Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
About your points
(1) I have answered this in my former letter. If the surrealist dream experiences are flat, pointless or ugly, it must be because they penetrate only the “subconscious” physical and “subconscious” vital dream layers. Dream consciousness is a vast world in which there are many provinces and kingdoms, but ordinary dreamers penetrate consciously only to these layers which belong to what may properly be called subconscious. When they pass into sleep beyond these, the recording surface dream-mind becomes unconscious and gives no transcript of what is seen and experienced there, or else in coming back these fade away and are quite forgotten before one reaches the waking state. But when the dream-state becomes more conscious, one can often remember the deeper dream-experiences and these have a considerable interest and significance.
(2) It is only the subconscious that is chaotic in its dream sequences – for its transcriptions are fantastic and often mixed, combining a jumble of different impressions; some 
from the past or outward touches pressing on the sleep-mind some from successive dream-experiences that are not really part of one connected experience – as if a gramophone record were to be made up of snatches of different songs all jumbled together. The vital dreams are often coherent in themselves and only seem incoherent to the waking intelligence because the logic and law of sequences is different – if one gets the guiding clue and has some dream-experience and dream-insight, then one is able to seize the sequences and make out the significance which is often very profound or very striking. Deeper in we come to perfectly coherent dreams recording the experience of the inner vital and inner mental planes or the psychic – the latter usually are of a great beauty. Some of these however are symbolic, many in fact, and can only be understood if one is familiar with or gets the clue to the symbols.
(3) It depends on the nature of the dreams. If they are of the right kind, they need no aid of imagination to be converted into poetry. If they are significant, imagination in the sense of a free use of mental invention might injure their truth and meaning – unless of course the imagination is an inspired vision coming from the same plane and filling out or reconstructing the recorded experience so as to give more fully the Truth held in it.
(4) The word psyche is used by most people to mean anything belonging to the inner mind, vital or physical. Poetry does come from there or from the supraconscient sometimes; but it does not come usually through the forms of dreams – it comes either through word-vision or through conscious vision and imagery whether in a fully waking or an inward-drawn state. The latter may go so far as to be a state of samādhi – svapna samādhi. Dreams also can be made a material for poetry; but everyone who dreams or has visions or has a flow of images cannot by that fact be a poet. To say that a predisposition and discipline is needed to bring them to light in the form of written words is merely a way of saying that it is not enough to be a dreamer, one must have the poetic 
faculty and some training. Unless they mean something else than what the words would naturally signify. What is possible however is that by going into the inner (what is usually called the subliminal) consciousness – this is not really subconscious but a veiled or occult consciousness – or getting somehow into contact with it, one not originally a poet can awake to poetic inspiration and power. No poetry can be written without access to some source of Inspiration. Mere recording of dreams or images could never be sufficient, unless it is a poetic inspiration that records them with the right use of words and rhythm bringing out their poetic substance. On the other hand I am bound to admit that among the records of dream-experiences I get even from people unpractised in writing a good many read like a brilliant and colourful poetry that does hit – satisfying Housman’s test – the solar plexus. So much I can concede to the surrealist theory; but if they say on that basis that all can with a little training become poets – well, one needs a little more proof before one can accept so wide a statement.
P.S. I return your letter for point-comparison as perhaps my answers may not be clear enough without that.