Archive of Dreams: A Surrealist Impulse. Published 2024, Spector Books, Leipzig

We have just received this beautiful book on surrealism and dreams, by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Archiv der Avantgarden, Egidio Marzona, and the authors, artists and photographers. It starts with the Bureau of Surrealist Research in 1920s Paris. It is very informative, with several essays, and is lavishly illustrated with historical artefacts. It includes dreams published by various surrealists. 

One dream is from surrealist poet Paul Eluard, who was a close friend of Picasso. It includes a dream-within-a-dream and a false-awakening. ‘N’ is probably his wife, Nusch. 

The dream of Paul Eluard had been published in French in André Breton’s limited edition (1938) book Trajectoire du Rêve. On the next page in that book Eluard explains that in waking life he had been having feelings of physical weakness, anxiety, isolation and abandonment. 

The translation of his description of his waking life is: 'I frequently experienced during the day this feeling of isolation, these anxieties, these pains, this agony. And every time I get angry, I try to reproduce them, furiously, desperately. To have often been in a state of physical weakness. Extreme, so visible that I was supposed to be abandoned. I feel forgotten, in worse moments, the desire to voluntarily deprive others of me and to live against and against all.'    

The physiological explanation for dreams-within-dreams and for false-awakenings is that the sleeping cortex is active enough to know one has just been dreaming, even though one continues to dream. The Freudian explanation is that dreaming of waking up can itself be interpreted. Eluard had been in poor health and had been feeling isolated and abandoned. He dreams of being immobile, and then dreams of waking up and that he is still immobile. His immobility is emphasised by the false-awakening, as if it’s saying ‘look, you’ve woken up and you are still paralysed!’ That false-awakening can be explained by physiology or by psychoanalytic meaning.