Guillaume de Lorris began composing 'Roman de la Rose', an allegorical French poem set entirely within a young lover's dreamscape during the month of May. The dreamer enters a walled garden inhabited by personified psychological abstractions like Danger, Shame, and Fair Welcome, all surrounding a central rosebud. This text formalized courtly love conventions through a hyper-stylized landscape of symbols, suggesting that the subconscious is an architectural space where forbidden desires are mapped out and resolved.

The 'Roman de la Rose' became the most influential secular poem of the European High Middle Ages, establishing the dream-vision as the dominant literary structure for exploring complex interiority. It provided a vocabulary of symbolic displacement that directly anticipated the modern surrealist obsession with erotic desire mapped onto dream geography.