A reading

Surreal web design is dream logic, not a weird background. Objects keep their names and lose their rules. A door opens onto a hill. Scale lies. The page still has a door. It fails when nothing can be used.

The button does not dream. The pale line does.

Each method cuts one control and keeps the rest.

Automatism. The hand moves before a subject is chosen. In the 1924 manifesto Breton made this the name of the movement: psychic automatism, thought with no moral or aesthetic veto. Masson drew that way from 1924. The line is continuous. A figure appears only where the line closes.

Frottage. Ernst, 1925. Paper over wood, leaf, or stone. Rub. The grain arrives first. You name the forest after. Grattage is the same act in paint: canvas over a hard object, colour scraped back.

Decalcomania. Domínguez, 1936. Wet paint pressed between two sheets and peeled. The blot is coral, rock, or fur only after you look.

Fumage. Paalen, 1937. Candle smoke on paper or wet canvas. No brush. Grey drifts, then a reading.

Exquisite corpse. From about 1925. Several hands, one body, each seeing only a strip of the last. The join is the point.

Collage and the found object. Ernst cut printed pictures and set incompatible scales in one room. Duchamp’s ready-made is the cousin: the object is not made, only moved.

Dépaysement. A true thing in the wrong place, at the wrong size. One wrong fact, not a fog.

A lobster on a telephone is still a telephone.

Paranoiac-critical method. From 1930 Dalí treated paranoia as a way of knowing. Unrelated facts are pulled onto one obsessive idea until they lock. In "The Rotten Donkey" (1930) he called it a violently paranoiac will to systematize confusion. By 1935, in The Conquest of the Irrational, paranoia is a delirium of interpretative association with a systematic structure, and the method a spontaneous way of irrational knowledge. The delirium already holds its reading. Critical activity only develops it, the way a bath develops a plate.

He set this against automatism. A dream image stays virtual: you can only talk about it. His image had to be as hard as a photograph. The double image is the proof you can hand to someone else. One set of marks is two objects. Repeat it and it is a multiple image.

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) is the clean case. Two women in a market are also Houdon’s bust. The gap in the wall is the top of the head. Their heads are the eyes. Collars become cheeks and nose. A dark dress is the shadow. A white sleeve is the chin. An apple is also a back. A pear dissolves into a hill. Both readings are in the same paint.

Lacan came to him in 1930 about that essay, before the 1932 thesis. They agreed that interpretation and delirium are one moment, and that paranoia builds repeatable structure.

The limit is the word controlled. Dalí claimed he could enter the association and come back with a picture another person can see. Breton hauled him before a Surrealist court in 1934 over Hitler. The method does not filter what the obsession locks onto.

The mountain is not a double image. The flag is only a flag.