The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If, within the limits of ordinary consciousness, the human being wishes to study his soul, it will not suffice for him simply to direct his mind's eye backward, so to speak, in order to discern by introspection his nature as someone who looks out upon the world. He will see nothing new by this means. He will perceive himself in his capacity as a spectator of the world—merely from a different direction. In his waking life man is almost entirely occupied with the external world. He lives by his senses. In their impressions the external world continues to live in his inner life. Thoughts weave into these impressions. The outer world lives in the thoughts as well. Only the force with which the world is grasped in thoughts can be experienced as man's autonomous being. The sensation of this force, however, is of an entirely general and vague character. By means of ordinary consciousness one can differentiate nothing within this sensation. If one had to discern the human soul in it, one would obtain no more about the soul than a vague sensation of self; one would be unable to identify what it was.

What is unsatisfying about self-observation along these lines is that the nature of the soul promptly eludes the attempt to grasp it. Because of this drawback, people who seriously strive after knowledge may be driven to despair of it entirely.

Thoughtful people, therefore, have almost always sought knowledge of the human soul in ways other than such self-observation. In the realm of sense perception and ordinary thinking they have felt that the vague sensation of self is surrendered to the body. They have realized that the soul, so long as it remains in this surrender, can learn nothing of its own nature through self-observation.

A realm to which this feeling points is that of the dream. People have become aware that the world of images the dream conjures up has some connection with the vague sensation of self. This appears, as it were, as an empty canvas on which the dream paints its own pictures. And then it is realized that the canvas is really itself the painter painting on and within itself.

Dreaming thus becomes for them the fleeting activity of man's inner life, which fills the soul's vague feeling of self with content. A questionable content—but the only one to be had at the outset. It is a view, lifted out of the brightness of ordinary consciousness and thrust into the twilight of semi-consciousness. Yet this is the only form attainable in everyday life.

Despite this dimness, however, there occurs—not in thinking self-observation to be sure, but in an inward touching of the self—something very significant. A kinship between dreaming and creative fantasy can inwardly be touched [seelisch ertasten]. One has the feeling that the airy pictures of a dream are the same as those of creative fantasy, though the latter are controlled by the body from within. And this inner body [Korper-Innere] compels the dream-picturing power to desist from its arbitrariness and to transform itself into an activity that emulates, albeit in a free manner, what exists in the world of the senses.

Once one has struggled through to such a touching of the inner world, one soon advances a step further. One becomes aware how the dream-picturing power can form a still closer connection with the body. One sees this foreshadowed in the activity of recollection, of memory. In memory the body compels the dream-picturing power to an even stronger fidelity to the outer world than it does in fantasy.

If this is understood, then there remains but one step to the recognition that the dream-picturing force of the soul also lies at the basis of ordinary thinking and sense perception. It is then entirely surrendered to the body, while in fantasy and memory it still reserves something of its own weaving.

This, then, justifies the assumption that in dreaming the soul frees itself from the state of bondage to the body and lives according to its own nature.

Thus the dream has become the field of inquiry for many searchers after the soul.

It relegates man, however, to a quite uncertain province. In surrendering to the body, the human soul becomes harnessed to the laws which govern nature. The body is a part of nature. Insofar as the soul surrenders to the body, it binds itself at the same time to the regularity of nature. The means whereby the soul adapts to the existence of nature is experienced as logic. In logical thinking about nature the soul feels secure. But in the power of dream-making it tears itself away from this logical thinking about nature. It returns to its own sphere. Thereby it abandons, as it were, the well-tended and well-trodden pathways of the inner life and sets forth on the flowing, pathless sea of spiritual existence.

The threshold of the spiritual world seems to have been crossed; after the crossing, however, only the bottomless, directionless spiritual element presents itself. Those who seek to cross the threshold in this way find the exciting but also doubt-riddled domain of the soul life.

It is full of riddles. At one time it weaves the external events of life into airy connections that scorn the regularity of nature; at another it shapes symbols of inner bodily processes and organs. A too violently beating heart appears in the dream as an oven; aching teeth as a fence with pickets in disrepair. What is more, man comes to know himself in a peculiar way. His instinctive life takes shape in the dream in images of reprehensible actions which, in the waking state, he would strongly resist. Those dreams that have a prophetic character arouse special interest among students of the soul, as do those in which the soul dreams up capacities that are entirely absent in the waking state.

The soul appears released from its bondage to bodily and natural activity. It wants to be independent, and it prepares itself for this independence. As soon as it tries to become active, however, the activity of the body and of nature follow it. The soul will have nothing to do with nature's regularity; but the facts of nature appear in dreams as travesties of nature. The soul is interested in the internal bodily organs or bodily activities. It cannot, however, make clear pictures of these organs or bodily activities, but only symbols which bear the character of arbitrariness. Experience of external nature is torn away from the certainty in which sense perception and thinking place it. The inner life of what is human begins; it begins, however, in dim form. Observation of nature is abandoned; observation of the self is not truly achieved. The investigation of the dream does not place man in a position to view the soul in its true form. It is true this is spiritually more nearly comprehensible through dreams than through thinking self-observation; it is, however, something he should actually see but can only grope after as if through a veil.

