Dream Story

It’s carnival season, and within just thirty-six hours, the seemingly happy marriage of Fridolin and Albertine is turned upside down and put to the test. Fridolin, a doctor who lacks ambition, loses himself in the Viennese night, between patients and prostitutes, and finally ends up at a clandestine masked ball. Albertine, who has to look after the child at home, can transcend her everyday life only in her mind and dreams – but these dreams are, well, intense. The couple’s relationship is shaken by suddenly erupting longings and desires that they have kept secret from each other until now. In Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, published exactly 100 years ago and much later adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick titled Eyes Wide Shut, “no dream is entirely a dream”. “I don’t write plays, I write diagnoses” was the credo of the physician and contemporary of Freud, Schnitzler, whose Dream Story paints a clairvoyant panorama of the dazzling, bigoted and morbid Viennese society of the fin de siècle.