Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

But you know from previous lectures I have given here that this activity we spend in unconscious sleep is not without experiences. Between falling asleep and waking up, the ego and the astral human being go through experiences that simply do not shine into consciousness. And if you look more closely, you will find that those unconscious forces that are at work between falling asleep and waking up also continue to live in the waking state. They continue to live there, one might say, a kind of sleep life. They work in our entire will activity, which we are no more aware of in our ordinary consciousness than we are of the states of sleep. They continue to work in a large part of our emotional life, which forms a kind of dream existence. Precisely when we look at what comes out of our deepest being, out of our fundamental nature, we must also look at something unconscious during our waking life. And then, through spiritual scientific observation, we come to the conclusion that what is effective in the human being between falling asleep and waking up continues to work in the waking state, continues to work as the I and the astral human being, but that these do not enter the sphere of ordinary consciousness, but only appear in their effects, in the effects of the will, in the effects of the emotions. This gives what is actually present in full waking consciousness, the life of thought, a special character. And it is precisely this special character that becomes understandable to us when we consider the existence that human beings do not spend on earth, but between death and a new birth.