VII. The Questions of Life and the Riddle of Death I

At first, that which spiritual science has to say about sleep. From this hypothesis, the facts will arise as it were. Spiritual science states that it is illogical to assume that the whole day life with all its experiences sinks into nothing and is made new in the morning. The experiences must still exist somewhere. On the other hand, spiritual science has to join the view that one can discover nothing in himself as causes, why mental pictures should fulfil him as the whole wake day life contains them in itself. Spiritual science considers all that—the mental pictures, the memories et cetera of the wake day life—as a spiritual-mental reality which withdraws from the physical body and the etheric body during sleep and enters into the spiritual world, so that the human being is with his inner existence beyond the physical body. Then the human being is in the spiritual world and in the morning this spiritual-mental of the human being submerges again in the body, in the senses, in the brain et cetera. Thus, we have separated the human being during sleep as it were in a bodily being and a spiritual-mental being; both combine again after waking up.