This original work is executed from a photograph of the iconic painting "Le Sommeil" - with additional elements taken from another photograph, shot under direction from Dali, within the studio of Djon Milli in New York.
In this work, Dali returns to a classic motif favoured by Surrealists, as sleep and dreams evoke a state of unconsciousness and mental wandering, which favour creativity. Sleep is personified by an elongated face which loosely adopts Dali's features (on both accounts, as its particular shape mirrors that of Cadiques, the artist's Catalan features. The sleepy head is propped on several crutches, which have always been one of Dali's trademarks as they suggest the fragility of the frontier between dream and reality.
As he explained to his readers in Le Minotaure: "I have often imagined and depicted the sleep monster as a giant heavy head with a spindly body supported by the crutches of reality. When these crutches break, we have the sensation of "falling". Most of my readers have experienced this feeling of suddenly falling into the void, exactly at the minute when sleep is about to take over them completely."