From the paternal "Raucous Face" in the early story "Gadir" to motet-singing seals from the "Republic of Scholars" and Wieland's silver pocket watch in the last novel "Evening with Gold Edges": The dreams interspersed throughout Arno Schmidt's works consistently create poetic, surreal, and sharp, memory-laden images. Schmidt has repeatedly pointed out that these dreams are not invented by him but were actually dreamed. In his afterword, Bernd Rauschenbach explores this claim and traces (considering previously unpublished dream protocols of Schmidt) how Schmidt's understanding of dreams has evolved: from a means of "drifting across the surface of the river of time" to Freud's royal road into the depths of the human psyche.