§ 18. The Imagination in the Dream-Sphere

§ 18. The Imagination in the Dream-Sphere.

With the ego's spontaneity at the onset of sleep, the power of thought falls away, and with it, at once, the living energy of the categories of thought; but the imagination, as a power in itself plastic and subjective, and befriended with the life of fusion, remains standing. If, in waking life, the imagination had to exert itself in whatever direction, or toward whatever objectivity, the arbitrary will of the ego strained and dispatched it, it is now freed from these determinations of the ego; if, further, in waking life, as is the case with all poetic composition and creation, it had to fuse itself with the periodic forms of thought and their strictly sundered radiance, so that it laid its own plastic flow, and its ornament, and its vivacity, into that periodic longitudinal development, then, with the falling-away of thought, it now also becomes bare and free of the compulsion of movement in and through such long-drawn-out periods; and finally, with the falling-away of the categories of thought, it frees itself of all the understanding's regular measures of movement, and becomes, in itself, its own law of movement. But if, with the falling-away of the ego, it now becomes indeterminable at its center, it thereby falls to the determinations of that which, in the dream-sphere, now carries on its life around the centrality of egohood and at its periphery; hence it now falls, all the more, to the stirrings of feeling and of the psyche, to moods and affects, and next to all nerve-stimuli and whatsoever bodily excitations of the dream-sphere, and finally, above all and in particular, to the resonant vibrations of the inner world of images. If, further, it lost, along with the movement of thought, that far-extending periodic power of extension, it now becomes active in evolutions more compressed together, fresher with life, and richer in change; and if, along with the categories, the strict measures escaped it, then, throughout its creations, there now reigns the unmeasured, the monstrous, that which, in the sense of waking life, is disproportionate, conflicting, and irreconcilable, although, in the sense of plasticity in itself, that is, of a plasticity undetermined by the understanding, an inner equilibrium, development, and consistency everywhere reveals itself in its creations. But with this entire liberation from thought as such, it won back its full pliancy, agility, unimpededness, and delight in turning, both in its creative evolutions and in that delicately sensitive readiness to meet the most manifold images and impressions on which its fusings ground themselves. To this are added the influences of the narrow confinement of the dream-sphere. If, waking, it ranged, carrying its momentum through the realm of spirit, through world, nature, and state, and through all domains of the arts besides, then, with the inactivity of the ego and the senses, all its grandly disposed and real outward power sinks away from it, and it falls to being the mover within the narrow peripheries of the dream-sphere. But if it thus draws the arc-widths of its cosmic outward radiance back into itself, then the tension within itself grows thereby to its densest, and, full of the most fruitful excitation within itself, it awaits the knocking stimuli that will pour forth its power. To the tender mood-stimulus of the psyche it sends forth, in welcome, a most delicately wary and sensitive receptivity; the marrowy nerve-stimulus strikes it powerfully, to an expressive reverberation within the realm of spirit; the burrowing affect strikes it still more stormily, and more eager to unchain itself, than the affect itself; and to the countless image-impressions, whose expressive power grew in equal measure with the closing-in of the dream-sphere, it opposes an electric kindling of love, of touch, and of every inclination that melts into fusion, and, in untiring alternations, its power tests itself in attracting and in fusing, and in pouring itself forth again, out of that fusion, upon the sole-uniting basis of plastic power.

