The "Real" World Is More Dream-Like Than Science Admits
Meg ☺For most of human history, we believed the world was rigid — a solid, fixed stage where things simply “are what they are.” Science, especially in the last few centuries, reinforced this idea: matter obeys laws, objects stay objects, and reality is an indifferent machine grinding along its predetermined tracks.
But if you’ve ever fallen in love, woken from a symbolic dream, had a strange sign repeat itself three times in a day, or felt your entire identity shift in one moment of clarity — then you already know the truth:
Reality is not fixed.
Reality is plastic.
And plasticity is the real nature of existence.
This idea isn’t new.
It’s just forgotten.
In the early 20th century, the surrealists — André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington — attempted to say this out loud long before neuroscience or quantum physics caught up.
They believed the world isn’t as solid as we pretend.
Not emotionally, not symbolically, and not spiritually.
And they were right.
The surrealists and the plasticity of reality
In classical art theory, “the plastic arts” meant the arts of shaping matter: sculpture, painting, drawing. But to the surrealists, “plastic” didn’t mean clay or marble.
It meant reality itself is moldable.
Breton wrote that love, imagination, intuition, and the unconscious reshape experience as powerfully as the sculptor’s hands reshape clay.
To them, reality was something more alive, more fluid — a membrane rather than a wall.
They believed:
- Objects aren’t just objects
- Images aren’t just images
- Dreams aren’t just dreams
- Love isn’t just emotion
- Identity isn’t just personality
All of these are materials the psyche interacts with.
Matter has meaning.
Meaning has matter.
There is no clean separation.
This is why surrealism wasn’t just an art movement — it was a metaphysical revolt.
Love as a plastic force
Surrealists believed love was the most powerful sculptor of all.
The kind of love that:
- rearranges your identity,
- breaks your old patterns,
- expands perception,
- awakens symbolic vision,
- dissolves separation,
- rewires meaning,
- shifts the axis of your existence.
Breton described falling in love as discovering “the true structure of the world.”
Not because the world changes — but because you do.
Love is the heat that softens the “solid” world until you can shape it, feel it, understand it.
Love is not a feeling.
It’s a metamorphosis.
Remedios Varo and the sculpting of inner realities
Remedios Varo, took this idea further than most.
Her paintings reveal that “matter” extends beyond the physical.
The inner world — intuition, longing, awakening — has its own architecture.
Her canvases are diagrams of emotional physics.
- Pain becomes machinery.
- Intuition becomes geometry.
- Destiny becomes a staircase.
- Identity becomes an alchemical workshop.
- Consciousness becomes a tangible structure.
Varo understood that the invisible is not imaginary — it is simply subtler matter.
She painted not what we see, but what shapes what we see.
This is the ultimate surrealist plasticity:
the soul as sculptor, the world as soft wax.
Convulsive beauty: when reality rearranges you
Breton famously said:
“Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be.”
Convulsive beauty is the moment reality breaks open:
- spiritual awakening
- symbolic dream
- synchronicity
- identity shift
- intuitive knowing
- sudden clarity
- love that feels ancient
It’s a rupture in the surface of life that reveals the deeper structure beneath.
Convulsive beauty is terrifying and healing at the same time.
It reshapes your inner landscape so quickly you feel the tremor.
Surrealists believed this wasn’t a rare event — it was the natural state of the world, glimpsed only when the mind is awake enough to perceive it.
What science forgets
Modern science treats matter as the baseline and consciousness as a side-effect.
But surrealism — and centuries of mystical thought — suggest the opposite:
Consciousness shapes matter.
Matter responds to consciousness.
Even physics is inching toward this truth:
- observers influence experiments
- time is not linear
- matter can behave like waves of possibility
- information and material reality are intertwined
The world is not a machine.
It is a field of relationships.
It is dream-like not because it is unreal —
but because it is more real than the narrow slice we are trained to perceive.
The real world is plastic
If everything is plastic — capable of being shaped — then nothing is final:
- trauma is not destiny
- identity is not fixed
- meaning is not imposed
- reality is not dead
- the world is not solid
- the past is not immutable
- the self is not a cage
This is not philosophy.
This is experience.
When you begin to see life symbolically, intuitively, synchronistically, emotionally, metaphysically —
you begin to see that the “real” world is not a rigid structure.
It is a malleable, breathing, feeling, responsive landscape.
A dream not because it is false —
but because it is alive.
Their philosophy wasn’t an art theory
It was a map.
A map back to truth.
© 1960 Remedios Varo, courtesy of the Remedios Varo Estate. Image used under fair use for educational commentary.
Artist: Remedios Varo
Title: Mimesis
Year: 1960
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 48 × 40 cm (approx.)
Current collection: Private collection / © Estate of Remedios Varo
Mimesis comes from ancient Greek μίμησις.
The closest (and truest) English translation is:
“Imitation” or “Representation”
But both feel too flat, because the original concept means:
the act of mirroring, simulating, or reproducing the essence of something.
A more poetic / accurate translation that captures what Varo intended would be:
“Mirroring” or “Becoming What One Sees”
(though that last one is more interpretive than literal)
The simplest and most accepted translation is:
Mimesis → Imitation
... but when talking about Varo, most art historians leave it untranslated because the nuance is richer.