VII. Details from the Realm of Spiritual Science

The dream state has been characterized, in a certain respect, in the earlier chapter, Sleep and Death. It is to be conceived of, on the one hand, as being a remnant of the ancient picture consciousness that man possessed during the Moon evolution and also during a large part of Earth evolution. For evolution advances in such a fashion that the earlier states play over into the later. Thus, a remnant now appears in the human being during the dream state of what was previously a normal state. On the other hand, however, this state is different from ancient picture consciousness, for the ego, since its development, plays also into the processes of the astral body taking place in sleep while man is dreaming. Thus, in dreams we have a picture consciousness transformed through the presence of the ego. Since the ego, however, does not consciously carry on its activity upon the astral body during the state of dreaming, nothing that belongs to the realm of dream life must be considered as belonging to what in truth can lead to a spiritual-scientific knowledge of supersensible worlds. The same is true for what is often designated as vision, premonition, or second-sight (deuteroscopy). These come into existence through the ego's eliminating itself with the result that remnants of ancient states of consciousness arise. These have no direct use in spiritual science. What is observed by them cannot be considered in the true sense a result of the latter.