52. Dream, Hallucination, Somnambulism and Seeing Consciousness I

Note 1732-1735, undated, c. 1904

1.) Dreams are an influence of the spiritual on the human soul. The dreamer is the human being as a soul being. What the dreamer perceives, however, are the after-effects of his life in his formative forces body. In a dream, the human being is cut off from his physical surroundings and from his own physical body, just as he is in a real sleep. The dream shows the meaning of life in the physical world. This world provides the logical and the moral. Therefore, in a dream, man is neither logical nor moral. One should not describe a dream as a mental disorder. This disorder consists precisely in the fact that the supersensible aspect of dreaming takes hold of the body without the control of spiritual self-awareness. In a dream, the eternal is at work, but it is directed towards the temporal. It depends on the drama of the dream.

2.) In hallucination, unlike in dreams, there is not a spiritual-mental but a physical-mental appearance. The person is given over to the body. Instead of the whole body being used as a mediator to generate the perceptions, only part of the body is used. In the hallucination, the temporal is active, but this temporal dares to approach the eternal: that which should only be active in the creation of the human body itself.

3.) The somnambulist has infected his sensory life and sometimes - as a medium - his will life from the soul-bodily organs. He has become a physical and mental automaton. This results in an imitation of the spiritual. The temporal dares to approach the eternal; but in a way that should only be conveyed through sensory perception and through the willful misuse of will impulses that are only justified in interaction with beings of the physical world. Mediums sin against the common good; they act like someone who, for example, uses a substance that he has received as a gift for a crowd to adorn his own personality.

4) The artistic is related to the dream-like; but it differs from it in that the dreamer focuses on the temporal aspect of his own life, while the artist's soul is turned towards the spiritual, the eternal. The artist translates his spiritual experiences into the soul, but not into the activities that underlie the imagination and the will. He can do this because he only refers to that in the spirit which corresponds to his individual contemplation.

5.) The Contemplative Consciousness lifts the spiritual into the ordinary life that every human being has. One's own spirit stands in relation to the spiritual world. The experiences of the Contemplative Consciousness:

1.) cannot be remembered in the usual sense. Only when they are converted into representations;
2.) they do not become stronger in repetition like the habitually acquired representations and actions;
3.) they must be experienced with presence of mind.

Man is in relationship with a spiritual world. The beings of this world are not bodily-soul-spiritual like humans, but soul-spiritual. But within this world of the spiritual-soul there are levels, realms, as in the sensory world: the realm that has to do with the subconscious of the individual human being is active in his animal life; the realm that is active in his vegetative processes; the realm that is active in his mineral nature. This brings us to the unconscious of world-becoming. The original states were those that were more spiritual than the later ones.

1.) The dreamer has a reciprocal relationship with the being that serves him to guide his soul in the spiritual world.

2.) The somnambulist enters into a reciprocal relationship with an unjustified spirit world; the hallucinator with the 'human instinctual world'; the perceiving and acting somnambulist with the external world, which should legitimately only be experienced through sensory perception and influenced by the physical work of the will.

Goethe:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself [in the world] as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort gives him a pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as having reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Dream recognition:

1.) The spiritual researcher can compare what he experiences with imaginative knowledge.

2.) The spiritual researcher has a different experience with him. He becomes aware of this.