§ 32. Sixth Principal Group: The Mood-Dreams

§ 32. Sixth Principal Group: The Mood-Dreams.

They rest upon those excitations of the soul which we designate by the name “moods.” These excitations belong to the disposition (Gemüth); the disposition itself is a force spreading itself toward the innermost depth of the soul, in a certain measure enclosed by the fundamental powers of cognition and volition that reveal themselves outwardly. From its being enclosed within, whereby it likewise has no direct commerce with the outer world (but rather experiences excitations from without only indirectly, by means of cognition, and expresses its reaction against the outer world only by means of volition), there follows its being held together within itself, its self-persisting elasticity of force, and the sustained nature of its vibrating within itself when it is excited; hence every inner excitation of the disposition lasts so long before it runs its course, and, according to whether it is a pleasant or a disagreeable one, keeps the consciousness continually gladdened with pleasant images, or beclouded with sorrowful ones. And even in the manner in which one can help the disposition to a swifter running-off of its persistent excitation, its nature, held and enclosed within the inwardness of the soul, expresses itself; for one cannot discharge an excitation of the disposition by a mere act of will, but only through the persistent exertion of cognition, of thought, of effective labor, of active doing, that is, thus through the straining of the fundamental powers of cognition and volition directed toward the outside, whereby the emotional movement communicates itself to these, is drawn off from itself and worked off outwardly, and thus comes to rest indirectly. — Now that kind of emotional movements which underlie the mood-dreams are the gentle excitations, or the moods. They bear within themselves a mild nature, circling onward only within the bounds of the inwardness of the disposition; they are passive, having within themselves no striving to foam over and beyond themselves, or to shake and move themselves as does the affect. And yet they belong, as the passive side, to the disposition, just as the ever-restless, surging affect forms the active side of the disposition; accordingly, in them too the peculiarly persistent nature of the vibrational elasticity of the disposition must reveal itself, and, in accordance with them, the mood-dream itself must show it.

Already the origin of the mood-dream rests upon the persisting life-elasticity of the vibration of the disposition; for the mood-dream spins itself forth on the ground of the mild emotional excitation that arose in waking life and was carried over, at play, into sleep. That original moods should form themselves within the dream itself is not impossible; only, in order that a mood may generate developed dreams out of itself and sustain them upon itself, it must contain within itself a very definite character of excitation, that is, a pronounced life in general, which only the actual life of waking, continually diverging and fusing again in sharp contrasts, is capable of bringing about. — Still further, the richness of the images with which a single mood is capable of expressing itself in the dream betrays the long-breathed, self-contained life of the disposition; everything which, in memory, expresses the same tone of the mood, has a marked existence in the sphere of images, and shows itself akin, in the atom of its lasting excitability, to the long-vibrating wave of the disposition, now rises freshly up and attaches itself to the wave welling deeply forth from the inward depth of the soul, and the flowering of images adorns its generating mood, as the blossoming adornment of nature adorns the nourishing earth. But it is not in the hasty, ever-unsteady, ever-changing driving of action, as with the affect, that the duration of the mood works itself out upon the images; but rather, in keeping with the gentle passivity of its contentedly self-sustained persistence, in the contemplative repose of a ground-image, to which, in ever more lively decoration, new and ever new images, or the scenes of action sprouting forth from it, attach themselves for the extension of this same thought, just as with a tree continually developing further in the richness of its branches, and the coloring of the mood flows onward gently, like the life of the plant-soul, in ever-widening circles, until the whole cycle of the organic unfolding closes itself off. And only with those dispositions of mind which are of a disagreeable kind, and therefore carry within themselves the stinging spur toward the arousal of unrest, does there show itself a roaming of the dream-formation from image to image, akin to the manifestation of affect, which images seem to emancipate themselves from the underlying mood and to comport themselves for their own sake, whereby, however, the passive nature of the mood nonetheless maintains itself in this, that the disagreeable scenes of action that come forward appear more as things merely befalling and inflicted upon the dreamer than as things worked by himself. — If one wishes easily to obtain an intuition, immediately and of itself, of the pure nature of the mood-dream, it suffices to observe the dream-formations which the longing for one's homeland, so frequent among human beings, produces. Whoever, like myself, held back within city walls, carries in his heart the undying love for the homeland of mountains and valleys, him the dream-imagination all too gladly transposes to the lovely hill from which he surveys the lovelier valley and the mountains. Because the lovely longing, and indeed every pleasant mood, carries within itself the euphony of the soul, the imagination depicts a priori aesthetically and with all the expenditure of melting harmony. One surveys the region from a hill which, just as the waking artist is accustomed to choose it, is suited to unveil the lovely view most beautifully. Gradually the richness of the region breaks forth before the dreamer's gaze in ever-wider circles of unfolding; one surveys all this in one single act, and with much more melting enjoyment than in waking life, because the understanding does not dissect it in the process. There is no lack of an accentuating of the rustic house one wishes for, and the tower-cupola gleams brightly. Now the gaze hangs upon the idyllic dwelling-place of the countryman and its comfortable spread, now upon his busy toiling in the field, and one watches after the furrowing plowman and the horses; now the flying flock of jackdaws and doves over the dreamer's head captivates him, one sees the chain of partridges rising up; swiftly the potentiated fancy-dream joins in with this, and, even as one is admiring the strong number of the fowl, it grows so immeasurably that it stretches along the whole sky, and the imagination at once satisfies the dreamer's wish, in that it lets the fowl fall down to him here and there and everywhere at his side, to be caught by him. This leads to the scene at the cozy hearth before the presiding housewife or mother; lovely memories of youth attach themselves to this, and so forth and so on, until the swollen urge of the disposition gradually cools and runs its course, and the free play of the association-dreams takes its place. — For a closer characterization, however, the following facts may serve.