Surrealist prompts in honor of David Lynch
Read me with, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee!
“Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution—seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together.” - David Lynch
Surrealism & Synesthesia
My love for the surreal began at 14, during a year I spent in Madrid with my parents. There, I discovered Salvador Dalí’s paintings—worlds of melting clocks, impossible skies, and illusions captured on canvas. Surrealism and childhood felt like the same thing to me; an acceptance of life’s absurdity and its sensory overwhelm. I, too, was a mess of colors, sounds, and emotions mixed up in not always logical ways.
Surrealism plays in the space between too much information and too little. Known things are combined in unfamiliar ways, reality is heightened and bent until it feels like a dream.
I’ve always seen the world this way—too real to be real, too dreamlike to be a dream. My mind works differently from some; I know this to be true. I experience several forms of synesthesia, the most obvious being mirror-touch. I feel a jolt of pain or adrenaline when I see someone else hurt, as though my body believes their experience is my own. I also perceive pain and pleasure as colors, hear sounds as tastes, and perhaps others.
I often wonder if my creativity—the way I lean into poetry and metaphor—is rooted in this internal blending of the senses. The world arrives as a cacophony, and I make sense of it through patterns, metaphors, and a kind of surrealist translation. I know things before I know them. I dream things before they happen.
Lynchian Dreams
In college, I fell into David Lynch’s world. My boyfriend and I watched Twin Peaks in the span of a month, and I wanted to be Audrey Horne, to be Agent Dale Cooper. I wanted to live in that imaginal space of intuition and pine trees, dreams and darkness.
At NYU, where I studied film for a semester, I gravitated toward noir. But what I truly loved was anything that let me feel as though I could create my own world—worlds where the edges blur, where the mundane becomes uncanny. This, I realize now, is what Lynch mastered and what I’ve always sought in my own work, both visually in my photography and metaphorically in poetry.
It is really only years later that I can see just how influenced I really was and still am by David Lynch as an artist. I believe that he and I create from the same place; the place you can reach by doing daily meditation, by being completely open to ideas and letting them have their way with you.
Creative Prompts
This week, I want to honor David Lynch’s legacy by inviting you to create from that place of wonder, absurdity, and strangeness, where dreams bleed into reality, and "there is always music in the air.”
If you need some musical inspiration, here is a mix tape I made you <3
Surrealist Poetry Film: Write a short poem and film a one-minute scene on your phone. Layer it with audio: ambient sounds you’ve recorded (footsteps, wind, murmurs) or a voiceover of your poem. Focus on making the ordinary feel uncanny.
Dream Collage: Take magazine clippings, found objects, or photos, and create a surreal collage. Pair it with a caption inspired by a recent dream.
Synesthesia Experiment: Choose a sensation you’ve experienced recently (a sound, a taste, a texture). Translate it into a different medium: paint a sound, write a poem about a taste, or sketch a texture. Let the senses blur.
Intuitive Scriptwriting: Set a timer for 10 minutes and write a stream-of-consciousness dialogue between two characters. Don’t edit or overthink. Record it as a voice memo and let it be a seed for something else down the line.
Surreal Photography Sequence: Take three photos of your surroundings, but stage them to feel slightly off—unexpected juxtapositions, odd lighting, or strange props. Arrange the photos as a triptych and title them as if they’re scenes from a film.
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Love this post! Totally listening to the mixtape. (And the heroine of my novel-in-progress is a synesthete!) 💓
Thank you so much for sharing this - I am very late to the David Lynch party, but so inspired by your words and prompts. I often have not had words for how I experience the world, despite knowing that my mum has a few forms of synesthesia. I sense some journaling on the horizon!