§ 4. Nature-Reflections in the Dream

§ 4. Nature-Reflections in the Dream.

Certainly it may well seem strange to credit the dream, which after all weaves only in airy images, with any resemblance, in its products, to the real creatures and plants of nature; and yet the weaving and spinning, which the dream indeed has in common with all life, is already a weighty consideration that permits a further comparison with the real world of created things. And in fact the human soul is a threefold weaving life-force. Spiritually, she weaves in the triumphs of the spiritual over the sensuous, in that commanding power by which the law of the spirit, deifying and moralizing, spreads itself over every other interest of life and there sets itself up as force; in the shaping of noble beauty, and above all in the anticipatory drawing-out and unfolding of the cosmic pathways of spiritual life's development, before the more ponderous whole of man, and the complacent colossus of state and nation, are able to set foot upon the clearly pre-traced tracks. Her second power the soul has in the animal machinery of the nerve- and muscle-sphere of her life, wherein she raises up matter to be the messenger and servant of her divine powers; her third, finally, in the vegetal plasticity of the body generally, by which she carries out the foundation of that splendid cathedral which is her body.

Now, however, when the soul sleeps, she does not hold sway in her own highest spheres; for she has sunk to rest out of the free circles of spiritual life, down into the workshops of her own animal and vegetal life, abandoning herself, carefree, to the majestic power of her bodily plasticity, sweetly rocked up and down upon its swelling waves. And if consciousness now comes to appear within sleep, as indeed happens at every moment in dream, it comes from the soul deeply sunk into the weavings of bodily life, and the conscious life of the soul must then take on a shape resembling the animal and vegetal realm in which the soul now breathes and weaves.