I. States of Consciousness

In spiritual-scientific inquiries we encounter besides the two forms of consciousness known to everybody—dreaming and ordinary day-time life from waking to sleeping—a third form, best described perhaps as “higher perceptive consciousness”. Dream-consciousness we reckon in ordinary life as merely a sort of interruption of ordinary consciousness, but that is because we recall only a small part of our dreams. We are really dreaming all the time from falling asleep to waking, and what we commonly describe as the content of our dream-consciousness is merely such fragments of dreaming experience as we are able to remember when we are awake. From the standpoint of Spiritual Science, therefore we must say: We know three stages or kinds of consciousness; that of dreams, that of waking life, and the consciousness in which the spiritual world is open to higher perception.