The Surrealists weren't just sitting around waiting for weird dreams to arrive. They invented methods — reliable tricks for kicking the conscious, sensible mind out of the driver's seat so the unconscious could take over. Learn these four and you can manufacture surreal images on demand.
The Four Moves
The first and most famous is juxtaposition — placing two completely unrelated things side by side so the clash makes a spark. A sewing machine and an umbrella, on a dissecting table. A lobster on a telephone. Neither thing is strange on its own; it's the collision that's surreal, and your brain can't stop trying to make sense of it.
The second is automatism — making marks without conscious control. You let your hand scribble, doodle or wander with your eyes half-shut, then look for images hiding in the mess, like spotting faces in clouds. The point is to switch off the part of you that's trying to "draw well" and let whatever's underneath leak out.
The third is the impossible scene — paint something with total, believable realism, but make the situation impossible. A perfectly painted apple that fills an entire room. A train steaming out of a fireplace. The careful realism is what sells the impossibility; it dares you to disbelieve it.
The fourth is the scale shift — take one ordinary object and make it enormous, or tiny, against everything around it. A green apple the size of a man's face. A comb as tall as a building. Get the size wrong on purpose and an everyday thing turns instantly into a vision.
Why the Machine Works
The juxtaposition machine in the toy is automatism and juxtaposition rolled into one. By spinning two reels you've handed the choice over to chance — exactly what Breton wanted. Your sensible mind would never pair "a grandfather clock" with "the bottom of the ocean", but chance will, and the second it does, your imagination lurches into gear trying to picture it. That involuntary "ooh, what would that look like?" is the surreal idea being born.
Spin it a dozen times. Most pairings will be duds — and that's fine, that's the method. You're prospecting. You only need one that makes the hair on your arms stand up, and then you've got something worth drawing.