FOR SALE: seven dreams, tailored to fit your subconscious.

Contact Joe, a down-and-out poet who offers his home-made fantasies to seven different people in Dreams That Money Can Buy, Hans Richter's feature length avant-garde film which will be shown at noon Thursday at the Palmer Museum of Art.

Each dream is a separate concept developed by one of six early 20th century surrealists and artists involved in the dada movement.

The artists, including Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Alexander Calder, collaborated with Richter in this 1947 film, the first of its kind produced in the United States.

The stylistic revolution the avant-garde movement spurred spread into many offshoots still recognizable today. MTV is largely surrealist, Ploog said, in its preoccupation with the strange, the bizarre and the unexpected. For example, the dancing chickens in Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" or the slicing of Alice in Wonderland in Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More."

"It is impossible to imagine MTV without the avant-garde movement," said Jeff Rush, assistant professor of film and video. "If you look at the underground films of the '50s and '60s you will certainly see the influence on MTV," Rush said.

Dreams That Money Can Buy is a parent of the wacky world of music television and also reflects the avant-garde trends in visual arts.

"The reason this film is being shown is that most of its contributing artists have their work on display in the gallery," said Charles Garoian, assistant director of the Palmer Museum of Art.

The exhibition, "Avant-Garde and the Text," opened Jan. 7 and will continue until March 11. It displays works from the many different facets of the dada movement of the early 1900s, from its origins in Zurich to its political overtones in post World War I Germany.

"For the first time, artists were trying to express ideas that were larger than a painting," said Randy Ploog, assistant curator of the Palmer Museum.

The artists were trying to convey their new ideas on the way people should live and how the government should be run, Ploog said, and the concepts were too complex to be communicated through a single painting or poem.

The dada movement stressed the subconscious, a freedom from the constraints and stifling influences of society, Ploog said. Chance and intuition were stressed as guides for creative art.