The Dream of the Gods

A new translation of Hesse's 1912/ 1924 The Dream of the Gods (Der Traum von den Göttern). This edition also contains an epilogue by the translator, a philosophical glossary of concepts used by Hesse and a chronology of his life and work. Hesse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. He also received the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt in 1946 and the 1955 Peace Prize of the German Booksellers.

Hesse published this fascinating essay on a dream he had originally in 1912, and then again after WWII in 1924. It is an arcane dream where Hesse describes a prophetic dream of the flaming destruction of the world by the god of war Ares eight weeks before World War I. Carl Jung had a similar dream as well as Georg Heym in his poem "Der Krieg" (1912). This is a phenomenon that Jung describes in his book Synchronicity and Ernst Bloch called the 'Vorschein', a sense of the future that also leads to arcane dreams. Hesse's commentary on his dream is very Jungian in nature.