Salvador Dali and surrealism

A number of people have asked me "What exactly is surrealism?"
Quite often when I'm talking to Dali collectors, they refer to the art as abstract. Abstract art is more a combination of shapes and colors or lines that make up a scattered or fragmented image, although there are other styles of abstract such as pointillism (you can easily find examples of abstract art online). Surrealism in Dali's world was brought on by his childhood, the study of science and religeon and his introduction to a group of artists that wanted to promote the idea of the "Rebirth of Surrealism". Many beleive that surrealism started in the 1920's, but it can be traced back to the early years of art. With a bit of research, you can find many exaples of surrealism in the days of Velasquez and others. Surrealism spills over into other mediums as well. Study Gaudi the architect and the surrealists in film etc. The surreal state is a dreamlike state either brought on by environment, substance, or in Dali's case, self induced. There are a number of books that describe a self enduced paranoia and Dali's use of Freud in his works. As an example, the film Spellbound features a dream sequence desined by Dali and used by Alfred Hichcock to create what was referred to as "The Highest Grossing Film of that Year" attributed to Dali's contribution. In my opinion, Surrealism can bring about much more conversation and thought than many other categories in art, and much of surrealism is left to your imagination, while realism tells the story in full and leaves little for the imagination (depends on the subject of course). Impressionism seems to also tell the story in a similar way as realism, but you see a filtered image or the impression of the subjects. In Dali's case, you see long legged Elephants walking across a landscape or clocks melting over a tree branch. The experts over the years have all come up with various reasons why Dali painted melting clocks, but it's interesting that none of them were in line with Dali's own comments about the work.