Dream Story

Dream Story is a novella by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, first published in instalments in the magazine Die Dame between December 1925 and March 1926, and in book form in 1926.

The book covers two days in the life of one doctor, and what happens to him is less a plot than a sequence of encounters that each take him further from his ordinary arrangements: a stranger's confession, a rented costume, a house in the suburbs, a carriage he should not have taken, and finally a masquerade where he is the only person who does not belong. Schnitzler was a physician as well as a writer, and the novella is written from inside a mind that is used to being in control and can feel that control slipping, which is why the reader is never quite sure how much of the danger is real. It has been adapted several times for film and television, and the best known of those versions is Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut of 1999, which moves the story to New York and changes a great deal of the setting.