Am I dreaming?
"We know the state of wakefulness, where we are from morning till night, and we know the state of sleep, in which we are outside of the ordinary circumstances of life, and from which arise colorful iridescent dreams. If we maintain a reasonable point of view, we do not attribute the same perspective of reality to these dreams that we experience in the waking state.
But let us consider: by what means in general do we come to speak of the dreams that arise out of the sleeping state—in general so to speak—so that they often carry, namely, an interesting character, but have a lower reality value, or perhaps in a certain sense they do not quite have the reality value compared to what we experience when awake? We come to an assessment of the dream world only by the fact that we wake up, and by awakening we come to an entirely different state of consciousness. What happens because of this awakening? We switch our will on, especially in our body, in our physical tasks. These depend on the will.
After all, what we perceive through the awakened senses is also essentially caused by the awakening of the will in the senses, in the switching on of the sense organs. To a certain extent this goes on in our entire organism, our entire organism is taken hold of; we are able to turn ourselves to the natural world through our organism. And by what we experience because of this activity we are quite capable of assessing the value of the dream's reality. We could never come within the dream to any other insight about the dream than that which the dream itself presents as full reality. So long as we dream we see everything as real, what the dream presents to us in its colorful, dazzling variety.
Let us allow ourselves, once, to take up a certain correct, daring, paradoxical hypothesis. Allowing for this even once we would never awaken throughout our entire earthly life, but would constantly dream. Then we would fill ourselves during our conscious life on earth with all the ideas that we know only from our dreams. And one with such a problem could therefore definitely think that any force of nature—or by my account any spiritual being—could drive us to our actions, and in everything that we do from morning until evening our outer life thus proceeds as it proceeds. We would be accompanied not only with waking concepts, we would be doing something completely different of which we know nothing. However, we would dream our entire lives through, and we would come only to the thoughts that are not true reality. For that which occurs when we grasp things, when we see with the eyes, such as we have in the waking state, would not occur at all.
Thus we know our dream state only from the point of view of the Guardian's judgment. If such a thing is taken seriously, if we do not pass lightly out of habit over the usual events of life, then there arises just opposite the deeper soul questions this hypothetical view: Yes, is it not then perhaps also possible to some extent from a higher point of view to turn from our habitual everyday Guardian and awaken to something new, to a higher state of consciousness? Can we not allow ourselves to think that, if we can wake up out of the dream into everyday reality, we can also awaken out of everyday reality into a higher consciousness? Just as a higher consciousness is given with which we can judge the reality of the everyday world—where we are from morning until evening—can we not also judge the reality value of the dream from the standpoint of wakefulness?
I have put this before you first of all as a question, as an entirely hypothetical question. The same scientific point of view that I have here asserted now shows that it is actually possible for the human being to come to such a second awakening. Just as the shift from sleeping to dreaming in life occurs out of ordinary wakefulness, so this occurrence can increase to another higher level whereby one awakens out of this ordinary everyday life to a higher state and, from this, everyday life likewise appears as though out of dreams. [...]
[J]ust as the human being has evolved out of the dull, dreamy soul-state of the child, so must it be presumed that from the standpoint of the soul—where he has already come once—he can continue to develop himself when he becomes an adult. Now it will be shown whether such a second awakening as I have hypothetically constructed is possible, whether such a development can be produced.
Read more:Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature and the Essence of the Human Soul, GA 80b, 14 May 1923, Oslo.