Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

First of all, we must admit that what we recognize as the content of our consciousness in earthly life melts away from us in the course of a few days. That which we do not even notice in the course of earthly life because it is submerged in the unconsciousness of sleep, emerges afterwards when we really live through it—yes, really live through it. Namely, in those earthly states of sleep, we live through only the waking events in a pictorial way, living backwards with our ego and astral body. As we pass through the gate of death, we submerge into the spiritual substance just as we submerge into material substance when we become earthly human beings. One could say that just as we receive a physical and an etheric body when we become earthly human beings, so we receive a higher essence as an outer covering, a spiritual covering, when we pass through the gate of death. But in doing so, we then actually experience what we only experience figuratively here in states of sleep. This is real, actual experience, just as real as the earthly life spent in the physical body is real earthly life. And only to this real experience, which is a repetition in reality of the pictorial experience of every state of sleep, only to this do those experiences follow which we undergo in the further course of our life between death and a new birth.