Everybody's having them dreams: Real and surreal in Kafka's stories

It's no unique observation to note that Franz Kafka's stories are almost like transcriptions of dreams - we all have crazy dreams, and who hasn't at one time or another tried to capture one of those dreams by writing it down or at least telling the story? It's not as easy as it seems - there's a great deal of literary skill in conveying not just the incidents of the dream but the mood and the emotion - at this, Kafka excels. As noted in two previous posts, his stories almost always start off as a literal account of some rather mundane events - which makes the emergence of the dream-like imagery and events - the sudden shifts in time and space, the sudden appearance of startling characters or creatures, the unlikely weird discoveries and observations, the radical shifts in mood and behavior, the sense of unease and lack of control - all the more disturbing because he creates and presents them within a universe that seems literal and mundane. Great example is A Country Doctor, which begins with a good set-up sentence for any story: a doctor (the narrator) says he has to help a patient ten miles away but can't get a horse, his horse has just died (that in itself is strange) - and no one will loan him a horse (that's unlikely in reality - and is the first clue that we're not in reality) - then the events become more bizarre, horses and a groom emerge from a pig sty, the groom asssults the doctors maid, the doc is transported instantly to the sick patient, who asks to die, horses stick their heads in through windows of the sickroom, the doctor discovers on the patient a festering wound (rich with sexual symbols), the doc lies down next to the patient. It's one thing to simply transcribe a dream - which may have seemed novel in the early 20th century but seems pretty ordinary now - a freshman English writing assignment - but the greatness of Kafka is not only the dreamlike fiction but how this fiction conveys a sensibility and s sense of society: a narrator helpless in a world of distant authority figures, a culture helpless in a world of a distant and unknowable deity, a world without rules or moral forces or even expected codes of behavior.