The following section will speak about the perception of the soul through spirit knowledge.

Yesterday I tried to show how a more intimate study of man's dream-life can lead us towards the Science of Initiation. To a certain extent, the point of view was that of ordinary consciousness. Today it will be my task to enter more deeply into the same subject-matter from the point of view of ‘imaginative’ cognition—i.e. to present what we were studying yesterday as it appears to one who has learnt to see the world in ‘imaginations’.

For the moment we will neglect the difference between the two kinds of dreams discussed yesterday, and consider dreams as such. It will be a sound approach to describe ‘imaginative’ vision in relation to dreams which a man endowed with imagination may have. Let us compare such a dream with the self-perception attained by the imaginative seer when he looks back upon his own being—when he observes imaginatively his own or another's organs—or, perhaps, the whole human being as a complete organism. You see, the appearance of the dream-world to imaginative consciousness is quite different from its appearance to ordinary consciousness. The same is true of the physical and etheric organism. Now the imaginative seer can dream too; and under certain circumstances his dreams will be just as chaotic as those of other people. From his own experience he can quite well judge the world of dreams; for, side by side with the imaginative life that is inwardly co-ordinated, clear and luminous, the dream-world runs its ordinary course, just as it does side by side with waking life. I have often emphasised that one who attains really spiritual perception does not become a dreamer or enthusiast, living only in the higher worlds and not seeing external reality. People who are ever dreaming in higher worlds, or about them, and do not see external reality, are not initiates; they should be considered from a pathological point of view, at least in the psychological sense of the term. The real knowledge of initiation does not estrange one from ordinary, physical life and its various relationships. On the contrary, it makes one a more painstaking, conscientious observer than without the faculty of seership. Indeed we may say: if a man has no sense of ordinary realities, no interest in ordinary realities, no interest in the details of others' lives, if he is so ‘superior’ that he sails through life without troubling about its details, he shows he is not a genuine seer. A man with imaginative cognition—he may, of course, also have ‘inspired’ and ‘intuitive’ cognition, but at present I am only speaking of ‘imagination’—is quite well acquainted with dream-life from his own experience. Nevertheless, his conception of dreams is different. He feels the dream as something with which he is connected, with which he unites himself much more strongly than is possible through ordinary consciousness. He can take dreams more seriously. Indeed, only imagination justifies us taking our dreams seriously, for it enables us to look, as it were, behind dreaming and apprehend its dramatic course—its tensions, resolutions, catastrophes, and crises—rather than its detailed con-tent. The individual content interests us less, even before we acquire imagination; we are more interested in studying whether the dream leads to a crisis, or to inner joy, to something that we find easy or that proves difficult—and the like.

It is the course of the dream just that which does not interest ordinary consciousness and which I can only call the dramatic quality of the dream—that begins to interest us most. We see behind the scenes of dream-life and, in doing so, become aware that we have before us something related to man's spiritual being in quite a definite way. We see that, in a spiritual sense, the dream is the human being, as the seed is the plant. And in this ‘seed-like’ man we learn to grasp what is really foreign to his present life—just as the seed taken from the plant in the autumn of a given year is foreign to the plant's life of that year and will only be at home in the plant-growth of the following year. It is just this way of studying the dream that gives imaginative consciousness its strongest impressions; for, in our own dreaming being, we detect more and more that we bear within us something that passes over to our next life on earth, germinating between death and a new birth and growing on into our next earthly life. It is the seed of this next earthly life that we learn to feel in the dream.

This is extremely important and is further confirmed by comparing this special experience, which is an intense experience of feeling, with the perception we can have of a physical human being standing before us with his several organs. This perception, too, changes for imaginative consciousness, so that we feel like we do when a fresh, green, blossoming plant we have known begins to fade. When, in imaginative consciousness, we observe the lungs, liver, stomach, and, most of all, the brain as physical organs, we say to ourselves that these, in respect to the physical, are all withering.

Now you will say that it cannot be pleasant to confront, in imaginations, a physical man as a withering being. Well, no one who knows the Science of Initiation will tell you it is only there to offer pleasant truths to men. It has to tell the truth, not please. On the other hand, it must be remembered that, while we learn to know the physical man as a withering being, we perceive in him the spiritual man; in a sense, you cannot see the spiritual man shine forth without learning to know the physical as a decaying, withering being.

Thus man's appearance does not thereby become uglier but more beautiful—and truer, too. And when one is able to perceive the withering of man's organs, which is such a spiritual process, these organs with their etheric content appear as something that has come over from the past—from the last life on earth—and is now withering. In this way we really come to see that the seed of a future life is being formed within the withering process that proceeds from man's being of a former life on earth.

The human head is withering most; and the dream appears to imaginative perception as an emanation of the human head. On the other hand, the metabolic and limb organism appears to imaginative vision to be withering least of all. It appears very similar to the ordinary dream; it is least faded and most closely united, in form and content, with the future of man. The rhythmic organisation contained in the chest is the connecting link between them, holding the balance. It is just to spiritual perception that the human heart appears as a remarkable organ. It, too, is seen to be withering; nevertheless, seen imaginatively, it retains almost its physical form, only beautified and ennobled (I say ‘almost’, not ‘completely’).

