Beside the well known story of Inanna condemning Dumuzi to the underworld, Sumerian literature preserves a second, largely independent composition modern scholars call Dumuzi's Dream, which gives the god's death a different narrative shape entirely, one built around foreboding rather than judgment. In this poem Dumuzi, alone in the countryside, falls into a troubled sleep and wakes deeply shaken by a dream heavy with disaster: solitary reeds shaking, a fire lit without kindling, a churn overturned, a cup fallen from its peg, images his sister Geshtinanna, skilled in dream interpretation, reads correctly as an unmistakable sign that demons are already on their way to seize him. The bulk of the poem follows Dumuzi's increasingly desperate attempts to escape, hiding in the grass, transforming himself in succession into a snake, a gazelle and other creatures with help from the sun god Utu, while the demons methodically search him out through his sister's home, his friend's house and finally his own sheepfold, betrayed in some versions by the very friend he trusted to shelter him.
Whether Dumuzi's Dream and the Descent of Inanna were understood by Sumerian audiences as two tellings of one continuous event or as separate, only loosely related compositions is not fully settled among Assyriologists, since the surviving tablets do not explicitly join them into one sequence, but read together they give Dumuzi something the descent myth alone does not: a death met not only as a decree handed down by an angry goddess but as a fate he saw coming, fought against with every shape-shifting trick available to him, and lost regardless, a considerably more human, frightened figure than the god found unmourned on his throne in the other telling.