[In the following essay, Bryson contends that Aschenbach enters an extended dream-state in Death in Venice and touches on Mann's interest in Freudian dream theory.]

Most critics look specifically at Aschenbach's ecstatic, Dionysian dream in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice as the primary dream-state, but I would like to make the unusual supposition that Aschenbach's actual dream-state—from which he will awaken only once before succumbing to death (3 and 73)—begins during his “daily nap” after he abandons his departure from Venice and returns to the hotel. Aschenbach is losing his creative edge, “that motus animi continuus” (3), and he can no longer sustain his concentration, conscientiousness, and tact. He needs to rest, and he needs to go to sleep to find Mann's “theatre of the soul,” or the dream-state, in which there is a hyperacuity of the senses and “the onward sweep of the productive mechanism within him” (3). Aschenbach has entered, according to Richard McKeon, “the normal unreflective life of the bourgeois” and must penetrate the dream-state to regain “the thoughtful creative life of the artist” (226).

This extended dream-state follows the typical format for “lucid dreaming” in the psychological sense. Mann was enthusiastic about Freud's psychology; in a speech Mann delivered in Vienna on Freud's birthday, he summarized Freud's dream psychology by saying that “in a dream it is our own will that consciously appears as inexorable objective destiny, everything proceeding out of ourselves and each of us being the secret theatre-manager of our own dreams” (“Freud” 418). Mann knew that Freud was particularly interested in the incorporation of objects or events from the recent past and claimed that dreams reproduce not only experiences and information that have long been stored in memory but also experiences from the pre-sleep period; and Freud also believed the essence for all dreaming was located in the mnemic and affective processes (day residues and wish fulfillment). Aschenbach's dream is a “lucid dream,” a dream-state in which the dreamer is aware of being in a dream while it continues (this is especially true during Aschenbach's nightmare). Lucid dreaming intensifies the dimension of self-reflectiveness inherent in symbolic activity and provides a “rush of bliss” (contrasting with the “rush of dread” associated with nightmares) along with an enhancement of sensory detail. The lucid dreamer may or may not recognize a state of crisis in his waking-state, but his dream would be “an attempt to restore the psychic balance by generating metaphors of one's total life situation” (Spadafora 630). To restore this “psychic balance,” Aschenbach must attempt to resolve his inner conflict and to acquire the object of his affection by recalling past events and memories in the lucid dream-state.

Before Aschenbach's “nap” beginning in the middle of the novelle, Mann has carefully mentioned that Aschenbach “sought but found no relaxation in sleep” (3), “had slept little” (17), and had not slept well (35). He dreams, but he does not completely “sleep” again after welcoming “a calm and deliberate acceptance of what might come” (40); he doesn't have to sleep, because he is already asleep. In the same disjointed way that ordinary sleep draws on past events and reshapes them into either pleasant, innocuous, or nightmarish visions in sleep, Aschenbach recreates earlier events in his slumber, modifying them to meet the needs of his newly discovered infatuation with Tadzio (see Spadafora 629).

Many critics, including Henry Hatfield and Vernon Venable, have argued that Mann has intentionally repeated obvious imagery in an attempt to create “cyclic” themes. But in a dream-state, the mind recalls “real” events and transposes them into disorganized events, composing a new progression of subtly disguised events. The “real” is elucidated into a believable fantasy with creative enhancements. It might even be argued that there is no plague in Venice at all and that Aschenbach's tropical hallucination (5-6) in the cemetery is the catalyst for his mind to support the image of the plague in his dream (beginning on 52). Consider these two passages; the first is the vision in the cemetery:

He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank—a kind of primeval wilderness-world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. … There [was] … water that was stagnant and … among the knotted joints of a bamboo thicket the eyes of a crouching tiger. …

(5-6; emphasis added)

The Englishman, a dream character who easily could be the re-creation of the non-Bavarian stranger present at the time of the tropical hallucination, explains the plague to Aschenbach in his dream-state:

For the past several years Asiatic cholera had shown a strong tendency to spread. Its source was the hot, moist swamps …, where it bred in the mephitic air of that primeval island-jungle, among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches, where life of every sort flourishes in rankest abundance. …

(62; emphasis added)

It is not by accident that so many of the images from the first “vision” are repeated in the “dream” account. Martin Swales suggests that “the reason [Aschenbach's] subconsciousness generates the [original] dream of the rampant, anarchial living: the jungle,” is because the author Aschenbach “is simply jaded, in need of a change. … The image of untrammelled life harbors a certain threat—the eyes of the crouching tiger” (Swales 39). But the tigers do eventually catch up with him; Aschenbach has brought the tropical vision to Venice with him: “when [he] opened his window he thought he smelt the stagnant odour of the lagoons” (28); Venice has become his “primeval island,” and Tadzio is the “primeval legend” (33), the Dionysian “stranger god” who is often portrayed as a leopard or “crouching tiger” (6).