There would be a certain amount of truth in painting man's spiritual appearance as follows: a countenance comparatively wise looking, perhaps even somewhat aged; hands and feet small and childlike; wings to indicate remoteness from the earth; and the heart indicated in some form or other reminiscent of the physical organ.

If we can perceive the human being imaginatively, such a picture which we might attempt to paint will not be symbolic in the bad sense that symbolism has today. It will not be empty and insipid, but will contain elements of physical existence while, at the same time, transcending the physical. One might also say, speaking paradoxically (one must begin to speak in paradoxes to some extent when one speaks of the spiritual world, for the spiritual world does really appear quite different from the physical): When we begin to perceive man with imagination we feel in regard to his head: How intensely I must think, if I am to hold my own against this head! Contemplating the human head with imaginative consciousness one gradually comes to feel quite feeble-minded, for with the acutest thoughts acquired in daily life one cannot easily approach this wonderful physical structure of the human head. It is now transformed into something spiritual and its form is still more wonderful as it withers, showing its form so clearly. For the convolutions of the brain actually seem to contain, in a withered form, deep secrets of the world's structure. When we begin to understand the human head we gaze deeply into these cosmic secrets, yet feel ourselves continually baffled in our attempts.

On the other hand, when we try to understand the metabolic and limb system with imaginative consciousness, we say to our-selves: Your keen intellect does not help you here; you ought properly to sleep and dream of man, for man only apprehends this part of his organisation by dreaming of it while awake.

So you see, we must proceed to a highly differentiated mode of perception when we begin to study man's physical organisation imaginatively. We must become clever, terribly clever, when we study his head. We must become dreamers when studying his system of limbs and metabolism. And we must really swing to and fro, as it were, between dreaming and waking if we want to grasp, in imaginative vision, the wonderful structure of man's rhythmic system. But all this appears as the relic of his last life on earth. What he experiences in the waking state is the relic of his last life; this plays into his present life, giving him as much as I ascribed to him yesterday when I said of his life of action, for example, that only as much of man's actions as he can dream of is really done by himself; the rest is done by the gods in and through him. The present is active to this extent; all the rest comes from his former earthly lives. We see that this is so when we have a man before us and perceive his withering physical organisation. And if we look at what man knows of himself while he dreams—dreams in his sleep—we have before us what man is preparing for the next life on earth. These things can be easily distinguished.

Thus imagination leads directly from a study of the waking and sleeping man to a perception of his development from earthly life to earthly life.

Now what is preserved in memory occupies a quite special place in the waking and in the sleeping man. Consider your ordinary memories. What you remember you draw forth from within you in the form of thoughts or mental presentations; you represent to yourself past experiences. These, as you know, lose in memory their vividness, impressiveness, colour, etc. Remembered experiences are pale. But, on the other hand, memory cannot but appear to be very closely connected with man's being; indeed it appears to be his very being. Man is not usually honest enough in his soul to make the necessary confession to himself; but I ask you to look into yourself to find out what you really are in respect to what you call your ego. Is there anything there beside your memories? If you try to get to your ego you will scarcely find anything else but your life's memories. True, you find these permeated by a kind of activity, but this remains very shadowy and dim. It is your memories that, for earthly life, appear as your living ego.

Now this world of memories which you need only call to mind in order to realise how entirely shadowy they are—what does it become in imaginative cognition? It ‘expands’ at once; it becomes a mighty tableau through which we survey, in pictures, all that we have experienced in our present life on earth. One might say: If this¹ be man, and this the memory within him, imagination at once extends this memory back to his birth. One feels oneself outside of space; here all consists of events. One gazes into a tableau and surveys one's whole life up to the present. Time becomes space. It is like looking down an avenue; one takes in one's whole past in a tableau, or panorama, and can speak of memory expanding. In ordinary consciousness memory is confined, as it were, to a single moment at a time. Indeed, it is really as follows: If, for example, we have reached the age of forty and are recalling, not in ‘imagination’, but in ordinary consciousness, something experienced twenty years ago, it is as if it were far off in space, yet still there. Now—in imaginative cognition—it has remained; it has no more disappeared than the distant trees of an avenue. It is there. This is how we gaze into the tableau and know that the memory we bear with us in ordinary consciousness is a serious illusion. To take it for a reality is like taking a cross-section of a tree trunk for the tree trunk itself. Such a section is really nothing at all; the trunk is above and below the mere picture thus obtained. Now it is really like that when we perceive memories in imaginative cognition. We detect the utter unreality of the individual items; the whole expands almost as far as birth—in certain circumstances even farther. All that is past becomes present; it is there, though at the periphery.

Once we have grasped this, once we have attained this perception, we can know—and re-observe at any moment—that man reviews this tableau when he leaves his physical body at death. This lasts some days and is his natural life-element. On passing through the gate of death man gazes, to begin with, at his life in mighty, luminous, impressive pictures. This constitutes his experience for some days.

