Soren Kierkegaard

had spoken to himself in the dream or whether someone else had spoken
to him; he was only able to recall the words, but here, too, it was not clear
who had actually spoken them: “I remember these words: ‘Look, now he
wills his own destruction.’ But I cannot say with certainty whether this was
because I was the one who wanted to refrain from sending the manuscript
to the printer and make an overture to her—or the reverse, that I was the
one who insisted on sending the manuscript to the printer. I can also re-
member the words: ‘It of course is of no concern to’—but I can’t remember
with certainty whether the next word was ‘you’ or ‘me’—’that Councillor
Olsen is dead.’ I can remember the words, but not the particular pronoun:
‘You’—or ‘I’—‘could certainly wait a week or so.’ I can remember the
reply: ‘Who does he think he is?’ ”
In the period that followed, Kierkegaard attempted to make sense of this
dialogic monologue, but it was not until August 7 that it became clear to
him that in “that nocturnal conversation,” it had been “[my] common
sense, and not my better self, that had wanted to restrain me.” With this he
had come to a conscientious, though not an especially logical analysis of
the dream’s “remarks and rejoinders.” He was nevertheless still unable to
determine whether it was “my pride that had wanted to be daring in spite
of acautionary voice(‘Look, now hewills hisown destruction’)or precisely
the reverse, that it was in fact my common sense that wanted to restrain me
and make me wait for a week or so, which would have let everything return
to normal once again, andthiswould have been my destruction.” It is clear
that interpreting the dream had been fraught with torment: “It is dreadful;
I felt sufferings like the pains of death.”
When he awoke in the morning he was completely confused and was in
a state of “undefined dread.” The agreement with the printer had of course
been made, and he feared that he would become “an utter fool” if he now,
“after having struggled with the question of publication for so long,” were
suddenly to rush over and cancel the book. And he would be “very loath
to weaken the printer’s impression of my business sense.” It was a dilemma.
On the one hand, “something had happened that wanted to warn me off,”
and on the other hand, he had just recently been reading the French mystic
Fe ́nelon and his spiritual kinsman, Gerhard Tersteegen, a German religious
writer. Kierkegaard was profoundly affected by this reading, especially Fe ́n-
elon’s statement that it would be terrifying for a person if God had expected
somewhat more of him. Thus Kierkegaard could not rule out the possibility
that the situation was a test, and he reflected that when God terrifies a
person it does not always mean that God is trying to restrain a person from
doing something fearsome—but that the fearsome thing just might be the