The Experiences of Sleep and their Spiritual Background

Now as you know very well, in Anthroposophy we take this as our starting-point. We fully accept the fact that with such means of acquiring knowledge as are recognised today, the depths of man's soul-nature can never be fathomed. We fully accept the fact that as far as these means go we can do no other than refer simply to an ‘unconscious.’ We do not even need to consider birth and death—the two boundaries of physical life on earth; we need look only at the condition of ordinary sleep as it occurs every day of a man's life, and we shall be obliged to admit that, taking what can be learned about the experiences of the soul with the ordinary means of attaining knowledge, it is impossible to raise any objection when a conclusion such as the following is reached. It is asserted, for example, from the point of view of ordinary knowledge, that all thinking, feeling and willing, as they are present in consciousness in ordinary day-to-day life, show so great a dependence upon bodily conditions that it may well be inferred that experiences of soul emerge out of the bodily conditions as out of a subconscious region, and that what happens during sleep is simply that the purely organic life predominates as such and during such time allows no ideas or feelings or acts of will to flow forth from it. When such a statement is made there is nothing to be said. At the most we can point to the dream and suggest how dreams appear to come out of the life of sleep and to be simply remembered in the waking life. From the way the dream plays through the life of sleep the conclusion might be drawn that the soul-nature does in some way or other persist during sleep. Here, however, we are on uncertain ground; and the fact is, no serious and open-minded person can, with no more than the ordinary means of knowledge at his disposal, be expected to speak in any other way about the soul than to say it exhibits phenomena which are to all appearances absolutely dependent on bodily conditions.