Masanori Tsukamoto is invited by the Collège de France assembly, at the suggestion of Prof. William Marx.
Both Proust and Paul Valéry establish a link between writing and sleep. In neither case is it a matter of recounting oneiric experiences, but of creating an insight into ordinary reality. Sleep is not a means of exploring the unconscious, but a power capable of changing the ordinary vision of the world.
For Valéry, dreaming is a special form of consciousness. It is a " conscience sans le sommeil ", a state of continual invention independent of the dreamer, a " impuissance créatrice ". Proust, for his part, attempts to bring back to writing what is fragile about sleep. For the narrator of La Recherche, the dream is a form of consciousness stricken by a particular kind of oblivion. It has the power to make the absent appear. It is a powerful visual device capable of transporting us to another time.
The reflection of the two French writers on the dream from the point of view of its function and meaning can be illuminated by the reflection of the Japanese Buddhist monk Myōe in his Dream Diary, in which he collectedhis dreams for forty years, and which shows the close relationship between dream and Kegon thought.