Aschenbach claims after his “vision” in the cemetery that he needs a vacation: “what he needed was a break … he would go on a journey. Not far—not all the way to the tigers. A night in a wagon-lit, three or four weeks of lotus-eating …” (7-8). This passage seems to hold the key to Aschenbach's extended dream-stage: he wants a quiet place where he can be lost in a delusion, similar to the drug-induced state of Odysseus and his followers. The realm of lotus-eaters is a place of timelessness or a frontier between mortal time and immortal eternity; reality exists in a hazy confusion blended with self-imposed unreality. The frantic fantasy-world created in the dream-state carefully pulls together past events, like thoughts about tigers, and creates a disjunctive scenario of elapsed occurrences. The cholera epidemic becomes, according to Swales, an “outward embodiment of an essentially metaphysical process” (39). In his “lotus-eating,” Aschenbach “seeks experience [in the] anarchic, Dionysian fury, and the very intensity of rampant life” (39). The dream-state itself becomes his mental vacation from his rigorously controlled creative existence.

Aschenbach follows Tadzio and his family through the Venetian streets in his dream-state and rests at a fountain; recognizing “it as the very one where he had sat weeks ago” (71), the conscious mind has created a comparative dream in which illusions parallel real events. If Aschenbach's dream begins in his afternoon nap after returning from his abandoned escape, then his visit to the fountain, as well as observing Tadzio for the first time on the beach and eating the strawberries, happens on the day before the dream-state. The psychologist John Davidson states that “events of the preceding day are most likely to be represented [in the dream-state], though some incorporated events may have occurred 3 or 4 days earlier” (114). Aschenbach's actual visit to the fountain (35) generates his construction of it in his dream-state. Mann describes the genuine visit: “He reached a quiet square, one of those that exist at the city's heart, forsaken of God and man; there he rested awhile on the margin of a fountain, wiped his brow, and admitted to himself that he must be gone” (35). When the second passage in his dream-state is considered, not only are the analogies completed for the parallel influence of reality on dreams, but they also suggest that this entire half of the story is one continuous dream:

The street he was on opened out into a little square, one of those charmed, forsaken spots he liked; he recognized it as the very one where he had sat weeks ago and conceived his abortive plans of flight. … There he sat. His eyelids were closed, there was only a swift, sidelong glint of the eyeballs now and again, something between a question and a leer; while the rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams.

(71-72; emphasis added)

Not only has Mann repeated the visit to the fountain in Aschenbach's dream, but he has also carefully called attention to the dream-state (“the fantastic logic that governs our dreams”) and the chaotic disjunction of organized thought when a person is dreaming. Thus the fountain becomes a marker between reality and fantasy.

Similarly, his mountain home (6 and 41) and, more importantly, the tangible church in Munich are recalled:

The mortuary chapel, a structure in Byzantine style, stood facing [the graveyard]. … Its façade was adorned with Greek crosses and tinted hieratic designs, and displayed a symmetrically arranged selection of scriptural texts in gilded letters, all of them bearing upon the future life. … Aschenbach beguiled some minutes of his waiting with reading these formulas and letting his mind's eye lose itself in their mystical meaning. He was brought back to reality by the sight of a man standing in the portico, …

(4)

Later in the dream, Aschenbach questions whether or not he should warn Tadzio's family of the plague, and he remembers the church and the engravings pertaining to the future:

There crossed his mind a vision of a white building with inscriptions on it, glittering in the sinking sun—he recalled how his mind had dreamed away into their transparent mysticism; recalled the strange pilgrim apparition that had awakened in the aging man a lust for strange countries and fresh sights. And these memories. …

(66)

It is curious, though perhaps not unintentional, that Mann places this image, which is meant to recall the scripture “Enter into the House of the Lord” (4), just prior to the ecstatic, Dionysian dream of lust and passion with “the stranger god” (67). Aschenbach, in his dream-state, has created a deadly disease and fears for the life of his beloved Tadzio; as he contemplates the boy, he considers telling the family of the plague, but instead thinks about the Byzantine church and inscriptions pertaining to the future; this contemplation in turn leads Aschenbach to equate Tadzio with a religious figure in a natural progression of dream conceptions.

