Dalí wrote a letter to André Breton, the founder of surrealism, to defend himself against accusations of “selling out to the Hollywood system.”
He wrote:
“I have sold nothing. I have exported surrealism where it could sleep in front of millions of viewers.”
Two geniuses, two artistic approaches
Hitchcock and Dalí would never work together again, but they held each other in high esteem.
Hitchcock continued to explore the themes of the unconscious and the double in films such as Vertigo and Psycho. Dalí, for his part, brought cinema into his painting: his later paintings became increasingly “framed,” as if he were viewing the canvas from behind a camera.
Ultimately, both were obsessed with control. Except that for Dalí, control came through excess, while for Hitchcock it came through moderation.
Their shared dream was short-lived, but it was enough to demonstrate that cinema can become painting and that painting, if it is visionary enough, can become editing.
Dreams, fear, and clarity
Today, watching Spellbound again, that two-minute sequence still seems disturbing.
Not because it shows strange things, but because it shows too much. Everything is exposed, clear, cruel. It is the unconscious in broad daylight. We wonder what situation we are in, the inputs are many and all detailed. We could call it a Lynchian dream, but it actually predates Lynch by a long way.
Hitchcock knew it: fear does not arise from darkness, but from the precision with which we recognize an impossible detail.
Dalí, in his own way, had done the same throughout his life.
His melting clocks, ants, and split figures are nightmares in broad daylight.
The dream in Spellbound was not a diversion, but a synthesis: two languages that meet at the point where reality and fiction swap places.
Postscript: creativity as psychoanalysis
I like to think that this encounter between Dalí and Hitchcock was not just a cinematic curiosity, but a metaphor for creativity.
On the one hand, there is the part of us that plans, constructs, and frames (the inner Hitchcock).
On the other, there is the part that lets images come on their own, irrational, sometimes inexplicable (the Dalí that lives in each of us).
When we create something—a drawing, a story, an idea—we are perhaps doing the same thing: we assemble and disassemble dreams, cut out sequences that are too long, and save only what truly resonates.
And even if in the end only a fragment remains, a small dream cut down to two minutes, if that dream has the power to disturb or amaze, then that is enough.
