Imagine that you are in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art one Windy surrealistic night as the paintings and mobiles inside come to life and start moving about you in the darkness; the wind rises and falls as if orchestrated by Darius Milhaud or Paul Bowles; and a series of characters ready for the psychiatrist's couch wander in off the street and expose their fears, desires, and dreams to your view. You might not know exactly what you had been through, but you would certainly start telling your friends you had had an experience.

This is the sort of experience you have when seeing "Dreams That Money Can Buy." Probably no one could tell you precisely what the film is about--it makes no pretensions at hanging together all of a piece and giving any single, clear meaning. But the word "surrealist" shouldn't frighten you off. With no more than a New Yorker-level of knowledge of Freud, a little patience for modern music and art, and the least bit of initial curiosity, this quite amazing motion picture will soon sweep you up and carry you along in a swirl of color and sound without bewildering you hardly at all.

Producer-director Hans Richter assembled five of his fellow artists and allowed each of them to dream up a separate sequence for the movie. Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Alexander Calder each contributed an idea. Then Richter strung them all together with what--if logic be considered--is the most tenuous of threads. But, logic be damned, say the surrealists. And, in watching the movie, you are apt to accept their premise.

Behind the color, forms, and ideas of this noted collection of artists, Richter has woven in the music of an equally modern group of composers; the sounds of Milhaud and Bowles happen to be among them. Josh White and Libby Holman sing an ultra-modern ballad, "The Girl With the Pre-Fabricated Heart," behind one of the best sequences. There seems to be no end to the talent assembled here, and though the actors are unknowns, their performances are worthy of the company they are in.

Far be it from me to try and explain the movie. Perhaps it should be said that the film is not all abstract. A great deal of emotion fuses the color and sounds together. And for those who have a dread of the esoteric, it might be added that their baser instincts will be thoroughly aroused by a number of the scenes. Apparently everything passed over the head of the censors except Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase." On her, they have had some black discs appropriately placed. But throughout the rest of the film the libidos of the painters and musicians have freely flowed forth without regard for either the censors or the tastes of the old lady from Dubuque.