§ 3. The Life-Current in the Dream

§ 3. The Life-Current in the Dream.

Even in itself, the life of the soul flows more mobile than the subtlest imponderable of matter; its force streams swifter than light, falls upon the being it touches more gently than light; in its most sluggishly moving waves it still flits more lightly than the zephyr. And yet, in the chief force of its evolutions, so far as it is waking, daytime life, it moves only heavily and in fetters; for the almighty ruler of the whole psychical periphery, the eternal king of the day, the ego, holds it in bonds, and to everything that dares stir freely within it, it holds up the iron measuring-line of category and the dry rhythms of logic, to march it into step. Only when, with the closing of the eyelids, leaden sleep falls upon the strength of the ego, overpowering and subduing it, until its power awakens again in the morning, does the fleeting, generative force become free. In dream, life flows freely; scarcely has the fettering gravity of the ego vanished than it shoots forth in a frenzy. Life is movement; movement is flight, once gravity has fallen away. With infinite haste the stream circles, fleeing round and round; well may it surge centerless, once its center has sunk away, yet never does it escape the closed circle round which the very being of the soul, out of which it broke forth, itself traced and gave birth to, however freely it may surge through the expanses. At the periphery, life now kindles, gathered together; the lingering shadows of conscious life, the images, fill themselves with fire, with youth, with force; and with elastic buoyancy the rounds of images fly past. Shadow stretches toward shadow and draws near and coquets with one another; furiously the bond is knit, more swiftly still it fades away; for out of the fleeting union whole droves of more swelling images shoot forth and consume the generative force; atom clings to atom in the dream-image, and, ever spreading atom by atom, the chain of images draws onward in flight; it flees even as it comes to be. Here being dwells in motion; here it stands in the ascendant over the quiet pathos of being; how powerless, like a mere accessory, being wavers here upon the very substance of movement which it nonetheless bore out of itself! What a raging and roaring!—as in the tumult of the state, when the people's suppressed periphery rises up in storm, so now the images drive their own regency. Oligarchies of image-power ascend; the power of loudly resounding impressions rises up to become rulers over the others; realm upon realm surges up out of the scattering dignities of the ego, yet it disperses faster than it arose, and again there was new vanishing even as it came to be. And in the eternal alternation it roars and hisses; here you hear love's flute-tones, there swords clash; flames, men, beasts and gods, nature and the power of the soul, and the imitated traces of all being and life, rise up into powers; and the battle-tumult and song of victory of all the elements hurls the soul's circling upward and downward, ever pounding and clamoring around the sunken power of selfhood at the center: yet the roaring of all the elements was softer than the zephyr, lighter than the song of elves; it was the spirit's freely wafting breath of life amid unleashed passion, yet weightless through the abandonment of the power of the ego; and however mightily it surged along the confines of the periphery, however numberlessly it dispersed into the foam of consciousness, it was but the empty shadow-breath of a weightlessly slipping-away force.

Another mode of the power of flight arises when the unleashed current of life, in deep sleep, having discharged its overflowing intoxication of freedom, flows back into the depths of being, and, through the flowing-together of being with itself, out of which springs the firm persistence of being and its own outward-pressing life-urge, becomes wholly fused into one. Primordial within itself, where being, bounded upon itself, surges onward in its own power, gathers itself, and holds itself together in the densest fusion, the fleeting life-stream now also takes on, outwardly, the mightiness and the reach of that hearth of all force gathered within itself; closed into one, it wells forth out of that closed being; strong, as the power of being itself, it sends itself forth, grandiosely and mightily, like the tail of a comet, into the distances, and the narrow circular orbit of the life-periphery no longer suffices it. The life of the soul becomes presentiment reaching into the distance, becomes a striving of being toward the highest points of extension and boundary of its life within the cosmos; far off, in imperceptible gentleness, the stream, empowered by being's own swiftness, follows the melting-away of longing within inner feeling, and stretches itself in an instant into the distances of space, where friend, wife, or children beckon to it; or it plunges itself, in a flash, into the whole expanse of the already-traversed span of life, down to the very first impressions of childhood, surveying the whole chain of the past in crystal clarity; or it darts high up above its own present into the forerunning paths of the future and the veiled, everywhere sensing and beholding, radiating mightily into the distance of times and of space, even as the gathered being that bore it. A truly sublime kind of thing is shown here by this unfettered, vibrating ray of life; the mightiness of the stream's power slips away here into the distance without any foaming or roaring; gently and softly, full of the majestic calm of being, the stream drifts away toward the breadth of the world and of its own self, and there is nothing stiller in psychical life, no gentler beat of wing of the vibrating power, than the dream's presentiment reaching into the distance.