§ 8. The Epochs of the Dream

§ 8. The Epochs of the Dream.

The most finely mobile principle of all principles, the Soul, in that she lives and weaves, draws thread after thread out of herself, ceaselessly rejuvenating the one and selfsame outstreaming of life in ever new modes of radiation, multiplying it, setting it against itself, and thereby ever anew kindling and discharging it once more. Everywhere the creative force unrolls itself in flight from moment to moment, forms lines and sections out of the moments of its particularization, gathers the larger circles together into mightier epochs, and encloses these again within the universal periphery of its course. Thus does the Soul show herself in the cosmic cultural surge of all-one humanity, as in the monadic circles of individual self-development; and thus, too, in the sharply-radiating movements of the waking spirit, as in the whispering creation and weaving of the dream; everywhere life spins points out of points, points into lines and circles, circles into spirals, and so on.

Three principal stages, however, comprise the dream's mighty life and all the change, variety, richness, and splendor of its creations. They follow, and bound themselves according to, the course of development of spiritual life in sleep upon which they rest. The first comprises the spinnings of the dream which arise from the first moment of falling asleep up to the full development of deep sleep, accompanying the processes of falling asleep as a luminous flickering and glimmering. The second contains those quite peculiar processes of the dream, wholly opposed to regular consciousness, which, amid the complete silence of the ego during the time of deep sleep, carry on their mysterious being, and continue for as long as that sleep itself lasts. The third begins with the first stirrings of the spirit out of deep sleep toward polar consciousness, and conducts the whole evolution of the preparing awakening, in its continual growth and rising as an ever more vivid power of conscious radiation, until, with the tearing-asunder of the veils of sleep through the fully emergent majesty of the spontaneous power of the ego, it disperses of itself and turns back into the bright sharpness of daytime life. Great is the transformation which the sleeping spirit accomplishes through these epochs. At first, it flowed away, gradually falling asleep, gradually into itself. The central power of the ego of the spirit, which by day governs and illumines everything, released itself and sank its weight down, as ballast, into the plastic life of the body; the ministries of the categories of reason and understanding, the reflections, the feelings of reason, the impulses of the will of the spirit, the middle host of the spirit-bodily, all sink down gradually; and only still in the peripheries of the spirit, in the images, does force blaze and roar, while, from within the spirit, no sun sharpens them of its own power, no majesty governs them, until they too grow weaker and weaker for want of the counter-pole of the ego that had kindled them, and sink down into shadows of mere sensation, flowing away within themselves, just as the majestic selfhood of the spirit, ahead of them, had itself flowed away into itself, songless and soundless. So now the spirit keeps holiday, as spirit, and from all its conscious power; and yet the spirit still lives within it, and with it, and in it, all that has its existence through it. No life of the spirit by day is higher than that of reason; but no life of the spirit, by day or night, is broader than this in which the spirit lives and creates in deep sleep; here the spirit surges in unboundedness, free of every barrier and determination beside and outside of itself, and it pulses purely within itself alone; it surges in cognition and thought, as this is in itself once it has withdrawn into itself, laden with images, out of all reality; it surges up and down in the wave-oscillation of feeling, as feeling itself remains within itself, once it has lost the mediation of consciousness with its objects and circles within itself, undiminished by the brightness of selfhood, and what it now wills, and what drives it, in the depths of sleep, is only its own immediately self-giving objective being of plan and purpose, without subjective aims, deliberation, templates, or limits. It flows away within itself; the extended force and organism of its own being is, to it, the sphere of objective sensing and enjoying, it lives plastically; and not merely plastically in the life of the body, but just as much, and more powerfully, in the essence of the spiritual as such, which there contains the deep tissue of its own self and the force, engendered out of it, of the bodily-plastic. As it is within itself, when it has withdrawn out of the brightly conscious agitation of the day into the wholly unconscious darkness of the plastic, so does the spirit live in deep sleep; therefore it lives and weaves in a kind of spiritual feeling and stirring which is no consciousness and yet a sensing, and no willing and yet a rising and falling surge of energy. And what, in waking, separates itself as cognition and feeling, here flows entirely together into one