But we must now advance farther in imaginative cognition. As we do so our life is enriched in a certain way and we accordingly understand many things in a different way from before. Consider, for example, our behaviour towards other people. In ordinary life we may, in individual cases, think about the intentions we have had, the actions we have performed—our whole attitude towards others. We think about all this, more or less. according as we are more or less reflective persons. But now all this stands before us. In our idea of our behaviour we only grasp a part of the full reality. Suppose we have done another a service or an injury. We learn to see the results of our good deed, the satisfaction to the other man, perhaps his furtherance in this or that respect—i.e. we see the results which may follow our deed in the physical world. If we have done an evil deed, we come to see we have injured him, we see that he remained unsatisfied or, perhaps, was even physically injured; and so on. All this can be observed in physical life if we do not run away from it, finding it unpleasant to observe the consequences of our deeds.

This, however, is only one side. Every action we do to human beings, or indeed to the other kingdoms of Nature, has another side. Let us assume that you do a good deed to another man. Such a deed has its existence and its significance in the spiritual world; it kindles warmth there; it is, in a sense, a source of spiritual rays of warmth. In the spiritual world ‘soul-warmth’ streams from a good deed, ‘soul-coldness’ from an evil deed done to other human beings. It is really as if one engendered warmth or coldness in the spiritual world according to one's behaviour to others. Other human actions act like bright, luminous rays in this or that direction in the spiritual world; others have a darkening effect. In short, one may say that we only really experience one half of what we accomplish in our life on earth.

Now, on attaining imaginative consciousness, what ordinary consciousness knows already, really vanishes. Whether a man is being helped or injured is for ordinary consciousness to recognise; but the effect of a deed, be it good or evil, wise or foolish, in the spiritual world—its warming or chilling, lightening or darkening action (there are manifold effects)—all this arises before imaginative consciousness and begins to be there for us. And we say to ourselves: Because you did not know all this when you let your ordinary consciousness function in your actions, it does not follow that it was not there. Do not imagine that what you did not know of in your actions—the sources of luminous and warming rays, etc.—was not there because you did not see or experience it. Do not imagine that. You have experienced it all in your sub-consciousness; you have been through it all. Just as the spiritual eyes of your higher consciousness see it now, so, while you were helping or harming another by your kind or evil deed, your sub-consciousness experienced its parallel significance for the spiritual world.

Further: when we have progressed and attained a sufficient intensification of imaginative consciousness we do not only gaze at the panorama of our experiences, but become perforce aware that we are not complete human beings until we have lived through this other aspect of our earthly actions, which had remained subconscious before. We begin to feel quite maimed in the face of this life-panorama that extends back to birth, or beyond it. It is as if something had been torn from us. We say to ourselves continually: You ought to have experienced that aspect too; you are really maimed, as if an eye or a leg had been removed. You have not really had one half of your experiences. This must arise in the course of imaginative consciousness; we must feel ourselves maimed in this way in respect to our experiences. Above all, we must feel that ordinary life is hiding something from us.

This feeling is especially intense in our present materialistic age. For men simply do not believe today that human actions have any value or significance beyond that for immediate life which takes its course in the physical world. It is regarded, more or less, as folly to declare that something else takes place in the spiritual world. Nevertheless, it is there. This feeling of being maimed comes before ‘inspired’ consciousness and one says to one's self: I must make it possible for myself to experience all I have failed to experience; yet this is almost impossible, except in a few details and to a very limited extent.

It is this tragic mood that weighs upon one who sees more deeply into life. There is so much in life that we cannot fulfil on earth. In a sense, we must incur a debt to the future, admitting that life sets tasks which we cannot absolve in this present earthly life. We must owe them to the universe, saying: I shall only be able to experience that when I have passed through death. The Science of Initiation brings us this great, though often tragical enrichment of life; we feel this unavoidable indebtedness to life and recognise the necessity of owing the gods what we can only experience after death. Only then can we enter into an experience such as we owe to the universe.

This consciousness that our inner life must, in part, run its course by incurring debts to the future after death, leads to an immense deepening of human life. Spiritual science is not only there that we may learn this or that theoretically. He who studies it as one studies other things, would be better employed with a cookery book. Then, at least, he would be impelled to study in a more than theoretical manner, for life, chiefly the life of the stomach and all connected therewith, takes care that we take a cookery book more seriously than a mere theory. It is necessary for spiritual science, on approaching man, to deepen his life in respect to feeling.

Our life is immensely deepened when we become aware of our growing indebtedness to the gods and say: One half of our life on earth cannot really be lived, for it is hidden under the surface of existence. If, through initiation, we learn to know what is otherwise hidden from ordinary consciousness, we can see a little into the debts we have incurred. We then say: With ordinary consciousness we see we are incurring debts, but cannot read the ‘promissory note’ we ought to write. With initiation-consciousness we can, indeed, read the note, but cannot meet it in ordinary life. We must wait till death comes. And, when we have attained this consciousness, when we have so deepened our human conscience that this indebtedness is quite alive in us, we are ready to follow human life farther, beyond the retrospective tableau of which I have spoken and in which we reach back to birth. We now see that, after a few days, we must begin to experience what we have left un-experienced; and this holds for every single deed we have done to other human beings in the world. The last deeds done before death are the first to come before us, and so backwards through life. We first become aware of what our last evil or good deeds signify for the world. Our experience of them while on earth is now eliminated; what we now experience is their significance for the world.