It is also not surprising that Aschenbach would create a tropical plague in his dream-state. He has already visited Venice in the past, and “for the second time, and now quite definitely, the city proved that in certain weathers it could be directly inimical to his health” (35). As he walks through the city and rests at the fountain, he is aware of the “hateful sultriness” produced by the “evil exhalations” of the canals, a heaviness that is oppressive to his breathing and creates a feverish tortured state (35). His intention to leave Venice is generated by “actual bodily surrender” to the “evil concomitants of lagoon and fever-breeding vapours” (38, 35). Bruno Frank suggests that Aschenbach “has brought the very cholera that he will die of along with him to Venice. Not in the real, medical sense, of course” (121). But the idea of feverish disease, induced by his tropical vision and the actual stagnant, sultry air of the city, promulgate the idea of cholera in the dream-state. Tadzio's smile, the “fatal gift,” promotes Aschenbach's self-revelation of homosexual love for the boy. Once he has become mentally diseased, it follows that the body will answer with physical conformity (a theme Mann again demonstrates in his Magic Mountain), and the progression in the dream leads to the immediate recognition of the smell of carbolic acid, the first creation necessary to suggest the choleric plague. It might also be useful to note that “no one else seemed to notice” the smell of the disinfectant (61). Only as the sleeping mind in the “imperative” nap prepares to enter the bestial nightmare is the concept of a plague actually voiced in the slumbering mind.

If we can believe that the plague “illusion” in Aschenbach's dream is a result of his already precarious health, then the role of the strawberries becomes less important as the source of cholera and more significant as another event based in waking-reality that manifests itself in the dream-state. In his waking-state, Aschenbach literally eats “great luscious, dead-ripe” strawberries (33) before dreaming that they had been the source of his exposure to the plague; “he bought some strawberries. They were overripe and soft; he ate them as he went” (71). Earlier in this dream-state, the Englishman warns Aschenbach that “the food supplies—milk, meat, or vegetables—had probably been contaminated” (64). In his dream, Aschenbach eats the fruit and disregards the warning. It is also noteworthy that in both cases, the real and the dreamed, the fruits are “overripe.” Clearly this suggests that the unconscious, sleeping mind is drawing on past “real” events to structure the dreamscape.

One of the “real” events that happens two days before this “imperative” nap is the encounter with the “ghastly young-old” fop on the boat to Venice. Aschenbach studies

one of the party, in a dandified buff suit, a rakish panama with a coloured scarf, and a red cravat, … and he was shocked to see that the apparent youth was no youth at all. He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow's feet round eyes and mouth; the dull carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig. His neck was shrunken and sinewy, his turned up mustaches and small imperial were dyed. …

(17)

In his dream Aschenbach, with the assistance of his barber, becomes the “young-old man,” and,

Like any lover, [Aschenbach] desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure, and brightened his dress with smart ties and handkerchiefs and other youthful touches. … [His hair] was as black as in the days if his youth. … He watched. in the mirror and saw his eyebrows grow more even and arching, the eyes gain in size and brilliance, by dint of a little application below the lids. A delicate carmine glowed on his cheeks where the skin had been so brown and leathery. The dry, anæmic lips grew full, they turned the colour of ripe strawberries, the lines round his eyes and mouth were treated with facial cream and gave place to youthful bloom.

(69-70)

The primary difference between the “real” young-old man and Aschenbach is that Aschenbach's dreamed “ego” is more successful at disguising his age. He adapts the image of the real fop on the boat from Pola, and his cognitive lucid dreaming enhances the memory. In his sleep, he recognizes that he, an older man in his fifties, will have no chance of winning the affection of his youthful lover; hence, he must become the young-old man if he is to succeed in his dreamed objective—winning the boy's sentiments. Aschenbach is completely surrendering to his mental disease and promotes the further extension of physical disease in the reference to his lips becoming the “colour of ripe strawberries” (70). He is anticipating his total destruction in the dream-state, and Mann is preparing the reader, with allusions to strawberries as the source of the disease, for the author's submission and death. The mental obsession for the boy is leading to Aschenbach's physical and emotional destruction.

