Dissonance

How is it possible to find beauty in dissonance? I'm thinking primarily of music that might fairly be described as dissonant here, but the idea has application to other areas of artistic experience. A fairly obvious answer is that we project the quality of what we imagine onto the dissonant material - and this fits neatly the clever idea that in doing so we are saying something about our status as superior consumers of art. I'm keenly aware that there was something more than a little pretentious about my early encounters with Messiaen, for example. But for the life of me I don't recognise any such pretence any more. So is it simply that my ability to deceive myself has reached awesome proportions, making me believe I'm encountering a non-existent beauty just because I'm so thoroughly desperate to do so?