And then we go farther back, experiencing our life again, but backwards. We know that while doing this we are still connected with the earth, for it is only the other side of our deeds that we experience now.

We feel as if our life from now onwards were being borne in the womb of the universe. What we now experience is a kind of embryonic stage for our further life between death and a new birth; only, it is not borne by a mother but by the world, by all that we did not experience in physical life. We live through our physical life again, backwards and in its cosmic significance. We experience it now with a very divided consciousness. Living here in the physical world and observing the creatures around him, man feels himself pretty well as the lord of creation; and even though he calls the lion the king of beasts, he still feels himself, as a human being, superior. Man feels the creatures of the other kingdoms as inferior; he can judge them, but does not ascribe to them the power to judge him. He is above the other kingdoms of Nature.

He has a very different feeling, however, when after death the undergoes the experience I have just described. He no longer feels himself confronting the inferior kingdoms of Nature, but kingdoms of the spiritual world that are superior to him. He feels himself as the lowest kingdom, the others standing above him.

Thus, in undergoing all he has previously left unexperienced, man feels all around him beings far higher than himself. They unfold their sympathies and antipathies towards all he now lives through as a consequence of his earthly life. In this experience immediately after death we are within a kind of ‘spiritual rain’. We live through the spiritual counterpart of our deeds, and the lofty beings who stand above us rain down their sympathies and antipathies. We are flooded by these, and feel in our spiritual being that what is illuminated by the sympathies of these lofty beings of the higher hierarchies will be accepted by the universe as a good element for the future; whereas all that encounters their antipathies will be rejected, for we feel it would be an evil element in the universe if we did not keep it to ourselves. The antipathies of these lofty beings rain down on an evil deed done to another human being, and we feel that the result would be something exceedingly bad for the universe if we released it, if we did not retain it in ourselves. So we gather up all that encounters the antipathies of these lofty beings. In this way we lay the foundation of our destiny, of all that works on into our next earthly life in order that it may find compensation through other deeds.

One can describe the passage of the human being through the soul-region after death from what I might call its more external aspect. I did this in my book Theosophy, where I followed more the accustomed lines of thought of our age. Now in this recapitulation within the General Anthroposophical Society I want to present a systematic statement of what Anthroposophy is, describing these things more inwardly. I want you to feel how man, in his inner being—in his human individuality—actually lives through the state after death.

Now when we understand these things in this way, we can again turn our attention to the world of dreams, and see it in a new light. Perceiving man's experience, after death, of the spiritual aspects of his earthly life, his deeds and thoughts, we can again turn to the dreaming man, to all he experiences when asleep. We now see that he has already lived through the above when asleep; but it remained quite unconscious. The difference between the experience in sleep and the experience after death becomes clear.

Consider man's life on earth. There are waking states interrupted again and again by sleep. Now a man who is not a ‘sleepy-head’ will spend about a third of his life asleep. During this third he does, in fact, live through the spiritual counterpart of his deeds; only he knows nothing of it, his dreams merely casting up ripples to the surface. Much of the spiritual counterpart is perceived in dreams, but only in the form of weak surface-ripples. Nevertheless in deep sleep we do experience unconsciously the whole spiritual aspect of our daily life. So we might put it this way: In our conscious daily life we experience what others think and feel, how they are helped or hindered by us; in sleep we experience unconsciously what the gods think about the deeds and thoughts of our waking life, though we know nothing of this. It is for this reason that one who sees into the secrets of life seems to himself so burdened with debt, so maimed—as I have described. All this has remained in the subconscious. Now after death it is really lived through consciously. For this reason man lives through the part of life he has slept through, i.e. about one-third, in time, of his earthly life. Thus, when he has passed through death, he lives through his nights again, backwards; only, what he lived through unconsciously, night by night, now becomes conscious.

We could even say—though it might almost seem as if we wanted to make fun of these exceedingly earliest matters: If one sleeps away the greater part of one's life, this retrospective experience after death will last longer; if one sleeps little, it will be shorter. On an average it will last a third of one's life, for one spends that in sleep. So if a man lives till the age of sixty, such experience after death will last twenty years. During this time he passes through a kind of embryonic stage for the spiritual world. Only after that will he be really free of the earth; then the earth no longer envelopes him, and he is born into the spiritual world. He escapes from the wrappings of earthly existence which he had borne around him until then, though in a spiritual sense, and feels this as his birth into the spiritual world.

• 1. The drawing is not reproduced.

Comedy in one act by Max Dreyer
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

These four one-act plays are performed at the Lessing Theatre in the following order: Zeche, Unter blonden Bestien, Ehrenhandel, Liebesträume. This gives the audience the opportunity to watch a certain play twice in a row. Fulda gives the impression of a self-contained picture. Everything you want to know is there. The poet has a feeling that people become impatient when you bring up a matter and do not tell them everything they need to know if they want to understand it. When the curtain comes down after each of Fulda's two one-act plays, we have the feeling that we know everything we can ask for if the thing we are seeing is to make sense to us in a satisfactory way. With Dreyer it is quite different. The curtain is lifted: we have a feeling of amazement. And we have not come out of it when the play is over. We have roughly the same feeling as if someone had shown us a small piece cut out of a larger picture. Even if we are now of the opinion that everything we see in the cut-out piece is excellent, we become impatient because we know that something belongs to it which we do not know. A one-act play by Dreyer looks like a scene from a larger drama, but not like a small work of art in its own right.

