3. The Living and the Dead

These general phenomena are, however, sometimes broken through in the following way. What a man experiences on falling asleep, as putting the question to the dead from himself, continues, in a sense, during sleep. During sleep we look back unconsciously to the moment of falling asleep, and through this fact, dreams can be regulated. Such dreams can really be a reproduction of the questions we put to the dead. Far closer than we suppose do we approach the dead in our dreams, although what was experienced in the dream was said at the moment of falling asleep. The dream draws it up from the undifferentiated depths of the soul. A man may, however, easily misconstrue this; he does not take the dreams—if later he recollects them as dreams—for what they really are. Dreams are really always a previous companionship with the dead springing from our life of feeling. We have moved towards them and the dream often gives us the questions we have put to them. True, it gives us our subjective experience, but as though coming from outside. The dead speak to us, but we really utter what they say ourselves. It only appears as though they spoke. As a rule, it is not messages from the dead that come to us in our dreams, but the expression of our need of being with them, of our need of coming to them at the moment of falling asleep.