with the full darknesses of plastic receptivity, and out of this there forms a general sense of unconscious sensation, as fine in its groping-touch of what is sensible to it as it is great, wide, and unbounded in the fields of this sensation, and all the stirring, falling, and rising of the spiritual energy of deep sleep follows these feelers of feeling, whether they extend themselves within the organic workings of the spiritual power of being itself, or within its bodily organism, or within the cosmic fibers and threads in which the selfhood of the spirit, and of all its organism, weaves and rests bound up with the cosmos. And all the harmonies that swing forth to the unconsciously sensing spirit out of this world of life are, however much they are unconscious feeling, nonetheless delightful intoxications of the spirit, sweet refreshing harmonies, murmuring out of the flowing-away of the spirit; and toward the world the spirit surges therein, not as a manifoldly particularized force, but as being, as it is in itself, in One, and it drinks the chords of being, as being itself, immediately, and, through its own refraction, sounds forth from itself undimmed. But the life of the spirit does not feel itself born for the bliss of enjoyment alone; rather, just as it drank its fill of the self-formed harmony of being and gave birth to itself more strongly through the waves of that harmonious flowing, so does the spirit lift and stir itself anew within itself; it rises in energy, and energy will discharge itself; and it seeks channels and definite paths of discharge, and it strives after polarity and division within itself, seeks a center, seeks peripheries of discharge, from which tangents leap backward and forward, and the spirit stirs toward a central gathering within itself, and already the images, fused into masses of sensation upon the periphery of representation, seem to knock at it, so far as, being flowed-away, they are still able; and the newly emerging centrality of the spirit sharpens and kindles itself thereupon into a brighter and more decisive outward radiance, and, together with it, just as it shines and streams livingly inward, the contrast of the images grows forth into clarity and expression in themselves, and the images of elastic youth and fullness unroll themselves anew, and the airy dances of the dream begin; but at the leaping of the images, imagination awakens and mingles its boldness, its beauty, and its force into the connections of the images; the monstrous forms of imagination's plasticity by night awaken the excitement and astonishment of beholding, and the sharp emergence of the understanding, and the ego, in reflexes, shines and suns itself inward, and it becomes intoxicated anew with the world that proceeds without it, and, just as it rouses itself out of this intoxication, it beams a new crimson and dawn-glow of awakening into it, and again the crimson of the spirit fuses into one with the bacchanalian round-dances of image-power; for imagination still holds the upper hand. Swelled by the moods of feeling, goaded and freshened by the stimuli of nerve-life, carried off and abducted by the associations of the images themselves, it rises up in the boldest luxuriance of evolutions, creates in painting, chases and leaps in wondrous combinations, variations; it outbids the stimuli of nerve and of feeling through the boldness of symbolic after-images; and the understanding admires the strange beauty and swells in strength at its own contemplation; above it stirs the depth of the ego-spirit, rationality, and ever more strongly the energetic pole of the ego braces itself against the forming powers, though carried off by the images' bold flight, escapes itself once more, until, with a decisive upward leap of its innermost force, the whole misty web of shadow disperses, and, bold as a lion, the ego-spirit awakens to the majesty of day. With these transformations of spiritual life in sleep, the dream-formations keep equal step. In the first epoch there rules the falling-away of the spirit out of subjective consciousness into the egoless and unconscious night of sleep. Hence, too, the dream-formations of this epoch necessarily show the gradual decay of the dream-forming power within itself, insofar as this expresses consciously spiritual processes within itself. First, with the beginnings of falling asleep, where the ego is still spontaneously alive but already beginning to sink toward indifference of spiritual being, there arise reflex-dreams, that is, image is joined to image in definite directions of the still-waking, convulsively flashing understanding; dreams form themselves according to the inner scheme of the concept, of thought; but it is no longer the understanding that weaves them, since it already lacks the spontaneously acting power of the ego, which is caught up in submersion, but rather imagination, following the flashing-in reflexes of the understanding. It is here that imagination so often, in the act of falling asleep, invents what the thinker, the theorist, and the practical man had labored in vain, pondering and puzzling, to solve throughout the day. Thereupon the power still glowing on in the understanding also sinks to