In "Zeche", Fulda depicts a process that can take place in less than an hour. We have before us a nobleman who seeks healing for his organism, which has been run down by a somewhat lazy lifestyle, in a seaside resort. In this seaside resort he meets the woman to whom he swore love more than thirty years ago for that eternity which ends when the lover's relatives throw the seduced woman out of the house. The woman did not perish by chance. The fruit of the love she believed in, but which the nobleman was only playing with, has become a faithful son who replaces the mother with everything that life has robbed her of. And this son is the town's spa doctor, where the hero of our play wants to make himself fit to continue his easy life. So the man meets his own son and his son's mother. The moment takes control of him. He wants to marry the once seduced woman and acknowledge his son. He receives the right answer. The lives of three characters, played out in the events of half an hour as a repetition in miniature, appear before us. This is how a one-act play should be.

Dreyer has a North German landowner appear before us, accompanying a violin virtuoso on the piano. The landowner's husband is out hunting. The virtuoso does not want this man to come home. He storms the woman with proposals of love. The woman demands that he repeat to her husband everything he has said to her in private. Otherwise she will tell him everything herself. The man comes - the virtuoso leaves. In order to be interested in such things, we would have to learn all sorts of things about the characters, which Dreyer withholds from us. We have before us a scene, but not a one-act play. When the curtain falls, we are basically as clever as before. It was not a particularly happy idea to have Fulda alternate with Dreyer. Because when you saw Dreyer, you always had to think back to Fulda, because you got proof, so to speak, through the counterpart of Fulda's artistic rounding off.

In "Ehrenhandel", a councillor kisses the wife of a major at a ball and is surprised by the latter. A duel would be inevitable if it came down to reality. But that is not what matters. What matters is that the playwright replaces reality with a good idea in an extremely graceful manner. The councillor's wife simply allows herself to be kissed again by the major, with charming accompaniments that we prefer to preparations for a duel and the carrying in of a more or less slightly wounded man.

Dreyer's "Love Dreams" are no less taxing on the senses of the reality fanatic. But they make up for it all the less with artistic wit. A somewhat clumsy daredevil asks for the hand of a landowner related to him, a robust woman who has gradually developed from an "elephant chick" into a rough agrarian with quite solid ideals. One of these ideals is a "fat sow", which she has brought to I don't know how many hundred hundredweight. She wants to "sleep on" her relative's marriage proposal a little longer. But the cousin fills the waiting time by kissing a little girl in the moonlight and a maid wherever he can find her. When the chosen landowner becomes aware of her bridegroom's polygamous tendencies even before she makes love, she whips him. He is like many a poodle. He doesn't even know why he's being beaten. Because the fat pig-breeding lady hits him without saying a word. And the beating is the end of the play.

There is an exact relationship: the "trade of honor" relates to the "love dreams" like the lips of the beautiful majoress to the riding whip of the landowner's wife.

The performance was quite good. Adolf Klein as the departed baron in the "Zeche" and Rosa Bertens as the former mistress brought out the charms of this play just as Schönfeld as the government councillor brought out those of the "Ehrenhandel".

Ferdinand Bonn as the violin virtuoso and Elise Sauer as the landowner (both in "Unter blonden Bestien" and in the "Liebesträume") could not turn stones, which are not flints, into fires of wit.

If we want to give its proper place among familiar things of life to what we come to know as stages on the road into the spiritual world, it is important first to have the right conception of the three states of our ordinary human consciousness. These three states – waking, dreaming, sleeping – we have described over and over again.

And we know how the human being is fully awake only in his thinking, in his conceptual faculty; how feeling, although its experience appears to differ from that of dreams, in the whole mood of its relation to a man is yet of the same nature. In ordinary consciousness feelings are experienced in just as vague a way as are dreams – not only that, but they seem to be connected in a similar manner.

The dream produces picture after picture without any regard for connections in the external world. It has its own connections. On the whole the same is true of the world of feeling. And anyone whose world of feeling in ordinary consciousness is of the same kind as his conceptual world, is terribly prosaic, dreadfully dried up and frigid. In the conceptual world when we are fully awake we must have an eye to what in the ordinary sense is logical; but we should never get anywhere in real life were we to feel in the way we think.

Then – as we have often said – there rises up from a man’s hidden depths, the will. It is possible to have some conception of it, but its essential being, how it works and weaves in the human organism, is something of which a man remains as ignorant, or as unconscious, as of his dream experience. It would be profoundly disturbing for him were he to experience what his will is actually doing.

In reality the will is a burning, consuming process. And for a man throughout his waking life always to be perceiving how in his willing he actually consumes his organism and, by food or sleep, has to replace what is thus consumed, would in ordinary consciousness certainly not conduce to his comfort.