Tadzio is Aschenbach's object of desire, and the resting author realizes this attraction just before falling to sleep. The boy is generally portrayed in Aschenbach's mind in terms of mythic illusion. Mann calls him a “godlike beauty of the human being” (29); his name “conjured up mythologies, it was like a primeval legend, handed down from the beginning of time, of the birth of form, of the origin of the gods” (33; emphasis added). Henry Hatfield comments on the mythical depictions and writes that “after his encounter with the boy Tadzio, the allusions to Plato and to Hellenistic sculpture establish the mood for his homosexual passion” (62). Tadzio becomes Aschenbach's perfected mythological god. Aurelia Spadafora notes that stabilized lucid dreaming, like Aschenbach's, “can involve the spontaneous, unsought occurrence of numinous emotion … and encounters with mythological beings” (629). The psychologist Paul Tholey believes that “in lucid dreams, dream characters sometimes give the impression of having consciousness of their own. They speak and behave logically, perform amazing cognitive feats and express in their behavior distinct purpose and feelings” (567). This “personality” of the dream character, or really any fictional character, is created through a blending of “the cognitive and affective memory processes” (568). Aschenbach has carefully observed Tadzio and his mannerisms in the waking state; therefore, not only does the dream character Tadzio behave in an expected fashion, but his movements and responses can take on a “life” of their own. As Aschenbach, the dream ego, needs more and more responses from the boy, the “dream character” faithfully complies. Tholey continues to explain that dream characters typically try to avoid the dreamer's gaze (574), but once the dream character “expressly requests the dream ego to fix them with a stare, this also leads to the subject's waking up” (577). Mann wrote in his essay on Schopenhauer that “no achieved object of desire can give lasting satisfaction” (“Schopenhauer” 382). Once Aschenbach has “had” the “stranger god,” his objectives have been met and there is nothing more to be gained from the dream-state; consequently, Aschenbach must awaken.

Yet perhaps the most convincing evidence of Aschenbach's continued dream-state involves the older man reclining in his chair and watching “Tadzio, in his striped sailor suit with the red-breast knot” (39). Earlier Tadzio's same outfit is described:

Aschenbach … was astonished anew, yes, startled, at the godlike beauty of the human being. The lad had on a light sailor suit of blue and white stripped cotton, with a red silk breast-knot and a simple white standing collar round the neck—a not very elegant effect—yet above the collar the head was poised like a flower, in incomparable loveliness. It was the head of Eros. …

(29)

There are only four times when Mann specifically mentions this striped suit and breast-knot: when Tadzio first makes his appearance at the beach (29), as Aschenbach tries to find him later the same afternoon (32), just before the dream-state begins (40), and as the older author is waking from his dream and dying (74). However, during the dream, the boy is dressed differently from waking-reality: Tadzio comes to the beach, “in the blue and white bathing-suit that was now his only wear on the beach” (42). The dreaming Aschenbach has retained the colors of the linen suit but dresses the object of his desire in something more revealing and actually more practical for bathing. This different attire leads the dreamer to describe the boy in an almost erotic description (43).

Just before his afternoon nap and the extended dream-state continuing through the rest of the story, Aschenbach observes Tadzio in his “striped sailor suit with the red-breast knot” (39). As he sees the boy, he “realized it was for Tadzio's sake that the leave-taking had been so hard” (39). Mann continues the description of the tired writer:

Aschenbach, his hands folded in his lap, … sat, dreaming, resting, barely thinking … and looked within himself. His features were lively, he lifted his brows; a smile, alert, inquiring, vivid, widened the mouth. Then he raised his head, and with both hands, hanging limp over the chair-arms, he described a slow motion, palms outward, a lifting and turning movement, as though to indicate a wide embrace. It was a gesture of welcome, a calm and deliberate acceptance of what might come.

(40; emphasis added)

The what, which immediately follows the break in the middle of the prose, is mythological imagery, carefully placed to create a sense of the dream-state. And for the next 33 pages, Aschenbach dreams of fulfilling his lust for the boy. It may be necessary to interrupt at this point and recall a much earlier passage:

A nice observer once said of [Aschenbach] in company—it was at this time when he fell ill in Vienna in his thirty-fifth year: “You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this”—here the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand to a fist—“never like this”—and he let his open hand relaxed from the back of his chair.

(9)

Aschenbach begins his observation of Tadzio with his hands “folded,” but as he enters into the dream-state, both hands are “hanging limp, … palms outward” (40). The tired author has lost control of his obsessively-driven, regulated lifestyle and surrendered to sleep.