But the imagination experiences an eminent elevation in power and in standing through the ego-energy that has sunk down into fusion. No power of the waking spirit perishes in sleep; hence, too, the vanished spontaneity of the ego does not perish in sleep, but rather passes into fusion within itself, loses its polarity through the neutralization of its poles, and it is this state of neutrality that makes it appear inactive, or, as it were, vanished. But if the energy that had been present in the polar spontaneity of the ego persists further, as such, within this neutralization, and if, as a bound power, it is now no longer able to appear on its own account within the dream-sphere, then it necessarily falls, for its own inner reinforcement, to another power which contains within itself all the vital activity of that unbound life. But the most living, subjective power within the dream-sphere is the imagination; already in itself, within subjectivity, it stands foremost among all the other powers of the spirit as the most creative; since, by its very nature, plastic, it had passed over into the life of the dream undiminished, and the casting-off of every polar constraining fetter made it fresher still with life, and more mobile; in itself, however, in waking life it stood connected with, and brought near to, the most highly polar realm of spirit, in that it bound together and gave wings to its most finely riven radiance amid its flowing-forth; all the more readily, then, does the neutralized ego-energy fall to it, once, with the surrender of polarity, the periphery and the centrality of the ego's spontaneity dissolved into one, whereby the supreme energy of the realm of spirit received just such a structure as became, in essence, akin to the imagination, ever active as it is in the fusion of the one and the many. Instead of the impeding categories of thought, as was the case in waking life, the liberated imagination now receives, in addition, the power of egohood transformed into its own likeness, and strengthens itself with that power's swelling; and since this power thus received into it was the highest and most powerful of subjective life altogether, the imagination thereby raises itself to the highest authority within the subjectivity of the dream, and it becomes the ruling mistress within the conscious life of the dream-sphere. Corresponding to the power embodied within it, it proves itself at once to be the most living and most animating principle of the dream, primordially active through all the changes of its creation; hence it appears, a priori, as it were the equal of the ego, that moving principle of all subjective life in waking, whose power it has absorbed into itself. But bearing within itself the spontaneous energy of the ego, it necessarily fuses to itself, as its own now-belonging organ for gathering perception, that weak and immobile receptivity of the ego still left over from waking life, which everywhere accompanies the dream's knowledge; and all the receptivity of consciousness that appears within the dream becomes servant unto it, functioning as an organ of the imagination. Hence it so often draws up into itself the immediate reception of reason, and takes it as the determinate motif for its meaningful painting. Hence it comes about that all the nerve-stimuli springing from bodily life during sleep at once arouse the imagination, as the supreme ruling power of the dream; hence it comes about that the impressions vibrating in upon it at once receive from it their symbolic expression of life within the realization of vision, being, as it were, newly shaped and set in place out of the plastic will of the imagination. Just so, all the sensory drives appearing within bodily life during sleep now appeal to it as that very power which is to satisfy them; and it alone is the one capable, in its own manner, of satisfying them; for it sets before the thirsting man in the dream, at once, the full glass, and the merry drinking-companions round about him, and the thirsting man delights, in full draughts, in his slaked craving, and the imagined nectar tastes delicious to him; if the strengthened power of sight, within the eye, urges itself to activity before the moment of waking, then the imagination paints, high up in the air, the scarcely visible bird, and, with the greatest exertion, the dreamer believes himself to be gazing thither, until his desire to see grows blunted, or else it bids him gather fruit, in the darkness, out of the tall grass, and the like, which, in waking life, demands a sharp straining of the sight. To the gentler knocking of the (male) sexual drive in sleep, for its appeasement, it at once paints the company of female beings, without any explicit reference on their part to the sexual, and seeks to soothe and to divert it through the alternation of harmless feminine images; but if it presses forward more strongly, it sets before it forms of natural life which stand in some relation to procreation, expressing that which follows upon it or precedes it, or it lets a woman, a girl, appear to it in some situation of surprise in which she has forgotten to veil her nakedness, and so forth. Likewise, all psychical and spiritual stirrings, drives, and everything within subjective life that is as yet only half-set in place, and therefore still demands the fulfillment of what is lacking, now turn to it; or else that which, within itself, is too full of life seeks, through it, to sound itself out to its close. In this way, it brings to quiet those moods still resounding onward out of waking life through the psyche, in that, stirred by their gentle stimulus, it brings forth, upon the theater of vision, whole scenes of images expressing the same tone of mood, and thereby pours the inner life of that mood out from within itself; likewise, it satisfies the active, affect-like continued knocking of the psyche in that same manner, through the transformation of inner into outer life, whereby the soul's inner excitation streams itself out and is extinguished. If they are thought-processes interrupted by the onset of sleep, living half-completions, that is, of thought-energy that has become concrete, which demand quiet through their completion, then it is now the imagination that accomplishes this in the ego's stead, in that, enabled and stirred by a universal penetration of feeling through the whole of the thought-matter caught in half-completion and striving toward its close, it sets its counter-activity in the form of the other, missing half of the unfinished thing, whereby the inner law of equilibrium of its plastic nature is set at rest; hence dream-creation has so much to tell of philosophical, mathematical, poetic, and, in general, spiritual problems resolved. And even every stirring of the sphere of will within the dream makes use, for its realization, of the power of the imagination, and is never brought into being without the imagination, in that, in every action of the sleepwalker, real movement was made possible only in that the imagination generated a real design of will, in the form of a determinate thought of intention goaded on by impulse, and thereupon set the sphere of the muscles into corresponding movement. Indeed, even in crises of a diseased bodily life, which so readily appear in sleep, when the vital force is gathered together, the imagination must often enough pre-form corresponding image-scenes in order to call forth those dream-actions which are required for the resolution of this or that malady ripe for decision.