Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

Therefore, those who have insight into these things can confirm stories such as the following: Once there were two university students. One was a philologist and knew nothing about arithmetic—I must add—knew nothing at all about arithmetic. The other was a mathematics student. Now, we all know from experience that when it comes to certain parts of mathematics, you have to sweat a little over the problems. Philology is usually easier. And so it was with these two students who, as is often the case with students, shared a room and also slept together, so that when they had finished preparing for their exams one evening, the philology student was very pleased with himself, but the mathematics student was not at all, because he could not solve a problem that he was supposed to solve for a written assignment. He went to bed feeling extremely dissatisfied, and a strange thing happened: at a certain hour, the philology student woke up and saw the math student get up, go to his desk, and continue brooding, writing for a long time, and then go back to bed and sleep. The next day, when both got up, the math student said, “We didn't skip class yesterday, did we? I have a terrible hangover today.” The other replied, “That's no surprise. If you get up at three in the morning and spend hours doing math, you're going to have a foggy head the next morning.” The first student said, “I didn't get up!” He knew absolutely nothing about getting up. Now they looked, and lo and behold, he had solved his problem, but he knew nothing about it. Such things are by no means mere fairy tales. I have chosen an example from literature so that it can be verified. I could tell you many similar stories. I am not concerned with this individual case, but rather with the fact that this is indeed a reality: when consciousness is not present—and I emphasize that the person concerned knew nothing about it—the physical body and etheric body are, in a sense, acted upon by external impulses, and the etheric body works alone in the physical body to continue the task.