In the final paragraphs of the novelle, Aschenbach starts to wake from his sleep, and once again (in his dream-state and in the reality outside of his napping world), Tadzio “wore his striped linen suit with the red breast-knot” (74). The dream is ending as Mann relates:

The watcher sat just as he had sat that time in the lobby of the hotel when first the twilight grey eyes had met his own. He rested his head against the chair-back and followed the movements of the figure out there, then lifted it [the dream has ended], as it were an answer to Tadzio's gaze. [His head] sank on his breast, the eyes looked out beneath their lids, while his whole face took on the relaxed and brooding expression of slumber.

(74-75)

For one brief moment, Aschenbach wakes; but he immediately returns to the dream-state, and this final dream-state is not the pleasant escape from reality in the mediation between life and death: it is the total release of the soul into the theatre of death. In Aschenbach's last dream, Mann writes:

It seemed to [Aschenbach] the pale and lovely Summoner [Tadzio as Death] out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though, with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation. And, as so often before, [Aschenbach] rose to follow [in his final dream].

Some minutes passed before anyone hastened to the aid of the elderly man sitting there collapsed in his chair. They bore him to his room. And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.

(75; emphasis added)

It is curious that Mann does not say, “news of his disease,” although the reader who does not believe that the last half of the story is a dream would read that into the text. What he does say is that the world will be shocked simply because of Aschenbach's death.

Aschenbach succeeds in creating a mythic, mental fantasy that begins with his attraction to Tadzio. As he begins his dream by looking “within himself” (39), the “real” events in his life become transposed into

[a frenzy that] the aging artist bade … come. His mind was in travail, his whole mental background in a state of flux. Memory flung up in him the primitive thoughts which are youth's inheritance, but which with him had remained latent, never leaping up into a blaze.

(44)

Forgotten feelings, precious pangs of his youth, quenched long since by the stern service that had been his life and now returned so strangely metamorphosed. … He mused, he dreamed. …

(49)

His dream becomes a soothing balm, a fantasy, an escape from reality, and a well-earned vacation. But Aschenbach is a tired, old man; and at the end of his dream, he dies.

Perhaps one of the most convincing arguments for one continuous dream-state is Mann's use of time references throughout the novelle. Before Aschenbach's “daily nap,” there is a very specific time schedule that can be broken down into actual days and weeks. Once the dream period begins, time reference for the reader become vague and undefined. Compare “two weeks after that walk of his” (15), “only twenty-four hours” (15), “the next morning but one” (15), and “ten days after” (16) with “one afternoon” (70), “time passed” (63), and “a few days later” (73). While the first half of the novelle can accurately be charted, the second half is only precise for three days. In the dream-state, there are no touchstones of duration. Mann's ambiguous progression of time, such as “equable days were divided one from the next by brief nights filled with happy unrest” (48), implies an obscured illusive nature. The only specific time reference after the dream-state begins is “in the fourth week of his stay on the Lido” (52); because of the illusory time sequence and adaptation of past “real” events and thoughts, this can easily be attributed to Aschenbach's intention to escape into “three or four weeks of lotus-eating” (8). The dream is simply following the already conceived and predicted duration, and without referential markers, the dreaming man establishes the “fourth week” as an indicator that the dream is about to end. The text moves from the specificity of concrete time to the inexplicit abstract dream world. Although there are mornings and afternoons, there are no distinctive days in Aschenbach's dream-state.

Similar to the movement from concrete to abstract in time, a shift in Mann's language has also been identified by several critics. Bruno Frank notes that prose changes.

from the Nordically severe, dogmatic manner of the early [sections] (in which the formalistic, the somewhat “officiously didactic” traits attributed to Aschenbach the artist are apparent) to the sensuous wealth of the later ones, when the soft, well-rounded sentences flow as if waves were rolling on a blue Southern sea. Or as if ringing beneath the beautiful words were the gentle melody of a greek pastoral flute.

(122)

Mann's style in “waking-reality” is cold and hard, but the language in the dream-state is luminescent. The shift in language can also reflect Mann's disposition concerning the idea and values of a writer. The author Aschenbach creates heroes in his books who are sensuous and plastic, but as he enters into the dream-state, it is the author himself who becomes his own “artificial” hero, embellished with poetic prose to represent this dream-state. Martin Swales notes that Mann is intentionally critical of “the artist who denies scruple and reflection in the name of a cult of formal beauty and perfection” (42). In the dream-state, Aschenbach ceases to be reflective, critical, and analytical, and embraces his “idealized” mythic god, Tadzio—the perfected one. The initial state of Aschenbach's devotion to duty and discipline brings him, according to Hatfield, “to the point of collapse; the ‘death wish’ rebels against the categorical imperative of the conscious mind” (61). Early in the novelle, Aschenbach has no inner life, although he is productive; as he illuminates the deepest recesses of his mind in sleep, Mann is in agreement with Schopenhauer, who holds that “the epic writer's aim should be to conjure up the richest possible inner life by means of a minimum of external action” (von Gronicka 58). Sitting in a chair and sleeping is the minimum of external action, and the author Aschenbach finally experiences what he has only imagined in his own writing.

