From at least three viewpoints, quite as inseparable as art and life usually are for the surrealists, Breton affirms the importance of dreams: to the poet, painter, or sculptor, dreams furnish the models—procedures and products—of an activity which is unencumbered by the constraints of realist representation; to the explorer of daily life they indicate by analogy how spaces and events which initially appear disconcerting are organized among themselves; to man in general, that "definitive dreamer," the analysis of dreams provides the most vivid sense of all the possibilities which existence offers him. Apprehending his dreams, man would in the same breath apprehend the "natural necessity" which governs all life….

Despite important reservations, [in Les Vases Communicants] Breton borrows from Freud the essential elements of the notions presented in The Interpretation of Dreams: wish-fulfillment, manifest and latent content, the mechanisms and the processes of dream-work, the method...