I have had creative dreams all night. In one of them, a complete dress collection was invented, itself sufficient to assure my fortune as a couturier for at least seven seasons. Forgetting my dream has caused me to lose this small treasure. I have barely been able to reconstruct two dresses that will be worn by Gala in New York this winter--but the last of the night's dreams was very powerful.

It was all about a method to obtain a photographic Assumption, which I shall call an "Ascension." I shall utilize the procedure in America. Wide awake, I still find this dream as excellent as during my sleep.

Here is my recipe: you take five bags of chick peas that you have put into a bigger bag which will hold them all; you drop the peas from a height of thirty-five feet; with a sufficiently powerful electric light you project on the falling chick peas an image of the Virgin; each chick pea, separated from the next by space, Iike the corpuscles of the atom, will register a small part of the image; you must project the image upside down; due to the acceleration resulting from the laws of gravity, the inverted fall of the chick peas will produce the effect of an "ascension."

If you follow these directions you will have an ascensionist image that corresponds to the purest laws of physics. Needless to say, such an experiment will be unique of its kind. To heighten the effect, you might cover each chick pea with some substance that will give it the consistency of a movie screen.

SOURCE: Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dalí, p.41-2

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