Historical dream account · English · machine translation
The hand-sized poet in the washbasin
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Friedrich Hebbels Tagebücher. Zweiter Band (1887) · Printed p. 243
Dreamer identified by the source: Friedrich Hebbel
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During the night I dreamed that I drowned the poet Otto Prechtler in a washbasin because he would not stop reading verses to me; he was no larger than a hand.
Den 8. März.; year not repeated in this heading.
Read the original German account
The hand-sized poet in the washbasin
Ueber Nacht träumte mir, ich ertränkte den Dichter Otto Prechtler, weil er nicht aufhörte, mir Verse vor zu lesen, in einer Wasch-Schüssel, denn er war nicht größer, als eine Hand.
Source & context
English machine translation. The original account, source credit and publication terms remain available.
Hebbel’s own brief dream in which the named poet is the size of a hand. The drowning is dream violence, not a report or allegation of an actual homicide.
Friedrich Hebbel, Friedrich Hebbels Tagebücher. Zweiter Band (Berlin: G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1887), edited by Felix Bamberg, Printed p. 243. Dreamer: Friedrich Hebbel; recorded by Friedrich Hebbel. Original German witness: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Biogr.506sv-2, via Internet Archive. Editorial title and navigation metadata added by Synastry; source wording, narrative uncertainty and distinct reported voices retained.
The diary heading reads Den 8. März., without repeating a year. The dream is described as occurring during the preceding night; no normalized exact dream date is assigned.
Public domain in the United States (original German 1887 edition) ↗
Original German diary passage from the independently witnessed 1887 second volume, edited by Felix Bamberg (1820–1893), of Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863). The 1887 publication has an expired-US-publication basis; author/editor ordinary life-plus-70 terms have elapsed. No modern edition or English translation is copied. Public archive access is not itself a reuse grant; no new licence or blanket worldwide clearance is asserted.
Source locator and text provenance
Printed p. 243
The original text and redactions are preserved. The page title is an editorial navigation label.
Original-scan-witnessed OCR letter/punctuation repairs; long-s transcribed as s; physical line/page furniture and division hyphens normalized exactly as the reversible ledger records. Historical spelling, wording and dream uncertainty retained. Complete three-line dream paragraph after Den 8. März. The following maxim about an echo is outside the dream.
- Account text SHA-256
- 5528e66a8eee985b4fa37e8b946cf8e5d2ed71ba9e3e9630e31a63765a01f837
- Source file SHA-256
- ebd64c69b8734682c1c03d597a68ea4332c644f521634ab61208df941367032c
Content notes
- Historical recollection
- Dream violence
Connections in the Loom
Titles, theme labels, illustrations and map connections are editorial navigation aids. They are separate from the account’s words and do not establish connections between real people.