§ 12. The Decentralization of the Life-Movement in the Dream

§ 12. The Decentralization of the Life-Movement in the Dream.

In waking, the power of the ego, set as the ruling center of subjective life, holds the vigorous rein through all conscious movement of the soul, inward and outward. Subjectivity raises itself up, a hero within itself, through the vigorous power at its center, into a unified expression of life; unity, force, self-determination bind themselves together into mighty strokes; everything that goes on within the spirit, centripetal and centrifugal radiation alike, and every stirring within, breaks upon the ego, or is spontaneously driven forth out of it; the world of images, thought, plan, and endeavor follow the commands of the ego, and the whole domain of conscious life constitutes itself into the strictly monarchic organism of the ego. In the dream, by contrast, the leaden weight of the plastic power of life immediately strikes down the power of the ego; for, as this power, becoming dominant, drew the peripheral, far-reaching radiation of the ego inward and down to itself, toward its own sense-organs, the same enervation befell the central power itself as well, that is, both periphery and centrality at once, since the two stand in reciprocal connection, and the strength or weakness of the one conditions that of the other. Nevertheless, the overpowering of the ego touches only its spontaneous side; the ego loses its self-determination, and, with it, at the same time, the energy to act, self-determiningly, upon all the peripheral force of conscious life; the periphery of the spirit accordingly withdraws itself from monarchic organization and becomes the freedom of the many. And this annihilation of the spontaneity of the ego sets in, at its core, already with the onset of falling asleep; already robbed of its primal force, it still stirs itself, in ever-weakening traces, through the processes of falling asleep, until, with deep sleep, every immediate trace of it vanishes, and only its potentiality still remains; but, after the overcoming of deep sleep, forerunners of the ego's spontaneity appear anew: seeming-willing and seeming-thinking, and, later, flashes-in of real thinking, which nonetheless soon breathe out again: these already proclaim the greater uprising to come; yet, until the entry of true waking, the ego persists only in the semblances of spontaneity, and its true energy remains powerless, sunken, immobile, and undetermined by itself; and only as a consequence of external impacts, generated out of the worlds of image-life within, are spontaneous movements of selfhood noticeable, which react exactly according to the impression received and immediately close themselves off again, once repulsion has been satisfied; and, because the ego lacks the power of inner self-determination, that is, self-movement, its reflection, arising in sleep, though it does belong to its spontaneity, does not maintain itself as ego-thought, but transforms itself, in an instant, into the form of plastic imaginative activity.

However much, then, the spontaneous side of selfhood proves, in all this, to be put out of force, the receptive side of it nonetheless remains in operation and in fresher life, so far as one may speak of receptivity, taken by itself, as fresh and alive. For, as is well known, the conscious sensation of the ego accompanies all the forming dream-plays and thoughts; these, in the very act of touching and stirring selfhood as they proceed, are thereby first made conscious at all, and, without the sensory capability of the ego for inner impressions, there would be no consciousness whatsoever in dream-life. Even in the more or less clearly emergent self-person of the dreamer, who everywhere seems to see, to hear, to act, the life of the ego's receptivity expresses itself in the form of imagination, and, indeed, the dream-life is, by virtue of this, not entirely without a center. Yet, while, with the living energy of the ego's spontaneity, the whole circuit of conscious life shapes and moves itself in and according to the commands of the ego, thus expressing the dominion of the ego, this relation, where only the receptivity of the ego is present, reverses itself entirely into its opposite; for now the ego has no more power to govern; all the forming powers of the dream, and all peripheral life, play freely about, and, though around the center-point of the ego's receptivity, yet wholly unrestricted, unordered, and without any determination from it; the ego becomes a mere accompanying point of peripheral life, a mere binding-form of what circles unrestrictedly in the outer, in a word, a mere expression of peripheral life through its own (the ego's) form. Under such circumstances, the dream-sphere is indeed decentralized, since the center left behind to it remains without any power to assert itself as ruling and valid; hence all the powers belonging to conscious life must likewise appear decentralized in the dream, and, in this decentralization, take on a structure of manifestation wholly different from that proper to waking. On the whole, however, it becomes clear that, once the spontaneity of the egoic center has decayed, all the conscious powers of the spirit must, in the direction of the ego, that is, inward, toward the depth, likewise decay or weaken themselves; whereas, through the influx of the life turning itself away from within, their peripheral self-force, though only within the bounds of the dream-sphere, must all the more strengthen and develop itself. Hence the decentralization of the dream-sphere necessarily brings about a structure of conscious life which, in the reciprocal relation of periphery and center, shows a form opposite to that of waking; and just as, in waking, not only the ego, but the deep powers of the spirit lying nearest to it, worked together in governing the periphery, so now the preponderance of the periphery works, determiningly and governingly, upon the ego and the powers of reason at once, regardless of which faculty of the soul they specifically belong to.