On the night of November 10, 1619, while stationed in Neuburg an der Donau, the young French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes shut himself inside a stove-heated room and experienced a series of three vivid, consecutive dreams. In these dreams, he encountered a terrifying phantom whirlwind, a thunderclap that woke him, and a dictionary that opened to a verse by Ausonius: 'Quod vitae sectabor iter?' (What path in life shall I follow?). Descartes interpreted these dreams as a divine mandate to found a unified system of rational science.

Irony defined this foundational moment of Western rationalism: the Cartesian method was birthed from a highly irrational, surreal nocturnal experience. This paradox fascinated later Romantic and Surrealist poets, who frequently cited Descartes's dreams to prove that even logic's ultimate architect was indebted to the untamable poetic subconscious.