Nietzsche’s Dreams
Since his death in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche has become one of the most influential, most cited, and most mythologized figures in the Western philosophical tradition. Nietzsche was born in Röcken, in modern-day Saxon-Anhalt, in 1844. His father and grandfather were both Pietist pastors, and Nietzsche was given an excellent bourgeois education, attending Schulpforta in Naumburg, one of Germany’s most prestigious boarding schools. After a meteoric but brief career in academic philology (Nietzsche became the youngest ever full professor in the Swiss system at the age of 24), he spent much of his life traveling through Europe in search of climates salubrious for his poor health, migrating often between Switzerland and Northern Italy. Though in Anglophone circles today Nietzsche is best known as the iconoclastic herald of the death of God and teacher of the Übermensch, his legacy has been debated by philosophers, scholars, poets, and followers of all stripes for over a century.
To many, Nietzsche’s name continues to be ominously associated with the Third Reich, which celebrated him as an exemplary Germanic thinker. His reception as a “respectable” philosopher rather than Nazi progenitor in the English-speaking world is in part traceable to Walter Kaufmann’s groundbreaking 1950 book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, in which Kaufmann, in clearing Nietzsche’s name of National Socialist affiliation, also sought to debunk the “Nietzsche legend” that he saw as dominating the Nietzsche reception in European and American circles in the early 20th century.[1] Part of this legend, Kaufmann contends, involves mythologizing the life and biography of Nietzsche, thereby making him into a mystic, a prophet, or a founder of a new religion. Indeed, many groups in the early twentieth century characterized Nietzsche precisely in such terms.[2]
Though Kaufmann and others helped marginalize the study of the religious, visionary, and prophetic elements of Nietzsche’s life and writings, those elements have received renewed scholarly attention in recent years. Such scholarship is welcome, though these themes must still be treated cautiously given the tendency toward mythologization that dominated the first decades of the 20th century. Many of these reports, from Nietzsche or others, were collected in an atmosphere in which Nietzsche was being celebrated as the herald of a cultural rebirth in Germany, a project largely abetted by Nietzsche’s enterprising, Nazi-sympathizing sister, Elisabeth. We must therefore be sensitive to the possibility that Nietzsche appears to be a visionary or mystic in part because Elisabeth and others, many of whom were associated with the rise of National Socialism, portrayed him as such.
One element of Nietzsche’s life and work that particularly warrants further study is the significance of dreams, both to his philosophy and his personal life. In early and late works alike, Nietzsche’s remarks on dreams suggest that his own dream experiences informed his critique of metaphysics and his perspectivism. He intimates that just as we integrate the sound of a cannon or church bell into our dreams through an act of narrative interpretation and projection, so too we unconsciously imbue the events of our waking lives with meaning and stability. In other words, the waking world is just as much our own invention as are dreams.[3] While more work on Nietzsche’s philosophy of dreams is sorely needed, this article focuses on Nietzsche’s own dreams, which were undeniably important within his thought and life.
Source
Nietzsche writes about dreams often in his works, and there is evidence—from self-reports as well as second- and third-hand accounts—that Nietzsche took his own dreams quite seriously as a source of inspiration, and even as prophetic. Nietzsche describes one famous childhood dream in particular as foretelling future events:
At that time I had a dream that I heard organ music in the church, the music I had heard during my father’s funeral. When I perceived what lay behind these sounds, a grave-mound suddenly opened up and my father, wrapped in a linen shroud, emerged from it. He hurried into the church and returned a moment later with a child in his arms. The tomb yawned again, he entered it, and the cover closed over the opening. The stentorian sounds of the organ ceased instantly and I awoke. On the day that followed this night, little Joseph suddenly fell ill, seized by severe cramps, and after a few hours he died. Our grief knew no bounds. My dream had been fulfilled completely. The tiny corpse was laid to rest in his father’s arms.[4]
Nietzsche was fourteen years old when he wrote this recollection, and the dream in question occurred when he was only five years old, offering reasons for skepticism as to the literality of the account. However, it is at least clear that the young Nietzsche recalled his earlier dream as deeply and ominously prophetic.
Ronald Hayman, in his biography of Nietzsche, reports a second prophetic dream that Nietzsche purportedly had in 1859, forecasting the imminent death of his grandfather. Hayman describes it as follows:
He saw the parsonage lying in ruins and his grandmother sitting alone among the debris. Waking up in tears, he was unable to sleep any more. In the morning he told Elisabeth [his sister] and his mother, who said neither of them must talk about the dream. Always robust, their grandfather was still in good health. But before the summer was over he caught a bad chill, which developed into influenza. By the end of the year he was dead.[5]
Hayman provides no source for this report, and I have been unable to find any independent verification, though it’s possible it exists in unpublished materials from his sister’s papers. This ambiguity demonstrates the difficulty of separating mythology from history in the case of Nietzsche’s experiences.