Now, with regard to their pictures, we can to a certain extent compare a man's feeling world in his waking state, in his waking dreams, with the dream-world when he is either in deep sleep or halfway there. In this way we find that a man does not perceive these pictures as belonging to his ego but as part of the external world. While dreaming, he has so strong an impression of the action of the dream-picture being the world outside, that, at times, he can even perceive himself in the picture.

Today the following should be of particular interest to us. We go through ordinary life having one experience after another, and our dreams shake up all these experiences together, paying little heed to the connection between them which holds good for a man when awake. The dream becomes a poet developing the strangest tendencies.

A philosopher, describing his own experience, once said that he constantly dreamed he had written a book. He had not really written it but when dreaming thought he had, thought too that it was a better book than any of his others. But he dreamed the manuscript was lost. It was mislaid and he could not find it. In his dream he hurriedly searched everywhere, without success. A terribly uneasy feeling grew upon him that the manuscript of his best book might be irretrievably lost. In the midst of his discomfort he woke up. In the particular case of this philosopher this was a natural experience, for he had published a great many books. So great was their number that once when I went to see him, and his wife happened to be in the room, she told me he had written so many that the success of one was detrimental to the others.

In this philosopher’s house you always felt a remarkably practical atmosphere. On another occasion, when I called on him with a publisher, wanting to discuss an epistemological problem, this rather annoyed me. I had insisted on the publisher coming in with me – or, rather, he had insisted upon it himself – and the moment the philosopher saw him, he began: As an expert can you tell me how many copies of my book (I cannot remember which) are to be found in second-hand bookshops? – You see what a sense of the practical there was in this philosopher's house! I have no wish to be scornful; I am merely giving you a characteristic example. Others, too, may have had dreams in which their experiences appeared in fanciful guise.

Everybody knows that in dreams things do not take the same course as in our ordinary experience; the connections in them are different. On the other hand, it is easy to see how intimately related the dream is to the characteristics of the dreamer. It is a fact that many dreams are actual reflections of what is going on within our body, and we move about in our dreams as if in a perfectly familiar element.

Little by little we become aware that the dream has its own way of grouping experiences. By thinking clearly we gradually learn how we actually live in our dreams; we live there when on the point of leaving our physical and etheric bodies or at the moment of return. It is always on the transition from waking to sleeping, or from sleeping to waking, that the dream really takes place. I have frequently given you examples showing that even our dreams of greatest import take place when we are either waking up or on the point of falling asleep. Among these examples you may remember the dream of a student: how he dreamed that two students were standing at the door of a lecture-room, when one of them said something to the other which, according to the students' code in Germany, demanded satisfaction, and how it came to a duel. The whole dream was very vivid – the setting out for the scene of action after the due appointment of seconds, and so on, up to the very moment of firing. The dreamer hears the report which, as he now wakes up, changes into the noise of a failing chair that he himself has overturned. By this time he is fully awake, for the fall of the chair has cut short the dream. Thus the dream has taken place at the very moment of waking, containing within it its own time, not the time of its actual duration. According to their own inner time dreams often last so long that no one would ever sleep to that extent. Yet the dream maintains a close connection with what the sleeper is inwardly experiencing – the experience going right into his physical body.

The men of old knew quite well about such things, and a certain kind of dream was said by the old Jews to be God's punishment of a man "in his reins". Thus there was known to be a connection between the functioning of the kidneys and certain dreams. On the other hand, you have only to read a book like "The Seer of Prevorst" to find there how out of dreams people described what was wrong with their organs. Such men have a special gift for perceiving, symbolically in mighty pictures, any defective organs, so that beside it the cure can be seen. In those days this was made use of to encourage the sick person himself, out of the explanation of his dream, to prescribe his own remedy. On this point we should also study what was the authorised practice in the Temple-sleep.

When we consider the relation of the dream to our ordinary experience, the dream must be said to be a protest against the laws of nature, the laws according to which we live from the moment of waking till we go to sleep. The dream pays no heed to those laws – it makes them appear foolish. And what for the external, physical world is found to be natural law is no law for the dream, which is in itself a living protest against it. If we ask of nature on the one hand what the facts are, she will answer in accordance with natural law; but if we ask the same question of the dream, the answer will be different. Anyone who judges the course of a dream in accordance with natural law will say there is no truth in the dream – which is so, indeed, in the ordinary sense. But the dream approaches the supersensible, the spiritual, in a man, even though its pictures belong – to speak in the abstract – to his subconscious. We shall not judge correctly unless we realise that the dream has to do with a man's inner spiritual reality.

Now this is something people are slow to admit; they want to make an abstraction of the dream, to judge it only according to its fantastic character. They refuse to recognise it as something connected with the inner nature of man. And if the dream has this connection and it protests against nature’s laws, surely this is a sign that man's inner nature does the same itself.

I beg you to grasp the importance of this – that, when we come to the real man, what is within him protests against the laws of nature. Now what does this signify?

