§ 34. Eighth Principal Group: The Imagination-Dreams

§ 34. Eighth Principal Group: The Imagination-Dreams.

They form a very numerous throng and fill the dream-sphere with strange and wondrous formations. The imagination is the most flourishing power of the dream, and that power of the spirit which, in the night of sleep, where the spontaneity of the ego rests, rules and creates in its place; necessarily, then, there must correspond to its eminent life in the dream a great wealth of dream-formations, and of characteristic varieties underlying these. The various types of this variety form themselves partly out of the imagination itself, into modes of manifestation peculiar to it, partly out of constantly recurring stimulus-impulses of the same kind, in accordance with which the imagination develops for itself constant forms of formation. Many of these forms of the imagination-dream we have already encountered in the dream-facts developed thus far, since they often lie interspersed in other formations, or rather dispute rank and existence with them; but we have so far been able to devote particular attention only to the symbolic formations of the imagination, since these, in stimulus-dreams and sense-dreams, directly co-constitute the very essence of these, and therefore had to be drawn into the explanation; for the remaining ones, that is, for the symbolic formation itself, insofar as it has not yet been treated, this is the place for an independent consideration.

First Order: The Common Fantasy-Dream, or the Expansion-Dream.

It rests upon that tendency, lying immediately within the creative nature of the imagination itself, to well forth out of itself and thereby to stretch and expand. Wherever the imagination makes a vigorous start toward activity, the striving toward expansion at once comes forward; and since, in doing so, it is always compelled to proceed from after-images of the actual, the expansion embodies itself in these very images, and they thereby take on a magnitude far exceeding their reality, and with it the character of the strange. Favoring the imagination's striving toward expansion, moreover, there is added the wavering nature of the dream with regard to measure, since the sharp activity of the understanding, needed for an accurate delimitation of these, is lacking.