For him, the usefulness of dream-reports for his literary work depends on their reliability as empirical data. In stark contrast to Bräker and Keller, Schnitzler avoids even the faintest traces of literary and narrational revision, strictly following the rules of dream-notation developed in 19th-century empirical psychology.

Schnitzler retrospectively collected the dream-reports from his diaries, rearranging them into a sort of second-hand dream-diary. An even more intense literarization of the dream-report can be studied in the dream-diary of the young Gottfried Keller who, after failing as a painter, was trying to prove and coach himself as a writer.

The dream-reports in Bräker’s diaries reflect the changes in his intellectual biography: starting as pietistic soul-searchings, they soon become finger-exercises in the self-training of an aspiring author. The essay analyses factual dream-representations in the diaries of three authors: Ulrich Bräker, Gottfried Keller and Arthur Schnitzler.

To get closer to the ›negative capability‹ of the original dream-experience, mimetic devices can therefore also be supplemented (or substituted) by alternative (nonmimetic) modes of oneiricity, such as secondary oneiricity (borrowing motifs from the fantastic, the fairy-tale, myth, etc., illustrated by literary dreams by Jean Paul and Heine), and the poetic simulation of a dream space by the use of suitable current literary devices – like Trakl’s use of Expressionist poetics in his prose poem 'Traum und Umnachtung' (Dream and Derangement). Texts written like that will, however, only mimic the dream as we remember it when awake – as a sequence of deviations from our waking world. the notation rules of empirical psychology for factual dream-reports). Section 5 will formulate some hypotheses for a more complex view of a poetics of oneiric defamiliarization: This can, of course, be based on attempts to imitate dreams and related writing techniques (e.g. Section 4 will discuss some historical examples of dreams which are clearly shaped by (familiarizing) cultural and textual patterns (a message-dream and a symbolic dream by Homer an incubation-dream by Aelius Aristides a dream-vision by Jean Paul) and try to scale their oneiricity. Starting with an attempt to outline characteristics of the dream-world (section 1), the essay sketches a tentative systematic poetics of dream narration, which is based on a dialectical interplay between devices of familiarization and defamilarization (2 3).

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