In this week’s reading of “The Day After the Wedding, from Undine” from The Penguin Book of Mermaids, Hulbrand’s strange dreams serve as both psychological foreshadowing and also as a symbolic reflection of his unconscious fears of his newlywed. The narration describes how, during the night, he had “wonderful and horrible dreams had disturbed [his] rest; he had been haunted by spectres” and he describes these “spectres” to be “grinning at him by stealth, and had tried to disguise themselves as beautiful women, and from beautiful women they all at once assumed the faces of dragons” (102). This shifting imagery of women turning into monsters does a great job capturing the unstable boundary between danger and beauty, which seems to be an important theme in the story. Hulbrand’s dream functions as a warning that beneath Undine’s enchanting exterior lies a mystery that he doesn’t understand. The transformation from female beauty to a monstrous dragon symbolizes his anxiety about the power and unpredictability of the feminine being, especially within the sacred institution of marriage.

This moment also shows the reading audience that there is a larger Romantic fascination with the supernatural, and is used as a reflection of inner emotion. The “pale and cold” moonlight that is present when Hulbrand awakes blurs the line between dream and real life, which makes the domestic space feel haunted by this unseen presence. His fearful glance at Undine–who is lying beside him in an “unaltered beauty and grace”–shows how quickly love can give way to doubt. Yet his attempt to rationalize this fear–seen when he “reproached himself for any doubt…”–reveals that his struggle is not only against supernatural forces, but also within himself. He wants to believe in her purity and grace, but his subconscious continues to be a force of resistance against that trust.

By beginning the morning with this vision, our author, Fouqué, prepares the reader and foreshadows the later revelation of Undine’s true identity. The dream dramatizes Huldbrand’s deepest unease–that the woman he loves might not be entirely human–and successfully foreshadows the tension between human reason and the supernatural. Through this reading, the story of Undine explores how fear and fascination can coexist in love, and how the supernatural becomes a mirror for the human psyche’s hidden anxieties.