6. Spiritual Scientific Findings on the Ideas of Freedom and Social-moral Life

Therefore, the spiritual researcher will never view dreams in such a way that they disregard the following: When someone dreams something, the dream is based on a spiritual fact, but the dream images that are experienced and recounted as experienced in the dream could be completely different. One person may experience the same thing as another in a dream, but they may recount the dream in a completely different, radically different way because their dream images have a completely different meaning. What is important to the spiritual researcher when it comes to dreams? It is not important for him to pursue the dream images as such – whether one grasps them in their reality or in their symbolism – but rather the inner drama of the dream: how one image follows another, whether one image replaces the next, i.e., whether it is a relaxation or a fright, and the like. This inner drama, which the soul experiences completely subconsciously, only reveals itself to ordinary consciousness in that the subconscious experience is clothed in the reminiscences of everyday life. What is at work in the subconscious as the drama of the soul is clothed in images. The same experience can be clothed differently for hundreds of people, in hundreds of different images. Anyone who, as a spiritual researcher, becomes acquainted with a dream, therefore knows that they must not listen to the dream by looking at its content, but rather at the how in it, at the way in which the images surge. That is where the essence lies.