Planetary Evolution and the Evolution of Humanity
Then this consciousness was narrowed down to that of the plant. But it is now a somewhat brighter consciousness than that of the mineral. Man was in this consciousness when the earth was in the sun. The third form of consciousness is pictorial consciousness, also called primary psychic consciousness. It differs from the present one in that it works in images, but in such a way that it conveys the psychic of the other. Imagine a being - and the human ancestor on the moon was like that - that does not yet have sensory consciousness and can cover objects with colors when it wakes up: you have a last remnant of such consciousness in the dream world. The dream world is not the astral consciousness. The present dream consciousness is to the moon consciousness what some atrophied limb is to the form it was in when it still had its tasks in the human being; for example, certain muscles that could move the ears have lost their purpose in the human being. The present-day world of dreams has remained as a vestige of the astral pictorial consciousness of the moon; that is why it also works in the same way as the astral imaginative consciousness works. Imagine someone dreaming that he is catching a tree frog. He sees it jump and grabs it. Then the sleeper wakes up and sees that he had the corner of the bed cover in his hand. Or another dream that really happened. A farmer's wife dreams that she is going to church. She listens devoutly. Then the pastor moves his arms violently and, lo and behold, he gets wings. It was not too strange for the pious farmer's wife that a pastor who preaches from heaven occasionally gets wings too. But what happens? The pastor begins to crow loudly in the pulpit. At the same moment, the farmer's wife wakes up and outside in the yard, the cock crows.