§ 27. First Principal Group (Genus): The Template-Dreams

§ 27. First Principal Group (Genus): The Template-Dreams.

These accompany, especially where thinking activity has gone before, willingly the onset of sleep, and reinstate themselves again in the preliminary stages of awakening. Upon falling asleep, together with the spontaneity of the ego, the governance over the images on the part of reason, understanding, and the categories vanishes; but immediately after the sinking of the ego, there still remain living within the images themselves the modes of connection imposed upon them throughout the whole day, after the manner of forms of judgment and logical periods; and it is these forms of thought, now without any self-active power of thought within them, that undertake, upon falling asleep, to fill themselves out further on their own account, forming subject, object, predicate, principal and subordinate clauses out of themselves. But since all guidance of the understanding and of reason, and hence the unifying and illuminating concept, is here lacking, the resulting connections of judgment and thought shape themselves entirely and solely according to the measure of the life of representation for itself, that is, quite arbitrary images and representations of the most various content, in no way inwardly connected with one another, are set in the place of subject, object, and predicate, and there thus form sentences that share nothing more with intelligible thinking than the mere outer form of judgment, that is, the thought-template, on account of which we have called these dream-formations the "template-dreams." As a rule, the last waking thought with which one was occupied while falling asleep is the determinate first occasion of such dream-formations, but they at once transform this occasion into a nonsensicality peculiar to themselves. If one wishes to have an analogy of waking life for this kind of dream, the mode of thinking of the deranged and the insane would furnish a corresponding analogue, inasmuch as it strings word to word (spoken images) without intelligible sense; indeed, since the mode of behavior of both likewise rests upon a powerlessness of reason, this dream-behavior is essentially identical with it, and we might accordingly just as well call the template-dreams the "deranged dreams." — But according to whether the template-dream sets in at the onset of sleep or before awakening, it bears a form of representation particularly suited to each of these two states. The template-dream of the evening, since it still proceeds from the close of waking inner thinking, retains the preference for movement upon an inwardly persisting representation; it presents itself, accordingly, as thinking (though of its own kind) within the interior of the soul; the template-dream of the morning, on the other hand, takes its origin in opposition to abstract occupation, out of the image-forming activity of the imagination that blossoms in sleep, wherefore the more abstract form of reflecting is hateful to it, and it loves reflection in the visible and the audible, hence it constantly shows itself as a supposed reading or speaking of what it contains; and often, besides, the visual nerve-stimulus that is constantly active before awakening drives it to a pleasing persistence in reading. — In the evening-dream one supposes oneself to be moving amid inexhaustibly shooting-forth inner thoughts; the supposed thoughts and philosophemes chase one another without ceasing; so madly swiftly do the semblance-judgments rush past, and ever new ones in their place, that the dream-ego, which indeed perceives them before it, is scarcely able to grasp an impression of them; all the more does the conceit rise within it, for the dreamer supposes himself thereby to be moving in the highest cleverness, he marvels at himself in his art, at being so philosophical and so inexhaustible in the philosophical comedy that appears to him as real thinking; he rejoices sweetly in his skill, and with the sweetness of self-feeling there swells within him the dark sweet-feeling of sleep. Both the swift flight of the semblance-thoughts and the astonishment at the dreamer's supposed cleverness are easily explained. The swift flight arose through the suspension of the ego's spontaneity for the images, whereby they became bereft of the attraction and reining-in of gravity; but the flattering self-admiration had its ground in the lack of the power of the understanding, or rather in the lack of all inner content of the judging power of the understanding, whereby, naturally, the inner state of weakness of the dream-ego took itself as the measure of what was taking place at and before it, wherefore the judgment, too, had necessarily to turn out so laudatory, flattering, and self-satisfying, somewhat as, to waking children or foolish adults, their own doing and thinking appears as very clever. — In the morning-template-dreams, by contrast, it is the immense fluency of speech and reading, unceasingly proceeding within the dreamer, that excites his self-admiration to the utmost. One supposes oneself thereby to be reading German, English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or whatever language one has ever seen or heard anything of, and turns nimbly from page to page, declaims what has been read, believes oneself to be speaking it aloud with oratorical emphasis, and so forth. Still higher, however, does the pleasure mount when, setting aside all aids, one supposes oneself to speak freely, of one's own accord, in a foreign language; one delights in the supposed fluency, marvels at the swiftness of the capacity for speech developing without any cooperation of the will, as well as at the inexhaustible richness of the matter of speech. Here, too, of course, the high self-admiration rests upon the suppressed judging power of the ego, although, on the other hand, the magical activity of the imagination involuntarily incites admiration, and one sees, in this fantastical oratory, already the primordial seeds of those higher phenomena of somnambulism, where the somnambulist displays an admirable gift of speech in languages already forgotten by him or in general little learned. But were one to seek a measure for the swiftness of the speech proceeding within, our sometimes audible hearing of the speech of dreamers, in its frenzy heightened to the point of complete unintelligibility, would nevertheless give us only a very slight approximate notion of the swiftness of the flow of representation within the interior of the soul, because there the images flee freely only as immaterial vibrations, and are not held back and checked by the unwieldy burden of the organs of speech. But withal, the audible speech of dreamers, in its incoherent unintelligibility, casts a light upon the inner perversity of dream-formations in template-form.

