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—

And thus, everything dissolves into nothing again—as in awakening. There it was, the massive rending—but before I could see what was opening with it, I lost its pain. I can still feel its far-off echo. This too vanishes.

•

Should I then try to summon up the individual events of my dream, it is to find it completely empty. What had been image has become verbal. I can say in words: that I have dreamed this or that—but it has lost all reality. My attempt to grasp it has robbed it of its magic. There I stand, empty-handed, a swindled swindler.

I then try to deceive myself with all sorts of childish maneuvers. I fake guilelessness. I pretend to focus my interest on something else, something peripheral, innocuous—for instance, I count up the women I have slept with in any seven fat or lean years—