Today, the term surreal is used to denote a curious imaginative effect. The word’s provenance can be traced back to the revolutionary surrealism movement which grew out of Dadaism in the mid-1920s. Surrealism spread quite quickly across European arts and literature, particularly in France, between the two world wars. The movement’s founder – French poet Andre Breton – was influenced heavily by Freud’s theories, as he reacted against reason and logic in order to free the imagination from the unconscious mind. Surrealist works, both visual and oral, juxtaposed seemingly unrelated everyday objects and placed these in dreamlike settings. Thus, the popularity of surrealist paintings, including Salvador Dali’s, lies in the unconventional positioning of powerful images such as leaping tigers, melting watches and metronomes. Surrealist art is widely known today, unlike the less easily accessible works of the French surrealist writers who, ignoring the literal meanings of words, focused instead on word associations and implications. That said, the literary surrealist tradition still survives in modern-day proponents of experimental writing.