It would now remain for me to lay before view a few dream-facts of this kind; but however much I have taken pains to procure the necessary material even in this genus of dream, I have nevertheless succeeded only in a few fragments in holding fast the confused content with my memory, however often dreams of this kind may play before perception. The content of these dreams is so absurd and displaced that it offers almost no points of purchase at all for the retention of waking thought, to which there is further added, as a hindrance, the extraordinary delicacy and tendency to volatilization of the dream-images. Once I succeeded in holding fast the very beginning of such a dream-web, whereby, reciting it, I sprang with both feet at once out of bed and, in utter darkness of night, noted it down on paper lying ready. I had awakened shortly before in the night and had just been thinking of a ball arranged in Paris, and the arts of attraction employed there, of which I had read in the newspaper. Upon this I fell asleep, and as I fell asleep, the template-dream began literally to whirr thus: "Among the greatest modifications of a cunning waistcoat-pocket he conceals..." Here I awoke precisely in order to note it down. This, despite its already essentially senseless content, is nevertheless still the more sensible beginning of the dream, because that one of its ends which proceeded immediately from the preceding waking thought was thereby determined by waking life; and from this one may draw a correct inference as to the senselessness of these dreams in the further stage of their free development. Another time I sprang out of bed with the following fragment: "As long as the water can already rub the hands for stench"; upon this I awoke, and there hovered before me only quite dimly the sense that, immediately before, there had seemed to be talk of a cook and a kitchen. — A third time a template-dream began with the words: "yes, yes, one breaks sparrow-problems." — By contrast, I once succeeded, in dream-reading, which I had already long investigated, in making a few other interesting observations. What I supposed myself just then to be reading contained, not far from the beginning of the first sentence, the word "philosophy," as I believed; I reflected, without disturbing the dream, that is, during the dream itself, precisely upon how this word and the others were written. The word "philosophy," I saw it exactly, had not in the least the ordered manner of writing of waking life, but contained so curious a combination of syllables as, for instance, occurred to me during the dream itself, the word "Popocatepetl." I perceived from this, therefore, that in the template-formations not only do the parts of the sentence set themselves into the most arbitrary relations to one another, but the syllables of the individual word do so as well, in relation to the other syllables; and it likewise surprised me to observe that the individual letters, too, did not all stand right side up, but some stood upside down, that is, reversed. The whole of the writing, however, looked more yellowed than black, and altogether blurred, somewhat as when a drop of water falls upon a freshly written word, or as when dry writing finds itself in a state of complete soaking. This whole appearance, however, casts, as it seems to me, a very telling light upon the plastic condition of the life of the imagination during the dream, and marks the peculiar constitution of the activity of brain and soul in the state of sleep.