Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

Now, in their present life on earth, human beings are not able to follow what their ego and astral body experience when they are separated from the etheric and physical bodies and take with them from ordinary life only their will and a part of their feelings. For this experience between falling asleep and waking up actually takes place in a completely different world, in a spiritual world, in a world where the environment is not the natural realm, the mineral realm, or the plant realm, but where the environment is the higher hierarchies, where the environment is a world of spiritual beings and spiritual events. But insofar as human beings dwell in earthly life, it is certainly true that they are not yet sufficiently developed to follow everything they experience with their ego and astral body from falling asleep to waking up into their conscious and self-conscious awareness. It remains unconscious, but is no less alive than the conscious. It is experienced, it is something that, after it has been experienced, belongs to the inner content of the human being. We also wake up every morning as changed as we have been changed by the night. We do not wake up merely in the state we were in when we went to sleep the night before, but we wake up in the state that our sleep life has made us.