ABSTRACT

Dream notation was a surrealist duty, almost, performed most notably by Andre Breton, Michel Leiris and Louis Aragon. Starting out from the manifest dream, one could go back, thanks to the method of free association, as far as the latent dream. The manifest dream appearing absurd, it was important to interpret it, to find meaning in it. The surrealists didn't agree. The surrealist philosophical project, elaborated by Aragon and Breton, was based on three principles. The first, subjectivist, solipsistic and immaterialist, prolonged the speculations of George Berkeley and Fichte. The second, intuitionist, imaginist and oneiric, echoed Novalis, Schelling or Bergson; mind is creative imagination, intellectual intuition, thinking via images. The third, nominalist or linguistic, under the auspices of Berkeley, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and Jean Paulhan, that one cannot think without words, without a syntax and without the odd platitude. These three principles combined an integral idealism, a wave of dreams or images, and an absolute nominalism.