Salvador Dali Must Have Had Rather Large Tonsils

I am afflicted with a very sad condition. It is the condition of extraordinarily vivid dreams and nightmares. As a very small child I remember several reoccurring nightmares, one in particular where I stand helpless to watch a little girl about my own age who comes upon a demon and is dragged screaming and crying into hell. My parents were protective and loving, I only ever exposed to age-appropriate movies and books. Why did these kinds of dreams plague my innocent mind? I would never know.

In high school and college they persisted. Almost every night it seemed I was subjected to watching loved ones commit desperate suicides, pulling dead bodies of children from dark waters, being covered in thousands of spiders, running from tornados and dinosaurs, and finding dismembered body parts of dear friends on my doorstep.

Waking to scream and cry never helped, the only method I found to keep my demons at bay was to whisper the verse that begins “Love, is patient and kind…” as I willed myself to fall asleep again.

I also suffer another, less dreadful, condition. Or as of a month ago I did. I have always had very, very, large tonsils. This would lead naturally to persistent and antibiotic resistant bouts of strep throat. When I finally went to see an ENT specialist (Ear,Nose,Throat) I found a few answers that I hadn’t been looking for. The real condition I was suffering, other than the obvious strep, was sleep apnea. Sleep Apnea is a problem in which for a number of reasons, an individual will never complete a healthy sleep cycle because they continually stop breathing as they sleep and wake up many times during the night, sometimes without even remembering it. My reason for waking up was simple; my tonsils were so large that they made it nearly impossible to breathe steadily while sleeping. My nightmares were a product of my fickle sleeping pattern and a body that was rarely allowed to regenerate and rest during the night.

Now to get to the point of this story. As an artist one of my most revered influences is the work of surrealist Salvador Dali. When I first glimpsed his paintings as a child (on a calendar in Barnes & Noble) I remember being frightened. His stuff had the eerie flavor of nightmares. It frightened me because it took me back to the moments of waking in the dark, alone and afraid. As a highschooler I became intrigued with Dali’s mixture of beauty and horror. It was like he knew what I saw at night, and instead of locking it away in fear he presented it to the world as his own reality. And Dali poured into his unearthly paintings a sense of wonder. To be faced with his “The Temptation of St. Anthony” is strange and creepy yes, but breathtaking as well. This led me to the conclusion that to glimpse into another’s mind would be an experience akin to finding a new world. 

I have no more tonsils, and my sleep is beginning to return to what it should have always been. But Dali gave me a new dream; to paint my own dreams. If I can I will endeavor to face the silky shadows of my mind. I will recover and reveal the beauty and the twisted memories that lie there. And perhaps another dream inflicted artist will see what I have done and face their own fears to give others a taste of the ethereal images and alien worlds we paint in our sleep.