4. Dream Life

Now man himself is not exempt from the laws we encounter when earthly laws, such as those of gravity or of light, no longer hold good. If anyone wished to discover a set of laws other than our laws of nature, he would have to journey further and further away from the Earth; and to find such laws in a more intimate, human way, he goes to sleep. When awake, we are in the sphere where the laws of nature hold sway and in all that we do we are subject to them. For example, we decide to lift a hand or arm, and the chemico-physical processes taking place in the muscles, the mechanical play of the bony structure, are governed by the laws discovered in earthly laboratories, or by other means of observation. But our soul goes out in sleep from our physical and etheric bodies, and enters a world not subject to the laws of nature. That is why dreams are a mockery of those laws. We enter an entirely different world—a world to which we grow accustomed in sleep, just as when, awake in our physical body, we accustom ourselves to the world of the senses. This different world is not governed by our laws of nature; it has laws of its own. We dive into this world every night on going out of our physical and etheric bodies. Dreams are a power which forcibly opposes nature's laws.