§ 36. Tenth Principal Group: The Acting, or Will-Dreams

§ 36. Tenth Principal Group: The Acting, or Will-Dreams.

They comprise all those strange dream-appearances which, while proceeding in the inner representational sphere of the dreamer, at the same time have the striving to realize themselves as willing and acting, or rather to be realized through muscular movement. These dream-formations therefore stand parallel with the resolutions, plans, and intentions of the waking will, in that they, just as these offer plan, content, and goal to the waking willing, here offer the same to the dream-willing and serve for its activation; they must accordingly also be grasped and named as belonging to the will, or rather, since they work within the purpose of willing, as proceeding from the sphere of the will. But since the will, in sleep, by no means possesses the power to determine and choose plans and undertakings for itself, and to carry out the undertaking out of its own power of self-determination, it necessarily follows: first, that all will-action of the dream can be no proper action of the spirit's will, and belongs only to the lower kind of willing; secondly, that all its impulses are taken only from without, or rather as impulses forced upon it and given to it, so that the dream's willing and acting appears as a mere reaction against impressions, or as occurring in accordance with, and in the service of, impressions; thirdly, finally, that the dream-formations, or rather dream-undertakings, underlying the dream's acting must themselves, since the spontaneity of the thinking spirit is lacking, have arisen through impressions, whether these sprang up within the dream-sphere or outside of it. As for exciting impulses toward acting dreams, however, the dream-life possesses essentially three kinds, differing according to their origin: 1) reverberating, or rather vibrations of energy of the waking will sounding on into and across into sleep, which lie, together with that will, outside the dream-sphere; 2) affections of energy brought forth by the dream-imagination and its show-images themselves; 3) goadings of the will's energy brought about through a potentiation of the nerve-life, whether of partial or of universal extent. It must be remarked here, however, that every psychic stirring of energy also directly calls forth a corresponding co-stirring of the nerve-life, and, conversely, that every surge within the domain of the nerves also calls forth a corresponding one of the psyche; hence these two kinds of impulse, however much, in their origin, they belong either to the soul (spirit) or to the nerves, in the course of their realization at once become, at the same time, psychic-nervous or nervous-psychic.

It rests, likewise, upon the organic reciprocal relation of soul and innervation, that psychic stirring of energy during the dream can translate itself directly into muscular movements; and that nervous excitement can call forth dream-formations which stamp the nerve-energy into a subjective undertaking, or rather that the undertaking of the representation can, in turn, pass over into the substance and force of muscular action and attain realization. But as for the qualitative worth of the three kinds of will-excitation named, it is evidently the second-named, that is, the affection brought forth by the dream's own representational life, that stands highest, judged according to the measure of the dream-life taken by itself, because, in its whole nature of origin, it is rooted in the psychic itself, is brought forth through the image-making of the imagination, and accordingly has its seat in the most properly psychic force-center of the dream-life; whereas the will-excitation resulting from a waking reverberation of spontaneous spirit-force, although it springs from a higher source of spirit, stands too estranged from the essential nature of the dream-life, since it was generated outside the dream-sphere; while that of the nerve-sphere draws the middle measure of soul- and body-life in sleep too far downward.