VI. Human Existence in Sleep and Death

Good morning, gentlemen! Now let us try to finish, at least for the time being, what we have begun to consider. You see, an understanding of life comes only from the fact that one begins to observe the sleep of man, as I have already mentioned to you several times. When one is immersed in life from morning to evening, one usually has the opinion that sleep gives one strength, removes fatigue and so on. But sleep actually does much more. You just need to think about it. Think back to your life, the dreams you have had in your sleep, you don't always remember them. Dreams are something you soon forget, as you all know. Only at most you may remember that you had a dream here or there that you often told. Then you remember it by telling it. But the dreams that you don't tell are quickly forgotten. If you remember your life back to your childhood, you will remember some memories from your childhood up to later in life. But these memories are always interrupted. When you think back today, there is the time during which you slept. That is a break, and you do not remember it. The memory starts again only yesterday evening and goes until yesterday morning. Then there is another break. So that actually, when you remember back, you do not have your whole life, but in this remembering back, what is in the night is actually always left out. If you draw a line of retrospection, a period of time flows from evening to morning without retrospection, then again from morning to evening, then again a pause from evening to morning, and so on. We actually only remember our lives in such a way that we do not remember a whole part of our lives at all. That is quite clear. That is the time that we have slept through.