Enigmatic is the single best word to use to describe this painting. Although Dalí had been painting some strange objects into his works for years now, the object in the center is most interesting. In form it is similar to the wall shown in Memory of the Child Woman which is also a sexual Surrealist tribute to Dalí's lover and muse, Gala.
    In this work however, the scene is simpler, consisting mainly of an elongated, somewhat rounded looking wall with several smooth alcoves in it. The largest of these houses a key, a symbol for the sex act, and a red jewel adorns the center. In several of the smaller alcoves, Dalí had written the words "Ma mere" or "My mother" over and over again, certainly a tribute to his dead mother, who had passed away in 1921.
    Some differences between this work and its companion piece are the scenery, barely visible at the edges, and the addition of what might be the ruin of a Roman or Corinthian column. Dalí often played near the ruin of Ampurius, on the plane of Ampurdan near his home. References to classical Greco-Roman themes, architecture or gods are often associated with this connection that Dalí felt with his ancient ancestors in Europe.
    Additionally, Dalí has rendered this work in a soothing blue tone, which despite the ram's skull in the foreground, creates a sense of calm. It is thought that Dalí used the blue tone in both this work and others to honor one of the greatest Spanish painters of all time, Velazquez.

    The Dream Approaches has the haunting atmosphere of a dream, aided by a luminescent pre-dawn sky. In the foreground of the painting is a potentially coffin-shaped form, over which white material is draped. On the right side of this block is a large cocoon shape, its opening suggesting the female genitalia. Standing on the sandy beach is a naked man, Classical in form as well as stance, with one hand raised and his hips tilted. The brushwork on his body creates the illusion that dark flames are swirling along his back.
    On the right, next to two trees that are still half in darkness, is a tall tower with one solitary window at the top. The tower seems like a ruin as the plaster is falling away and there are cracks along it. Amongst other paintings, this tower can also be seen in The Horseman of Death (1934). Towers appear in Dalí's work as a symbol of desire and death. In his autobiographical writings, Dalí explained this as owing to his childhood memories of a mill tower, where he had felt both sexual and violent urges toward a girl.

    Dalí tells us that this work was inspired by an intra-uterine memory. He says that one day, after vigorously rubbing his eyes, he became fascinated with the brilliant yellow, orange, and ochre colors he saw. As a result, he says, he had a flashback to his mother's womb, and created this paranoiac-critical explanation of the experience.
    Suspended on a string, in the center of the work is a single egg yolk, which Dalí said represented himself in the womb. Below that, the two eggs on the plate (curious, that plate, look at the title again) were painted with a shimmering yolk. These represented the piercing gaze of Gala Dalí, whom Dalí had met in 1929. At the time, she had been the darling of the Surrealist movement, not to mention the wife of Paul Eluard, the French poet. It was said that her gaze could pierce through walls, and Dalí is paying her homage here.
    A large, cubist building dominates the scene, while other objects are attached to the wall facing the eggs. First is a small, dripping watch, a continuation of the theme of the melting watches done in The Persistence of Memory. Above that is a phallic ear of corn, representing male sexuality. Just to the left of the ear of corn is a window in the building, and standing in it, looking out through another window, are the father and son figures that were originally painted in The First Days of Spring, some three years ago. Off in the distance are the rocks of Dalí's homeland.

    This portrait shows Gala shortly after her meeting with Dali. Gala is Dali's one and only inspiration. Her importance equals that of the most celebrated mistresses of the greatest men. As the wife of the poet Paul Eluard, she inspired him to write verses which are numbered among the most beautiful in contemporary poetry: "she whom I love, Gala, who hides my life from me and shows me love."
    André Thirion pays her the greatest homage, writing: "Dali felt for Gala an exclusive and devouring passion," and "he painted then some pictures which are considered among the most moving and most beautiful tokens of love that man has ever given a woman."
    Dali still today offers her this constant declaration of love in these lines written in 1971: "I call my wife: Gala, Galutchka, Gradiva (because she has been the one who advances) - Gradiva is the heroine of a novel by W.Jensen interpreted by Freud; Olive (for the oval of her face and the color of her skin), Olivette, the Catalonian diminutive of Olive, and its delicious derivatives: Olihuette, Oriuette, Buribette, Burkueteta, Suluhueta, Solibubulete, Oliburibuleta, Cihuetta. Also called Lionette (little lion, because she roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion when she is angry); squirrel, tapir, little Negus (because she looks like a pretty little forest animal); bee (because she brings me the essence of everything which, transformed into honey, nourishes the buzzing hive of my brain). Her glance pierces walls (Paul Eluard). She gave me the rare book on magic which was necessary to the elaboration of the paranoiac image desired by my subconscious mind for the photography of an unknown painting destined to reveal a new aesthetics, with the advice for saving one of my images that was too subjective and tainted with romanticism. I also call her Gala-Noisette poilue (because of the very fine down which covers her cheeks) and also Quatre cloches, because she reads aloud to me during my long séances of painting, producing a murmur like the sound of four clocks, which plunges me into a state where I am able to learn everything that, without her, I would never have known."

