Les modalités de la vie onirique dans Avatar de Théophile Gautier

Resumen

Gautier´s vocation for the hidden facets of the self drives him to explore the territory of dreams as a source for inspiration and discovery as well as a backing for the supernatural. He feels the lure of the onirism as a way of breaking the limits between the real world and the fantasy. The paper aims to study the different types of onirism in his works. First of all the onirism related to sleep. Dreams and sleep establish a relation that´s on the base of the characters´ experience and their subsequent tales. There are other ways of dreaming in which the writer explores various aspects of the ambiguous territories of woken states as a matter for his fantasy. Avatar is an extraordinary example of these varieties of the onirism that are responsible for the radical changes in characters, spaces and facts.