§ 7. The Originality of Dream-Painting

§ 7. The Originality of Dream-Painting.

The dream is born an artist, for within it imagination reigns freely and vividly, and its ideas do not spring forth turned and polished out of reflection, but freely, creatively, immediately, just as is granted to genius. Its realm, however, is color; for in countless tints of coloring the power of images shoots forth for it, fresh and lively, and out of imagination an infinite fusion pours itself into the colors; wherefore it is artist and painter. And of the sober, crystalline clarity of thought, in which the waking spirit unfolds its ideas, you perceive nothing in it; its own is the swelling of life in motley and resplendent radiance. Already in waking life the poet is able to adorn and color the brightness of the ego-spirit with the shimmer of images, and where poetry streams onward in lovely creation, there grace beads forth out of images; but in dream the flowery host of images is unfettered, and color itself becomes the brush, and color itself creates beauty, and the divine breath of imagination unites the whole of its power, and, lighter than a breath of air, the magical worlds of dream-art unfold, and you behold not the painter, not the color, not the individual working, in the dream: you admire the paintings.

Yet the painterly art of the dream lives according to its own law. Because the crystal-clear basic ray of the ego-spirit is lacking, its force spreads itself out through motley, through change, and through the shimmer of colors, and countless image-work expresses power through the very multiplicity of the dream-idea. Because it has lost the sustained gravity of the ego, it loses the repose of the classical; but through the eternal alternation in the confluence of the many, freer, more many-sided, and more surprising harmonies are generated than in waking life; and the dream-spirit overflows in eternal invention and creation, like the geniuses; and its creations, begotten in the very flight of their coming-to-be, lack elaboration in their particulars, just as those of genius do, and over the broad expanse of its paintings there lies a blurring-together of the images, as in the battle-paintings of painters, where countless multitudes crowd together into a single form. But the dream paints, by preference, in accordance with its own nature, scenes of excitement and passion, and hence in the emergence of the most vivid actions, and in subjects suited to forceful representation; and because, in dream, the images are not dazzled by the reflective light of the spirit, and are safeguarded against the blurring influence of external impressions, there joins itself to the power of its representation a truly enchanting vividness and freshness of expression, which waking life does not know.