§ 23. The Origin of the Holding-for-Real of Dream-Images

§ 23. The Origin of the Holding-for-Real of Dream-Images.

We hold all the things that the dream paints before us to be realities, and even amid the most violent emotional convulsions which images of danger awaken in us, we do not succeed in rousing ourselves to the conviction that all this is mere semblance; we cry out, toss our limbs in restlessness, women and children whimper, weep bathed in tears, and so forth, in consequence of this holding-for-true. How does this dream-deception arise?

With the closing off of the dream-sphere within itself, the inner impressions step before the soul strengthened and refreshed, and undisturbed by any outer impression; they must therefore, as inner impressions, act upon perception and upon the soul in general with an incomparably greater force than in waking life, and there must immediately form in the soul, through this very fact, the sensation that a kind of the actual (because energetic) hovers before it and stirs it. Furthermore, with the vanishing, in sleep, of the life of thought and of concepts, all inclination of the images to show themselves from their abstract side had likewise vanished; their conceptuality receded entirely, their sensuous visibility emerges all the more vividly and energetically, and, because their visible essence is no longer weakened and deadened by any conceptual contraction inward, they must appear in the primordially forceful shape of their visible essence, and along with this likewise assume that primordial magnitude in spatial expansion which the real object itself gave them. Therefore the dream-perception, too, now sees before it nothing other than actual magnitudes, and each of these presents itself with the full freshness of the living figure; endowed with the character of actuality, the objects fall upon the perception, and therefore the perceiving soul holds them to be actual. But upon the real appearances of the objects the imagination sets the crown, in that it paints the perceiving subject itself in its naturally visible bodily form and movement; things of the magnitude and force of actuality now bestir themselves before the perception, and the living center-point of them, the ego itself, steps forth in the midst of them in its visible human form, and traffics and deals with them as with living things, and does everything itself as the living human being does: how, then, could perception do otherwise than hold everything to be actual? and how could the living co-sensation of the soul do otherwise than vibrate and tremble along with it as with the actual?! — And yet the luxuriant semblance of the actual would have to disperse, were a spontaneous critique of the understanding to intermix, and were the impressions of actuality from the outer world to be added to those of the inner world, thereby offering to the understanding the material for distinguishing the actual from the merely apparent; but the spontaneous workings of the understanding, like the energetic impressions of the outer world, are equally excluded from the life of the dream, the former through the collapse of all spontaneity of the ego, the latter through the closing off of the dream-sphere from the outer world; but such flashes of reflection as do emerge in the life of the dream at once fall back again, for want of any sustaining force, into the play of the imagination and its semblances, and such tones of actuality as do, through the not entirely closed sense of hearing, penetrate within arrive at the soul in no other form than that of an impression already fused together with it, and hence as dream-semblances. There remains, then, the inner world of the dream, undisturbed by critique and by oppositions, a world self-identical and unique, proceeding along in the force, expression, life, and magnitude of the actual; and the inner perception, since it has before it only this one world, from which it receives living effect and impressions in the form of the naturally proceeding actual, grasps it as that of the actual, and thereby holds itself convinced of its objective actuality.