surreal

Thân thiện

The painting displayed a surreal landscape of melting clocks.

Definition

1. Adjective:
   • Resembling a dream; having an unreal, fantastic, or strange quality. This meaning describes something that feels disconnected from reality, similar to the illogical and shifting nature of dreams.
   • Characterized by fantastic, bizarre, or incongruous imagery and combinations. This meaning is specific to the artistic and literary movement of Surrealism, which seeks to express the subconscious mind.

Usage Examples

• Adjective:
  • Waking up in a foreign city felt surreal. (The experience had an unreal, dreamlike quality.)
  • The surreal landscape of the salt flats stretched to the horizon. (The landscape appeared strange and fantastical.)
  • The artist is known for his surreal paintings featuring melting clocks. (The paintings contain bizarre, dream-inspired imagery.)

Advanced Usage

• "surreal experience/moment": A common collocation to describe a situation that feels incredibly strange or unbelievable.
  • Winning the award was a surreal experience.
• Used to describe a situation that is so bizarre or unexpected it feels unreal.
  • The entire meeting had a surreal quality, as if no one was listening to each other.

Variants and Related Words

• Surrealism (n): A 20th-century artistic and literary movement that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, often through irrational juxtapositions.
  • Salvador Dalí was a famous painter in the Surrealism movement.
• Surrealist (n/adj): (A person) relating to or characteristic of Surrealism.
  • He is a surrealist filmmaker.
• Surreally (adv): In a surreal manner.
  • The events unfolded surreally.

Synonyms

• Dreamlike: Having the qualities of a dream.
• Unreal: Lacking in reality or substance.
• Fantastic: Extraordinarily good or attractive; also, conceived by unrestrained imagination.
• Bizarre: Very strange or unusual.
• Phantasmagoric: Having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as in a dream.

Related Idioms & Phrases

• Like something out of a dream: Similar in meaning to "surreal," emphasizing an unbelievable or fantastical quality.
  • The garden at night was like something out of a dream.

Học thuật

Adjective

1. resembling a dream
   • night invested the lake with a dreamlike quality
   • as irrational and surreal as a dream
2. characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions
   • a great concourse of phantasmagoric shadows--J.C.Powys
   • the incongruous imagery in surreal art and literature

Từ đồng nghĩa

• dreamlike
• phantasmagoric
• phantasmagorical
• surrealistic