In the dream-state, a person is more than himself and more accurately perceives his own emotional, spiritual, and physical sensations, states in which Mann believes “the waking senses prove worthless and insubstantial” (28). Aschenbach begins the novelle as a writer whose weariness can only be overcome by escaping the conscious mind. He must take his “daily nap” before he can enter the void, his nothingness in the dream-state; only then can he experience the part of him denied through his supreme exertion of the will and by playing the role of the hero of creative work. The dream-state becomes the mediator between life and death, and in the dream-state, the soul is released. Aschenbach's soul escapes from his body in the final dream, but he is ultimately refreshed and enters the immensity with the “highest expectations.”

APPENDIX

EVENTS PRIOR TO DREAM-STATE IN DEATH IN VENICE

Four weeks before the dream-state, Aschenbach …

Contemplates needing a “daily nap” (3)

Examines a Byzantine church while waiting for a tram (4)

Sees a stranger who disappears (5)

Has the tropical vision (5-6)

Recalls his country home (6)

Decides to take a vacation (7)

Thirteen days before the dream-state, Aschenbach …

Leaves Munich (15)

Twelve days before the dream-state, Aschenbach …

Takes a boat to Pola (15)

Two days before the dream-state, Aschenbach …

Boards boat to Venice (16)

Meets the “ghastly young-old man” (20)

Gets a “free” gondola ride (22)

Encounters Tadzio in hotel (25)

The day before the dream-state, Aschenbach …

Notices the “stagnant odour of the lagoons” (28)

Goes to the beach (29)

Considers Tadzio a “godlike beauty” (29)

Longs for “nothingness” (31)

Eats “great luscious, dead-ripe” strawberries (33)

Stops to look at his “own grey hair” (34)

Feels feverish and remembers past sickness (35)

Visits the fountain in the square (35)

Declares he must leave Venice (35)

The day of the dream-state, Aschenbach …

Has his luggage lost and his plans to leave Venice are aborted (38-39)

Returns to hotel and watches Tadzio in “his striped sailor suit” (40)

Realizes that it is for Tadzio's sake that leaving had been so hard (40)

TAKES AN IMPERATIVE DAILY NAP (40-75)

“TIME” AFTER ENTERING THE DREAM-STATE

“For two days he suffered …” having no clothes (41)

“Regular morning hours on the beach” (42)

“He rose early” (42)

“Next morning on leaving the hotel” [3 days since dream-state] (47)

“Equable days were divided one from the next by brief nights filled with happy unrest” (48)

“Daily” (50)

“But once, one evening” (51)

“In the fourth week of his stay” (52)

“On Sundays” (54)

“Time passed” (63)

“That night” (66)

“One afternoon” (70)

“A few days later” (73)

Works Cited

Cleugh, James. Thomas Mann: A Study. New York: Russell, 1968.

Davidson, John A. and Kelsey, Bruce D. “Incorporation of Real Events in Dreams.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 65 (August 1987): 114.

Frank, Bruno. “Death in Venice.” Neider 119-23.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 1965.

Hatfield, Henry. Thomas Mann. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1951.

———. Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

Neider, Charles, ed. The Stature of Thomas Mann. Freeport, NY: Books For Libraries, 1947.

Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage, 1954.

———. Essays of Three Decades. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1947.

———. “Freud and the Future.” Essays of Three Decades 411-28.

———. “Schopenhauer.” Essays of Three Decades 373-410.

McKeon, Richard. Thought, Action, and Passion: Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1954.

Spadafora, Aurelia and Hunt, Harry T. “The multiplicity of dreams.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 71 (October 1990): 627-44.

Swales, Martin. Thomas Mann: a Study. London: Heinemann, 1980.

Tholey, Paul. “Consciousness and Ability of Dream Characters.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 68 (April 1990): 567-78.

von Gronicka, André. “Myth Plus Psychology: A Stylistic Analysis of Death in Venice.” Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Henry Hatfield. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1964. 46-61.