Dream Story (eBook & Audiobook)

Audiobook Length: 3 hours 55 mins

eBook Length: 223 pages

Also known as:

• Traumnovelle (original German title)
• Rhapsody: A Dream Novel (Alternative English translation title)
• Eyes Wide Shut (film adaptation)

"I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?" —Arthur Schnitzler

Before Stanley Kubrick adapted it into his haunting final film Eyes Wide Shut, Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (1926) was already one of the most unsettling explorations of desire and marriage in modern literature. This new edition presents a fresh translation from the original German — and gives English-language readers the tools to experience the novella as Schnitzler intended it.

Set in early 20th-century Vienna, Dream Story follows a married couple whose intimate late-night conversation about unacted desires sends the husband spiraling into a single night of increasingly surreal and erotic wandering through the city. Schnitzler — a Viennese physician turned writer, and a contemporary of Freud — brought a psychiatrist's precision to questions of obsession, self-deception, and the thin membrane between dream and reality. The result is a work that feels as psychologically alive today as it did a century ago, and one that Kubrick spent years trying to bring to the screen.

This edition includes:

• A new translation from the original German text
• Illustrations depicting key scenes
• Chapter-by-chapter footnotes
• An introduction by the editor

Ideal for first-time readers and scholars alike, this edition offers a deep dive into one of modernism's most influential novellas — tracing its enduring themes of desire, power, and the secrets that sustain (and threaten) intimate life.

About Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was one of Vienna's most celebrated and controversial writers — a pioneering modernist whose unflinching examinations of sex, identity, and power made him famous across Europe and earned him the personal admiration of Sigmund Freud. A physician by training, he brought clinical precision to the inner lives of his characters, transforming the literary form through psychological depth and narrative invention. His works were burned by the Nazis in 1933 as "Jewish filth." His legacy endures as one of modernism's essential voices. Traumnovelle — the basis for Eyes Wide Shut — represents the pinnacle of his late style: intimate, erotic, and deeply unsettling.