Beyond "Inception": Best on-screen dreams

One of the great dream films of any era, "Un Chien Andalou" is also one of the 20th century's most playful and harmonious collaborations between great artists. The dreamers are surrealist painter Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who made this 16-minute short to demonstrate principles of avant-garde and surrealist art, and to have fun (though not necessarily in that order). From the infamous early close-up of a hand (Dali's) slitting a woman's eyeball (actually a dead goat's) with a straight razor, the film unmoors viewers from any expectation of "normality," meaning linear storytelling. A man stare at ants crawling out of a hole in his hand; two disembodied arms shake a martini through holes cut in a wall; a man pulls a piano containing two decomposing donkey carcasses and two priests (one of whom is played by Dali): The film is a sustained free association that defines the phrase "dream logic" better than words ever could. Bunuel and Dali would go on to instigate or participate in many dream-related movie projects. Highlights include the dream sequences Dali designed from Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and Bunuel's sustained forays into dream-inflected film storytelling, notably "The Exterminating Angel" (1962) and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972). "I love dreams," Bunuel once said, "even when they're nightmares, which is usually the case."