Having a wildly changing, dreamlike, and often surreal quality, like a fantastic sequence of strange images or events.
Derived from fantasmagoria plus the suffix -ic meaning 'having the quality of.' The adjective form emerged in the early 1800s to describe things that had the bewildering, shifting quality of the fantasmagoria spectacle.
Salvador Dalí used fantasmagoric imagery in his paintings to express the logic of dreams rather than reality—he called his style 'paranoiac-critical,' and it actually helped psychiatrists understand how surrealism reflects the actual structure of our unconscious minds.
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