The Life of the Dream

§ 21. The Symbolic Basic Formation for Bodily Stimuli.

By bodily stimuli we understand those which come to the imagination, during sleep, from within the body; they are essentially nerve-stimuli, and emerge into perceptibility just as much out of those nerves which, in waking, serve consciousness, as out of those which, without touching the consciousness of waking life, work only at the material preservation of the body. By virtue of that fusing-together of subjective life with bodily-plastic life, on which the peculiar essence of the life of the dream rests, that very sensitivity of subjectivity is already brought about, in general, for those bodily spheres otherwise inaccessible to consciousness, quite apart from the specifications of feeling-receptivity that form themselves more particularly out of it, of which we have already spoken sufficiently. But that, within the life of the dream, the bodily life of the soul possesses the ruling power over the spiritual, entitles us to devote a particular attention to its symbolism as well; and since it is the ruling power in sleep, it must therefore also occupy the symbolic art of the imagination the most, and, for the resolution of all the dream-facts that form themselves out of it, a closer entering into their fundamental symbolic conceptuality will be all the more necessary. For this purpose, the following general points of view at once come forward:

Every nerve-stimulus takes place in or upon the body; the body is its universal basis; accordingly, the symbolism of the imagination must also set up, for the body in general, a basic image within dreams of nerve-stimulus. Further: every nerve-stimulus takes place either within the interior of the body or upon its outer side; hence this, too, must be symbolically designated upon the basic image for corporeality. Further: since inner or outer affections of the corporeal frame take place now in the lower, now in the upper part of the bodily column, or, that is, at various heights of the body, the symbolic re-formation must accordingly express the particular height in question as well. Beyond this, however, all nerve-stimuli take place not merely within the body in general, but always within particular, determinate organs of it; the symbolism of the imagination must therefore also be at pains to designate the particular organs of the body affected in each case; and since every bodily organ, as a rule, works upon or produces a specific matter of the body, this too must be co-designated within the symbolism of the organ. But all nerve-stimuli are, immediately, already as such states of excitation, processes of movement; the imagination must accordingly re-form them in corresponding actions; and since the excitation of the nerve-stimulus possesses its immediate substance within the body, or, that is, within its organs, the action of the imagination that designates the nerve-movement must accordingly find its symbolic substance, or its object of activity, upon those very symbolic images which represent the particular bodily organ in question and whatever depends upon it, and upon this the action then develops in the manner already known. But now, finally, within the life of the dream, the receptivity of reason, too, is alive, and, together with its universal apprehension, the differentiated apprehension as well, insofar as this merely expresses receptivity; and the imagination, as the supremely powerful principle of all subjectivity in the dream, makes use, just as of ego-receptivity in general, so of all rational, intellectual, and sensory receptivity (given within the common feeling) as its own organ of apprehension; hence the imagination, too, with respect to bodily stimuli, must receive, for symbolic representation, feeling-impressions of corporeality, its organs, and its movements, distinguished both in outline and in particularity; and the symbolic re-formations themselves must, accordingly, have the immediate inclination to proceed in determinately grasped, distinctly ordered castings of real corporeality. With the symbolic representation of all those points of view of the corporeal designated above, the imagination will therefore also bring to utterance their determinate shares in the form of the body and its differences of configuration, and the fundamental concepts of this symbolism will express them in general.

The general designation, in the imagination, for the human body as such, is: the edifice erected of wall, brick, and timber-framing, that is to say, in general, what we call a "house." It is clear that the imagination, in choosing this symbol for the body, thereby fittingly designates the organic edifice of the body, which, like the edifice of wall and brick, possesses its own architectonic, and has in common with it, at the same time, a multitude of inner cavities and spaces; next to this, however, there seems to manifest itself, through this designation, the rational insight that the soul dwells in the body as in its house; and, finally, the immediate consciousness that all the world-real acting and doing of the human being attaches itself to house and hearth, just as all the inner activity of the soul proceeds immediately at and within the bodily edifice and appears fused with it, may have contributed to the immediate choosing of this symbol. Since the body is an upright-standing edifice, striving toward height, the imagination accordingly chooses for it, too, the tall house, consisting of several stories one above another, towering high; but in many cases it takes, in particular, the slender height of the body as its object, and then sets in its place the equally slender edifice of brick and mortar, that is, the tower. […]

§ 37. Eleventh Principal Group: The Presentiment-Dreams.

The General Nature of the Dream-Presentiment.

The presentiment-dreams are the summit of the dream-life. Mighty as the nature of the spirit, they stretch their feelers far out into the universe, and the radiant range of their sensing-power corresponds to the density held together in the substance of the spirit, and to the enormous fineness and vibrational power of the psychic force of being. From the heavy matters of nature up to the sublimity of spiritual being in man there is a vast gulf of distinction; the higher the concrete being in the universe ascends in essence, the weaker it becomes in weight and encumbrance, the more mightily does its energy and greatness of vibrational and radiant power develop. Already in the imponderables of nature, from which only a scholarship caught in preconceived opinion can deny selfhood, there rises, beneath the domain of the psychic, being to a vibrating world-essence, without weight in its being, though persisting in it. Infinitely higher than the inorganic imponderable stands the organically weaving, that is, the self-like life-oscillation of the plant's monad, drawing itself immediately in circular form in the most manifold windings about itself; and although the conscious essence of the psyche is not given to it, it nevertheless forms the lowest stage of the psychic, because a form-like life and being is already contained within it, for whose fixed manifestation it makes use of matter as a serviceable bearer; and because it contains, within the domain of matter-forming thought, that same concentratedness, self-containedness, and individual delimitedness of being in, upon, and out of itself which the higher psychic beings possess under the expression of consciousness. Still higher rises, in the cosmos, the consciously-voluntary animal soul, and at the highest point the Godhead created the human spirit, in that it reflected and condensed its immaterial, radiant essence, in its sensuousness, understanding, and rationality, threefold and consciously vibrating within itself, so that in its selfhood the sharpest and mightiest of all points of being expresses itself, and therefore a world-like greatness of life-vibration and radiance reveals itself at once.