    The True Picture of the "Island of the Dead" by Arnold Bocklin at the Hour of the Angelus is Dalí's reworking of the German painter Arnold Bocklin's piece, Island of the Dead; Dalí was writing a study on Bocklin during this period. Bocklin said that the Island of the Dead was a painting "to dream over", deliberately leaving it untitled so that the meaning remained open to interpretation by the viewer. Bocklin's thoughts were very close to views held by the Surrealists, especially Dalí. On the left appear the only objects: a cup with a thin rod attached to it sitting on a block. Using Freudian dream interpretation (which is evident throughout Dalí's early work) any receptacle is female and any rod is regarded as phallic. Read as male and female, these objects could be the reason for Dalí's inclusion of the "Angelus" in the title.
    The island does not resemble the island in the Bocklin painting; it resembles more the shape of the head in Paranoiac Face, painted around the same time. It is probable that both of these paintings were based upon the same rocky, coastal scenery.

    The Architectonic Angelus of Millet shows how Dalí used the "paranoia-critical" method, employing Millet's The Angelus as the catalyst. Dalí saw a reproduction of The Angelus in 1929, not having thought about it since childhood. He had been obsessed with the image as a child, finding parallels between that and two cypress trees that stood outside his classroom. Upon seeing this reproduction, he became very upset and distressed; to discover why he employed psychoanalytical methods. He also began to see The Angelus in "visions" in objects around him: once in a lithograph of cherries, once in two stones on a beach. The Architectonic Angelus of Millet was based upon this latter "vision".
    Unlike Gala and The Angelus of Millet, The Architectonic Angelus has no reproduction of The Angelus. Instead, the Angelus couple are transformed into two huge, white stones that loom over the Catalonian landscape. Dalí pointed out that although the male stone on the left appears to be dominant due to its size, the female stone is the aggressor here, pushing out a part of herself to make physical contact with the male. The often-used image of the young Dalí with his father can be seen sheltering underneath the male stone.

    In this interior scene reproduced here in nearly actual size, Dalí has brought together some of the characters or the obsessional themes of his Surrealist works before 1935. In the background, Gala, smiling, contemplates the scene; she is dressed in a richly embroidered jacket and is wearing a white cap with a transparent yellow-green visor which was then ih style. The seated figure facing her, one hand placed on the table near a ball and a precariously balanced cube, is easily recognizable: it is Lenin. On the left, the indiscrete mustachioed man eavesdropping behind the door is Maxim Gorky; on his head there is a lobster, a crustacean that the painter often places in equally anachronistic spots, even creating in 1936 an object known as the "lobster-telephone." Along with the soft watches, one of the most persistent obsessive images in Dalí's works is undoubtedly The Angelus of Jean-Francois Millet, painter of the peasant world. This picture, which is in the Louvre in Paris, is reproduced in Dalí's painting hung over the door. Dalí attributes to this image an erotic significance explained in his book, Le Mythe tragique de L'Angelus de Millet, in which he describes in minute detail and at great length this delirious phenomenon. ''In June 1932, there suddenly came to my mind without any close or conscious association, which would have provided an immediate explanation, the image of The Angelus of Millet. This image consisted of a visual representation which was very clear and in colors. It was nearly instantaneous and was not followed by other images. It made a very great impression on me, and was most upsetting to me because, although in my vision of the afore-mentioned image everything corresponded exactly to the reproductions of the picture with which I was familiar, it appeared to me nevertheless absolutely modified and charged with such latent intentionality that The Angelus of Millet Suddenly' became for me the pictorial work which was the most troubling, the most enigmatic, the most dense and the richest in unconscious thoughts that I had ever seen."