Imagine running your hands through your hair and finding that each dangling lock has turned into a living tarantula's leg. Imagine looking up into a chestnut tree and noticing that one of the spiny green conker shells is actually an eyeball and is watching you.

The entrants to this year's Tate Times Painting Challenge - which I judged alongside Ann Coxon, Tate Modern's assistant curator of displays, Stephen McCoubrey, regional curator of the UBS Art Collection, and David Rayson, head of painting at the RCA - came up with some unnerving images as they responded to the work of Surrealist painters in the Tate collection. To walk through a show of their work, which will go on display at Tate Modern next week, is to wander about in some pretty strange places.

Inspired by anyone from Marc Chagall to Salvador Dalí or Kurt Schwitters to Georgia O'Keeffe, the young entrants, aged between 11 and 18, have set off along some unexpected paths, following the illogical trajectories of their dreams, exploring the flipside of their everyday lives.

They are certainly not the first young artists to look to Surrealism as a valuable part of the process of individual development. Artists from Picasso to Jackson Pollock have turned to it as a way of limbering up the mind, building the imagination, training the hand to flow free.

The images the young Times artists have come up with are nothing if not vivid. The visitor will encounter a tiger leaping through a rainbow; a bunch of huge luscious red lily trumpets; the almost spooky stare of a pet tabby cat. But the presiding mood is poetic and often sad. The land of Surrealism can be a lonely place.

The first prize was awarded to Heather Hodkinson for her painting Crossing Over. An image that at first glance might seem quite humdrum - just a line of figures walking over a zebra crossing - on a second look starts to make very little sense. The torsos of statues march over the stripes, but there is nothing black and white about what they are doing. It is as confusing as her dreams, suggests Heather, who was inspired by Giorgio de Chirico's The Uncertainty of the Poet. She has tapped into this artist's unnerving atmosphere.

The runner-up is Joshua Mainprize, who finds inspiration for The Loneliness of Wisdom in the pinched and kneaded surfaces of Alberto Giacometti's gaunt figures. The skin of the Swiss sculpture's solitary stalkers is like the bark of a tree Joshua realised, and so in his prize-winning picture he presents a figure, or rather part of a figure, as a rock on whose lonely promontory a tree (like a head) stands alone, exposed to the elements.

Surrealism turns a key in a lock in the head. In those unexplored spaces we often find worries and fears. But in confronting them we find a way forward. Inside those solitary spaces is also a great optimism.

The Tate Times Painting Challenge exhibition runs Jan 6-9 at Tate Modern, or go to creativemanifesto.tate.org.uk to view all the entrants

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