Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

A nude woman - Dali's wife Gala - floats asleep above a flat rock over the sea, while from a pomegranate burst a fish, two snarling tigers, and a bayonet that lunges toward her arm; a single bee circles a smaller pomegranate below. Dali pictured the instant before waking, when a real sound invades and reshapes a dream. Now in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, this elaborately titled work is among his most dazzling dream-paintings - a chain of transformations, meticulously rendered, capturing the strange logic by which sleep turns a buzzing bee into a charging tiger.