It is an evil dream, which has haunted me for several years. Nineteen years, to be exact. Not regularly, of course, but at various short and long intervals. I can never figure out what triggers it. This time too there was no apparent cause. It ambushed me like a highwayman. (The element of surprise is its most effective feature.)

The dream was in most of its features the same as always. I commit my murder for no other reason than a vile cover-up. Covering up some shameful crime that would come to light if I didn’t murder the old cleaning woman. Like a coward, I kill this lamentable creature of mislived life—mistreated, humiliated humanity, foul flesh and rags—in the most brutal way. And as I go to bury the corpse, I realize with increasing certainty that nothing can help me, that I have murdered in vain and that I will be found out—worse, I will be found out along with the deeply disgraceful reason for my committing such a dreadful crime . . .

As usual, this dream haunted me in the daytime, too—an insidious pursuer that follows me step by step and disappears around corners when I try to confront it. For, as usual, everything I did during those days was aimed at luring out the terror of the night in me.

An unclean game. In the end it takes on a nearly erotic aspect (our friend Scherping would find it blissful). But I do not play it for pleasure. It inveigles and hoaxes me with the promise that I’m on the verge of some kind of revelation. The paralyzing horror at my deed has a moment of utmost intensity—in the moment in which I awake. I think I recognize in it something that is at the core of my being, or at least the key to it—and which I lose by waking up.

•

This goes on for a few days. I act as if nothing had happened, go about my customary business. I see this person, speak to that one, settle my accounts with yesterday and make my plans for tomorrow. But secretly I wait for the terror of my dream to ambush me again.

For it is always near—and yet I can never conjure it up. If I think of it, it fades away. If, seemingly unconcerned, I busy myself with something different, it skulks after me. If I glance around (so to speak), then the street is empty. . . But I sense it hiding somewhere behind me. It lies in wait for me, as I for it. Only it is incomparably more skillful, more nimble, more agile. At times, I feel the horror very close. The expectation that it will assault me again makes my knees go weak and the hair stand up on the back of my neck. But I am too impatient, I anticipate its desire. Even before the blow occurs—the terrible blow with which it might enter me and descend to the refuse heaps of consciousness in which the key to myself is lost—I already want to relish the rending that would pass through me if finally I were to lay hands on it—