§ 6. The Reproductive Power of the Dream

§ 6. The Reproductive Power of the Dream.

In waking life, thought itself weaves its own thoughts; understanding and reason unite their power into systematic evolutions; the laws of association among images, meanwhile, play only a subordinate role, bringing in new image-material only insofar and so far as thought permits it; they flow in only within quite narrowly measured circles, and in sobering ways that weaken the freshness of their expression, however much thought may tolerate them, and whatever it pleases to choose from among them according to its own absolutist decision. In sleep, conversely, the spontaneous power of the ego falls silent, and with it the sharply discerning torch of understanding and the compelling principles of rationality; and, freed from every fetter, the immeasurable round-dance of representative images rises up; the law of association creates unhindered, in its own native and free growth; out of the images alone, thoughts shoot forth, and, rising as a tropical, welling force out of atoms, proclaims the ruling power of the periphery and the mighty reproductivity of the dream. One wins the peoples of a state most easily for oneself and one's own purposes when one finds one's way into their nature, enlivens that nature itself, and then, out of the compelling force of their own inner being, calls them forth into living adherence to the governing power; so too does the dream: it enlivens the peripheral masses of the spirit, gives them freedom and room, and then draws out of this, for itself, the highest power; and it is upon the freedom, freshness, and full mobility of reproductivity that the dream first rests, before it can become productive in its own right.

Truly wonderful is the dream's power to pour forth, out of the storerooms of memory, every conceivable image of the day, in never-ending droves, to call them back again with the utmost freshness of intuitive expression, and to set them into ceaseless alternation of movement and mutual contact. Here chaos reigns on its own account, yet within that chaos there is nonetheless the individual and its law, the arbitrary self-will of the individual as against the whole, which lacks the all-pervading power of the One, of the ego, needed to shape it into the crystalline life-veins of a single central principle. Out of every atom of image, freedom here preaches itself; yet more powerfully still than out of the individual images, it blows out of the universally empowered laws of association, which, comparable to the categories of spontaneous thought, rule over and accompany the whole host of individual images as unifying powers. The law of association by external contiguity, or by chance, tears forth, by its own power, objects of representation which, for waking thought, have no contact whatever with one another, since their natures are, among themselves, the most contradictory, and brings them onto the theaters of the dream's display with the most eminent ease.