§ 16. The Life of Representation Following from Decentralization and the Narrow Confinement of the Dream-Sphere

§ 16. The Life of Representation Following from Decentralization and the Narrow Confinement of the Dream-Sphere.

Just as the power of the ego escapes from subjectivity, this at once heightens the power of the life of images within the soul. With the spontaneity of the egoic center, the rein of all-governing power falls away from the images; understanding and reason no longer have the power to dissect them singly, to tear and sunder them, and to bind them into schemas unnatural and repugnant to them, forging them into periods; the compulsion to move along the guiding threads of the categories of reason and understanding, in correct judgment and inference, ceases; in a word, the life of images casts off every fetter imposed upon it by selfhood, and becomes free! But with freedom it at once wins its own force; it renews its own fusion together, which by day was continually impaired by the operations of the understanding; and, with this fusion, its freshness of expression, its tension-elasticity, its generative and moving force, welling forth out of itself and against the others; and the more energetically this self-force develops, the more it has set itself into a state opposed to the purposes of thought.

To this is added the advantage of force which the strict closing-off of the dream-sphere, upon its own periphery, that is, against the real outer world, brought about for it: no impressions of light from without radiate in any longer; the sharpness proper to them no longer strikes stunningly and startlingly into a nature of impression already refined and softened, beforehand, by the incident ray of the spirit; the noises of the ear, insofar as they still penetrate through the imperfectly closed labyrinths of the sense of hearing, reach the world of images within only after having passed through the plastic darkening of the power of the auditory nerve in sleep, and hence are, from the outset, as gentle, faint, and mild as messengers from an equally ethereal, shadowy world; imagination, in at once making use of them for plastic structures, attests to their dream-like kinship. The functions of smell and taste rest entirely; the sense of feeling, on its passive side, insofar as it experiences any stimulation at all, introduces this so mystically, darkly, and delicately into the soul that it is sensible only to imagination and its outstretched, delicate feelers. On the whole, then, the dream-sphere rests wholly closed within itself; thereby the free world of images lives, within, unhindered and undisturbed, even toward its outer side; through the free tension within, as through the firm boundary of this against without, the elasticity of life develops within the images, gathered, dense, and strong, and every image presents, in itself, a most highly charged mass of life, and its fully vibrant activity, out of itself alone.