A simple explanation of this painting would be that Dali dreamt of drooping clocks in a desert and painted that dream. Dali was often inspired by his dreams. He even had an ingenious way of capturing dreams. He placed a metal plate on the floor of his bedroom and put a key in his hand when he went to sleep. When sleep overtook him, his hand would relax, the key would hit the plate and the sound would wake him up. Yet Surrealism is about more than taking snapshots of dreams. Surrealism suggests that reality itself is a dream. Time, for Dali, was not a concrete aspect of the universe, but rather an abstract, subjective quality that depends on the mind of the observer.