§ 2. The Dream World-Realm

§ 2. The Dream World-Realm.

More than the comedic delight the dream takes in bending and finding itself into every possible mood of the soul, which so amused us, it is the fullness of psychical life-content within the dream, and the wealth of its lawful thoroughgoing organization and its definitely regulated modes of dream-formation, that fills us with wonder. One would never guess, from the fleeting image-work of the dream, that so great a power of life unfolds within it, and that within its easily dissolving webs of shadow, law and order stand nonetheless just as firm as in the fortresses of the real world. The night-life of the spirit, the dream-life, is the vigorous counterpart of the day-life, or waking; the mighty all-oneness of the ego has here ceased to govern and to master the elements of spiritual life; unfettered, the multiplicity of life lives here for itself. Roaring, the images roll onward before the gaze, themselves their own lords and powers; no law of spirit, of understanding, hinders them; they are their own law, and out of themselves they form their own peculiar modes of existence. Many rise up to a centralizing power over the others, and out of this arise living organisms of the most fleeting kind that the cosmos knows.

Vying with the images of the power of representation, the stimuli of the body and the nerves swing forth in their unfettering; each casts itself as lord of a particular circle of representation, and draws and threads the images after it into forms suited to itself. The drives of the body do violence to themselves; they are now the rulers; what do they care for decorum and moral law, once they are freed! Frank and free, just as the nature of the body engendered them, they press forth out of themselves toward discharge, and bid the power of imagination set before them whole troops of images to express their distress, or their burning desire. And everything that ever moved you deeply, or frightened you, by day, in boyhood, in youth, in manhood, now rises up and towers, wondrously, without regard for time, into a mighty mist-formation of the present, and delights or threatens you. The affects rush forward, pregnant with agitation; they seize upon everything terrible that our real life has ever brought forth, drawing it into representation, and out of it form uncannily gloomy, threatening, raging thought-shapes; but often drive and affect, however much they generally govern only the image-work of the soul, seize hold too of the sinewy strength of the body itself, rousing the muscle to tension and movement, indeed, they compel the dynamism of the nerve to make itself as effective as lies within the quite determinate sense-content of the dream-representation. Almost as powerfully as affect, one might well believe, the gentle, soft tones of feeling, the moods, are able to give birth, out of themselves, to whole worlds of corresponding trains of thought! Sorrowful moods summon forth never-ending chains of affliction; the sweetly harmonious moods revel in an equally luxuriant welling-up of joys; the cheerful and mischievous, in their own corresponding kind; and everywhere the free creation of the spirit's night mingles with the memory of the day.