rest along with the power of the ego; it no longer flares up in the shrill, flashing lightning of thought, and, with it, concept and category rest as a moving force. But the understanding had been active the whole day through, in the periodic structure of regular thoughts, of simpler and higher form, and all the images and representations of the day received from it the fixed inclination to move within the schemas of the period of thought; the images outlive the understanding's falling asleep, and, though the understanding no longer reaches masterfully into their realms, it has nonetheless left behind the form-schemas it impressed upon them during the day, and there now begins a new, remarkable kind of dream, which contains nothing else but a continual falling-after and tumbling-into the still-echoing periodic forms of understanding- and reason-thought on the part of the surging images, insofar as these are merely form and nothing further; not the categories themselves, but the modes of sequence of the images formed after them, are these forms. These are the template-dreams, which now carry on their senseless being. Concept-images, thing-images, forms of verbs, and every kind of linguistic form now plunge headlong, as though the sluice-gate of some dammed-up stream had suddenly been opened, blindly and without choice, into the thought-templates, and fill them out in the most nonsensical manner. One thinks and reflects, reads and writes, now dreaming, wholly nimbly and periodically, but the content of what one reflects upon, reads, or writes, is patched together out of the most contradictory things; subject, object, predicate, and every more complicated sentence-form is formed, yet each part of it stands wholly without relation to the other; it is only that the image is a noun, a verb, and so on, in general, not what content it contains, that determines here its entry into the place of the sentence corresponding to noun or verb: intelligible sense and logical binding there is none here. But even this after-plunge of the images into the lingering echoes of the forms of thought grows weary, and dies away with the complete overfilling of the periodic templates, behind which no kindling force any longer acts; they vanish, and, freed from every bond of thought, the images spread themselves out. Thereupon the still-living harmonies or discords of the more deeply lying moods of feeling begin their freer afterplay, and become the sole bases for the now pathlessly leaping images, and the psyche itself, having already sunk so deep out of the life of selfhood, is now only feeling, and beholding within feeling. The mood-dreams, borne upon the waves of feeling of the soul, now blossom forth in the spirit of night, everywhere displaying to view one and the same fundamental tone of feeling through an ever-new alternation of images, until even the melodies of feeling grow faint amid the mingling of images and fall silent, leaving life to the images themselves. While the dying gaze of the soul now only looks on mutely into this, association-dreams, knotted together out of the very atoms of the images themselves, flit past it like fleeting will-o'-the-wisps, in heaps and chains, then reduced to paired links; here and there, breaking through the midst of this, the marked dream, resting upon the images of strongest intensity, still emerges as a last gleaming atom out of the stillness of life; but already it is no longer able to stir the beholding gaze, for this has sunk down into the unconscious floods of feeling, and a sensing and living unintelligible to the conscious spirit begins. The second epoch of dreaming, the stillness of deep sleep, however little it, in the wholly unconscious state of the spirit, is able to offer clear dream-formations, is nonetheless one weighty and rich in itself, and reveals itself as such in the following, or last, epoch, to which it hands over the products of its mystical creation to be stamped into conscious representable image. It is in this silently self-contained second epoch that the unconsciously, that is, capable-of-centrality, sensing spirit takes in within itself the relations, the harmonies, the discords, the oppositions, and all their nearer modes, and, further, discloses them in representable form once the life of the ego begins to stir again. Out of this silence of the spirit flows the sensation of the well-sounding harmony of sleep, that is, of the fusion of spiritual being and life within itself; and out of this harmony there wells forth, for the epoch to follow, the lovely mood of the soul which generates dreams of gladdening images and scenes. But if deep sleep, hindered by disturbing circumstances, was not a full fusion of the spirit, then, instead of harmony, a discordant mood sounds into the following uprising of the spirit, and frightful or repulsive dreams spring from it. In like manner there form, in the depths of sleep, those numerous, directly spiritual sensings of inner bodily states which, still only prefiguring, still in their first coming-to-be, and therefore imperceptible to waking, contain the incipient disagreeablenesses, illnesses, and dissolutions unto death of life. If the spirit, in deep sleep, is an unconscious