Rearranging Reality, the Merit of Surrealist Collage Art

Even though the first examples of collage art that I encountered and loved were of the anarchic, satirical and political variety that was usually to be found as part of the inserts within punk band Dead Kennedys lps, and that collage and photomontage are very useful for making visual political statements, I also have a great love for artwork of a more surrealist nature.
There are two things that I have always said that I enjoy about collage, first of all is the immediacy of the medium.
Providing that I have all the source material ready, I could create a completed piece of artwork in potentially a fraction of the time that I could spend painting in watercolours or certainly oils.
The other major appealing factor of collage is the ability to rearrange reality, especially when employing the photomontage variety, which can lend to a more compelling form of surrealist artwork, more so possibly than an oil painting, the fact that it is based upon photographic sources adds a slight bit authenticity to a not quite so real scenario.
Among my favourite techniques for creating a surreal atmosphere are replacing background sky, one particular occasion was a background sky and ground reversal, with the sky behind the pyramids replace with an upside down mountain range looming down.
Anthropomorphising is also a fun way of creating an other worldly effect, it's very fun to replace a man's head with a bugs, or placing butterfly wings on Pieta, as is having people holding objects in unlikely situations, just like a dream, it looks real, but there's sometimes that one odd thing to give it that dream quality.
Surrealism is the style of artwork that I feel the most comfortable free-forming, kind of like how a jazz musician will improvise, or the early surrealists in Paris would employ automatic writing (coming up with whatever choice of words that the subconscious would throw out onto the page, not the psychic belief variety) I would begin with a base image and flip through source material an add things as the occurred to me, it was and still is a pretty cool way of coming up with something weird.
The best thing to do in the end though, is to always find your own sense of what can create a surreal effect and what you find weird, you know what you like and find odd, and remember, experimentation is half the fun!