In The Gay Science, §22, Nietzsche presents what appears to be an account of one of his own dreams in which he is the servant of a French king, presumably Henry IV, preparing along with other servants to schedule the King’s day, which includes a visit from Montaigne. Nietzsche is awakened by the sound of a bell, and interprets the dream as a lesson from the “god of dreams” to be less “formal and princelike” in his own comportment:
And there my strange morning dream vanished, probably the victim of the hard strokes of the tower bell, which just announced the fifth hour with all of its customary importance. It seems to me that this time the god of dreams wanted to poke fun at my habit of starting the day by organizing it and making it tolerable to myself, and it may well be that I have often done this in too formal and princelike a manner.[6]
Another important though obscure example is the “Alpa” dream that Nietzsche published in Zarathustra in “The Soothsayer,” almost certainly based on a dream of his own. Reports of this dream are contested. Lou Salomé recalls the dream taking place in 1882: “[T]he dream related in Zarathustra (II, “The Soothsayer”), which came to him in the fall of 1882 in Leipzig; he never tired of carrying it about him and interpreting it.”[7] However, Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin note in their translation of Zarathustra that Nietzsche described this dream to Reinhardt von Seydlitz in 1877, as recalled in Seydlitz’s own memoir.[8] Moreover, in an unpublished fragment from 1880, Nietzsche records the line “Träume: die Kröte essen.—‘Alpa Alpa, wer trägt seine Asche zu Berge?’—der blutige Mond” (“Dream: eating the toad.--'Alpa Alpa, who carries his ashes to the mountain?'--the bloody moon.”)[9] The middle clause corresponds to the text of Zarathustra, but the beginning of the quotation links this dream to another of Nietzsche’s dreams famously interpreted by Carl Jung, one in which Nietzsche eats a toad (die Kröte essen: “eating the toad”). In his seminars on Zarathustra, Jung relates an anecdote in which Nietzsche reports a dream about swallowing a toad at a dinner party, and interprets the dream as representing Nietzsche’s disgust with and fear of the “lower” human elements within himself.[10]
Though some of these reports are uncertain, it is clear that Nietzsche had at least one dream, and likely many others, that shaped his thinking and even found their way into his published writings.
Notes
[1] For Kaufmann, it is Ernst Bertram’s book, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (Georg Bondi, 1920) that represents and first began the “mystical” aspect of the Nietzsche legend. Bertram was a follower of Stefan George, whose circle sought to establish a new German mythology in Nietzsche’s, but more immediately in George’s writings. Walter A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton University Press, 2013), 3–18.
[2] Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890–1990 (University of California Press, 1994).
[3] See, for example, Human, All Too Human, §§13 and 236; The Gay Science, §54; and Twilight of the Idols, "The Four Great Errors," §4.
[4] KGW 1.14[77]. Translation in Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10.
[5] Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 32.
[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, 3. print, ed. Bernard Williams, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46.
[7] Lou Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche, trans. Siegfried Mandel (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 144.
[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 107n7. See also Dennis Vanden Auweele, Exceeding Reason: Freedom and Religion in Schelling and Nietzsche (De Gruyter, 2020), 185n107.
[9] NF-1880, 10 [B26].
[10] Carl G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934–1939, ed. James L. Jarrett, Bollingen Series 99 (Princeton University Press, 1988), 255, 1416–20. I have been unable to find any independent evidence of this report, though Nietzsche does mention dreaming of toads a handful of times in his unpublished notes, and mentions toads and frogs in his published writings with surprising frequency.
Bibliography
Salomé, Lou. Nietzsche. Translated by Siegfried Mandel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Aschheim, Steven E. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Bertram, Ernst. Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie. Munich: Georg Bondi, 1920.
Hayman, Ronald. Nietzsche: A Critical Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.
Jung, Carl G. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934–1939. Edited by James L. Jarrett. Bollingen Series 99. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Kaufmann, Walter A. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Vanden Auweele, Dennis. Exceeding Reason: Freedom and Religion in Schelling and Nietzsche. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020.
Young, Julian. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Nicholas Low
Nicholas E. Low is an associate at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, and a research fellow with the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute. His work focuses on the perdurance, meaning, and function of theological concepts in secular modern thought. His first book, Nietzsche, Dionysus and the Deification of Life, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic, interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy as a textual discipleship to the god Dionysus, a project designed to invite the reader to explore new practices of self-transfiguration, theosis, and physiological transformation. His current research work investigates the emergence of “Nature” as a source of theological and spiritual significance alongside the resurgence of polytheism in the modern West, with special focuses on idealism, romanticism, and transcendentalism.
