§ 35. Ninth Principal Group: The Reflective, or Thought-Dreams

§ 35. Ninth Principal Group: The Reflective, or Thought-Dreams.

These are those dreams which bring thoughts and problems, laboriously but vainly exerted upon during the day, directly to their solution. They are called the “reflective” dreams, or thought-dreams, because they take their origin from the reflection of waking life, whose carrying-over into the sleep of the imagination affords the occasion and the problem for the solution. They occur in every field of spiritual thinking, and it is in this wholly indifferent whether the preceding exertion of waking life had concerned a theoretical or a practical problem. Numerous published facts are to be found concerning this, and every dreamer can find still more in himself, if, after preceding musing and thinking by day that did not lead to a result, whatever it may have concerned, he observes his dream-formations with an attention already resolved upon by day, that is, made more alert through deliberate intent, whereby one perceives and notes a great deal that otherwise vanishes without a trace upon waking.

In order that a dream-reflection, that is, a weaving of the dream within the thought of the understanding or of reason, may form itself, it is, in the first place, absolutely requisite that a strenuous reflection of waking life upon the determinate object shall have preceded it; for the dream-life, given the abolished spontaneity of thinking in sleep, possesses no energy to devise and treat problems a priori; and wherever the understanding appears to be active together with the dream-imagination, it at once becomes evident that it only forms non-self-sufficient prefigurations or after-illuminations of the imagination's own evolutions, that is, that it speaks forth out of the imagination itself. The occasion for every reflective dream-formation therefore comes from waking life, or rather from a strenuous thinking of waking life, which fixes itself as such in the imagination and, after the manner of the marked images, breaks forth again in the dream, both as a whole and in its particulars. And this marked emergence must be all the more forceful, the more the problem of the day, upon whose solution waking life set great store, passes over unsolved into the dream; for then the still-unfinished nature of the thought, which drives itself further, within itself, toward completion, still further goads its emergence before the intuition, and at the same time sharpens the expression of the thought-content; on the other hand, however, the self-tendency living within the inherited thought, to bring itself to a close, becomes a direct summons to the imagination to accomplish this.