I admire this intriguing novel. [The History of Danish Dreams] is a challenging text because it apparently questions the very notion of its form. If we look closely at the title we are startled by the concepts of “history” and “dreams.” Some of the questions the title suggests are the following: Is “history”—or the past—a “dream”? How can one write a “history of dreams” in chronological order? Is the historian dreaming the Danish dreams? The text begins with a foreword written by a narrator, a historian who claims that he made his text as “simple” as he could. He then mentions two mysterious, cryptic incidents. One describes Carsten and his father in 1929. The father, Carl, is assembling a machine gun in his living room. “The weapon pointed, with the most liberating determination, into the hazy future.” The historian notes the enigmatic scene. Why does Carl construct a gun in the room? The historian then goes on to describe a scene occurring at the same time. Anna watches her mother's obsessive cleaning of the room, trying to attack all the dirt.

We are puzzled by these events for several reasons. Why is the “coincidence” mentioned? Is there some metaphorical or symbolic linkage? The historian suggests that he has heard about these events from Carsten and Anna, but he cannot understand why, of all the events he has been told, he remembers these. Thus he forces us to interpret the events, to understand their significance. We are placed in an awkward situation because we don't know yet anything about the characters, the meaning of the odd incidents. But the suggestion that we must help the historian is made. We must help him interpret history. Already, before we read the history, we are “lost.”

The text itself consists of various events involving several people; it follows a chronological order but at the same “time,” it seems to undermine the idea of logical reconstruction. The historian now and again speaks to us and to the characters. There is a kind of rupture because we are irritated by the comments of the meddling historian. For most of the first two sections of the text (which cover the years 1520–1939) we read about bizarre events, events which are, to say the least, “unreal.” When we finally get to the third section—the years between 1939–1989—we notice that the subtitle of this long section is “A Longing for Order.” This section seems to be less “magical,” less hallucinatory, than the previous ones. At first we believe that the text is cracked, that the modern events are not as wonderful (in all senses) as the first two. And we are especially disturbed by the interruptions of the historian who speaks obsessively to the characters. But after we begin to feel that the text has, in a sense, fallen—that it has become a mere series of commonplaces—we suddenly realize that the historian himself sees the rupture. He says: “there will be no future to face up to. …” He calls out to the past for help. And in the last sentence of the text the historian is “lonely”; he muses that perhaps he has dreamed the entire text.

The text, in effect, “ends” with a whimper. It does not ultimately commit itself to any stable continuity. It “overwhelms” the historian. And thus Høeg apparently implies that history itself is a dream, that “reality” is hallucination, that the historian is our “dream.”