2. The Tree of Life II

It must strike most people, if the conditions are favourable, that they do not awake from sleep as if out of a nothingness, but as if they emerged from a full but much more etheric, lighter weaving and living than what we pass through from waking up to going to sleep. It will certainly have already struck many people, in waking, that they lived during sleep in an element in which they felt themselves to be actually cleverer than they were when awake. The majority of men must on awaking have said to themselves: Yes, this or the other came; it placed itself before my soul ... I knew quite exactly: I have experienced something there that I cannot bring clearly enough into the waking consciousness. And then one can find oneself quite stupid in contrast to the cleverness in which one was during this nocturnal weaving and living, in this far more etheric element than the life of the physical world is from waking up to going to sleep. One was with one's whole being—of this one must be clear—immersed in a weaving and living which is around us just as is the physical living and weaving for the physical consciousness, but which cannot be grasped by this physical consciousness, and is generally completely forgotten in the moment of waking.