§ 10. The Narrow Periphery of the Dream-Sphere

§ 10. The Narrow Periphery of the Dream-Sphere.

If the material essence of nature already has the tendency to gather itself into a ball and to become globular, then the psychical essence possesses this all the more; for the soul is a one, and out of the monadic primal source there rises up, round about, the radiance of life, and the spiritual rays of fire envelop and circle round the creative point of being and form the spiritual sphere. The dream-life, too, for itself, forms its own peculiar shimmer and sparkle about the soul; and what is contained within it, and how it bounds itself outward and closes together within itself, this forms the dream-sphere. And, indeed, the dream-life draws the boundary of its creative power and movement more narrowly about itself than does waking, narrower, indeed, than even the daytime man deprived of sight and hearing. For the very nature of the dream, and, with it, its outward organization, began to constitute itself with the closing-off of the senses, and the muscle of the body, collapsing powerlessly together, became the joyful herald of the dream's beginning of life. But once the senses have closed, and their deadening has become the normal state for the dream, then the subjective (conscious) life of the dream separates itself, on its cognitive side, from the universe outside itself; the outer world, and living receptive intercourse with it, is barred to the dream. Instead, the dream dawns forth in that very content of cognition which it already possessed within itself at the time of falling asleep; and the narrow confinement of cognition upon itself becomes the narrow periphery of the dream-life itself on its cognitive side. Likewise, all the muscular life which carried the energy of conscious will outward, and was able to engrave itself upon the reality of the outer world, collapses powerlessly into itself; the dream-life, accordingly, likewise lacks, on the side of the will, the free extension of subjectivity outward, the energy of the will likewise sinks down upon itself, the inner image-work of consciousness becomes the goal and motive of movement, the ray of will, interrupted at falling asleep, is banished into a seeming death, it persists motionless within itself: the narrowness of conscious life within itself is the periphery of the life of the will within the dream-sphere. Likewise sinks the vividness of feeling, whose vibrating power, in waking, measured itself by the harmony or discord of the whole outer world, sinks down to the harmless catching of harmonies belonging to the mood-being confined within a subjectivity bounded upon itself alone, and proclaims the shortened compass of dream-life forth from the depths of its own interior; and the strengthened impacts which the now-dominant plastic force sends to it out of the domain of the body are unable to grant any substitute for the lost favor of once more resounding with the magnitudes of the cosmos and the reach of spiritual deeds. Only in presentiments, in which the gathered mass of life in the dream discharges sparks flashing far outward, and in the still-remaining faint auditory perceptions of sleep, where conscious life receives, from the nearness of the surrounding world, a weak impulse of reality, does the spirit's far-reaching, effective nature and determination still proclaim itself; but the breaking-forth of isolated sparks is unable to disturb and divide the mighty fused mass of life within itself; it persists, closed and gathered within itself, in the mystic darknesses of the plastic, and whatever springs forth from it into the distance is only the overflowing force of the plastic, with whose discharge the dream-sphere persists all the more firmly within itself. Thus is the dream-life the life-sphere of the spirit, narrowly enclosed within the very bounds of subjectivity; and, since there remains to it, within, the eternal vibration of life abiding with itself, and the ever-growing result of that vibration held together by the all-around closed-off outlet of movement, the energy of life must ever and ever condense itself within, and whatever it brought forth as product must fuse itself again with the moving generative force, and the force swells and swells within itself; the dream-sphere, thus closed narrowly off outward, constituted itself, within, into a ball of force filled with dense energy.