sensing, it is capable of impression in an unimaginable way, and it receives stimuli out of the sphere of its own being and life into itself, and there arise within it pleasant or unpleasant stirrings of sensation belonging to its own fused being. If the disagreeable impressions of deep sleep are very intense, they leave behind correspondingly more lasting after-vibrations in the soul for the conscious sensing that later sets in; and if the sensation of deep sleep was brought about by particular states of bodily life, then their nearer kind, locality, and so forth, struck together with them upon the sensitive pulse of being, and all this, too, resounds onward into the following epoch of the dream, though never otherwise than through a plastic, inwardly-stirred state of having-happened. Hence the dreams of the third epoch are rich in presentiments containing the weal and woe of the body in lighter or heavier degree; gentler stirrings produce, later on, more indistinctly emergent, or symbolic, presentiment-dreams; decided shocks, by contrast, a very definite, clearly objective after-sensing and immediate apprehension. Far in advance, into the organic web of the future of life does the feeler of the soul reach here; distance in itself, whether into the remoteness of space or of time, whether future or past, is here the ruling course of life, in which the spirit gives testimony that its energy, gathered together on every side, requires grander circles of discharge as well. The spirit of deep sleep sends its power of feeling far out upon the waves of its most inward mood, of love and of friendship, which resound onward through the fusion of the spirit to those to whom it is akin, and richly, from this, well the sensings of the weal and woe of the friend, the son, the husband, of loved ones far away; and the stronger the impression was in unconscious receptivity, the more clearly and eloquently does the following presentiment-dream express it, and the conscious dreamer starts up in mighty terror when the prophecy declares to him something dreadful, and he awakens in fright. Or the unconscious feeling of the spirit radiates far out into the distance of time; as though with a single beat of the wing, it traverses backward the thread of life already traveled, and, following upon this, imagination then offers to him, whether old man or man in his prime, the whole chain of joyful or gloomy events of childhood, of youth, of manhood, and the dream brings forth, in speaking freshness, the loved and unloved persons together with their deeds. Or the spirit springs powerfully forward from the seeds of the present into the future evolutions of life, of action, and of creation already prefiguring themselves, together with the collateral moments bound up as one with them, and the impression received sounds mightily into the brighter conscious dream, and the sleeper sees the evildoer or reckless man who threatens to kill him, or the treacherous flood whose wave brings dangers upon him, and the place of the event and the whole clarity of the accompanying circumstances. Loudly do the facts speak. But if sensation into the breadth of time and space comes so easily to the spirit, how much more easily still must it see into its own great circling movement through every domain and relation of its most finely flowing being! Therefore it draws into itself, with an irritable sense of feeling, every discord of moral disharmony and frailty within itself, and what it unconsciously felt, and at which the plastic life within it shuddered: this, imagination subsequently paints for it with a horror-inspiring nakedness or exaggeration, and it beholds itself consciously, just as it appeared and became manifest to itself while dreaming unconsciously. And whither a God-inspired soul, waking, wrestles and strains most powerfully toward the Absolute: thither the spiritual feeling-power of sleep sets itself into motion and agitation, which brings forth the non-knowing primal being of the spirit directly out of itself, just as the subjective uprising of waking does; and the spirit receives back the power of its self-surrendering outward swing, in the echo of the Godhead upon its created being, and out of this there wells a blissful melancholy of the soul, and it announces itself consciously through comforting images of the dream and through the appearance of ideally exalted, revelatory figures, and numerous are the angels of the dream that fly, and the elements of imagination proclaim the consecration of the path along which the power of spiritual being, having flowed together within itself, was borne onward toward the Divine. This was the second, the still, the deep, the holy epoch of the dream, which forms and creates within itself sensation-forms and images and chains of an unconscious kind out of the fused life of the spirit, whose strength and depth, comparable to a tremor in the interior of the earth, permeates and shakes through everything, however high it may sway upon the surface of life, wherefore, out of the trembling and vibrating of the spirit in the depths of its fusion, the resounding-through expresses itself so brightly and so clearly in the overhanging epoch of the conscious dream.