In Aurelia, Nerval, encouraged by his doctor Emile Blanche during his 1853 hospitalisation, described his dreams, thus undertaking something rather rare in French letters. The impulse to write had been present in earlier bouts of madness, but Aurelia is a coherent project first driven by the desire to document and describe, which transformed itself into a search for meaning, and then into meaning. Nerval, in transcribing his dreams, discovered their continuity as well as the continuity of his psychic life, and used them to draw out the significance and meaning of his life, thus constructing a moral of redemption.