Today natural law is studied from nature around us, in the scientific way customary in the laboratory, and we find the same world-outlook extended to the investigation of man himself. He is treated as if natural law held good within him – as if it continued to do so inside his skin. But that is not by any means the case. The dream with its rejection of natural law is far nearer to what is within a man than the natural law itself. The inner human being does not act according to natural law. The dream, which in its composition is an image of what is within man, is evidence of this. Anyone who understands this is bound to call it nonsensical to believe that within the heart, within the liver, the same laws hold sway as those in nature outside. Logic belongs to external nature; to what is within man belongs the dream. And whoever calls the dream fantastic should also speak of man's inner nature in the same way. This can be actually perceived. For in the course it takes during earthly life, between birth and death, when sickness arises in one part, well-being in another, the inner nature of man is far more like a dream than like ordinary logic. Our present mode of thinking, however, has no such approach as this to what a man has within him, but is utterly given up as people are to their observations of nature outside or in the laboratory; and what they observe in this way they would like to find repeated in human beings.

It is of great importance in this respect to realise for example, how science today often treats what has a part in a man's physical make-up. Albumen is known to play a part in his life, fats, carbohydrates and salts – in essentials, naturally. That is well-known. Now what does science do? The scientist analyses the albumen, finding in it a certain percentage of oxygen, a certain percentage of nitrogen, a certain percentage of carbon and hydrogen; he analyses the fats, carbohydrates and so on. He then knows how much of all these the man contains. But from such an analysis scientists never learn what effect, for example, the potato has had upon European culture. There is hardly any mention of the influence that potatoes in the diet have had on the cultural life of Europe. For this analysis, by which you simply discover the various amounts of oxygen, nitrogen and so on, in one food or another never shows you how, for instance, rye is digested mainly by the lower bodily forces whereas the digestion of potatoes calls upon forces which are right up in the brain. This means that anyone who consumes an undue amount of potato has to use up his brain in the process of digestion, and thus partly deprives his thinking of brain-force.

Such matters as these show that neither our materialistically-minded science nor a more theological outlook arrives at the truth. When science gives an account of our food it is as if I were to describe a watch by saying: The silver is procured from a silver mine, in such and such a way; it is then loaded up and conveyed to various towns, and so on. – But when it gets to the watchmaker there is a full-stop; and what goes on in his workshop does not come into the picture. Perhaps the porcelain dial may be described, how porcelain is made, but again nothing is said of what goes on in the workshop. This is how food today is treated by science; it is just analysed. For what science tells us is actually worthless as regards the effect of the various nutriments on the human organism. In spite of any analysis there is a great difference between eating the fruits, say of rye or wheat, and eating tubers – as in the case of potatoes.

In the human organism there is quite a difference between the absorption of tubers and that of fruits or seeds. It can really be said of our present mode of thinking that it no longer goes to the heart of material existence. Materialism is therefore a world-conception with absolutely no knowledge of the working of matter, and we have to gain that knowledge by the light of spiritual science. Therefore those whose attitude is that of materialistic science say: Anthroposophy is spiritual to a fantastic degree. On the other hand, theosophists or theologians are content with abstract spirit that is never actively creative and does not show any real connection with material activity; and these call Anthroposophy materialistic because it extends its knowledge to what is material.

Thus we find ourselves caught up between two factions: those who treat everything ideally, in the abstract, and those who deal with everything materialistically. The former learn nothing about the spirit, the latter never know anything about the material. On these lines today, a way of thinking is developing which is quite unable to approach man himself.

Now recently in our spiritual evolution something most remarkable has appeared. At least the nocturnal side of spiritual life can no longer be denied – unless people want to be pig-headed. It is characteristic of the way people steeped in natural science react when they meet the darker side of spiritual life – or something else I am going to discuss – which they are unable to deny.

A noteworthy example of this is a book by Ludwig Staudenmaier – the (translated) title of which is "Magic as an Experimental Science". One might almost say: The nightingale as a machine. – Anyway this book is characteristic of our time.

How, then, does this man go to work? In his case the peculiar feature is that his very way of life led him to experience magic in himself. And the day came when he felt impelled to start certain experiments on himself – which might be said to reveal the darkness of his destiny. He was unable to deny after these experiences of his that there is such a thing as automatic writing. You know that I never recommend anything of the kind, always describing it as dangerous. But when it comes to what these people have actually done, then we are faced by something exceedingly strange, and need all our critical faculty to distinguish the true from the false. Now this committing to writing of things never previously entering the writer's head, this automatic writing, became for Staudenmaier a problem on which to experiment. Accordingly he set himself down with a pencil, when, lo and behold, things burst forth to which he had never even given a thought, and what he wrote was indeed most peculiar! Just imagine how surprising it must be to a scientific thinker when, on taking up a pencil, he turns himself into an automatist, believing all the while that it cannot be done. But the pencil suddenly takes command, guiding his hand to write quite astonishing things. That is what happened to Staudenmaier.

Now his greatest surprise was when the pencil began to show temper, as dreams do; it wrote what was very far from his thoughts. Thus remarks appeared such as "You're a silly fool!" – and it can be gathered from this how completely the pencil was now in control.

These indeed are things this gentleman would never have thought! After repeated remarks of this kind, and the pencil had written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked who was really the writer. The answer came: "Spirits are writing." In his view this again was not the truth, since for a scientific writer spirits do not exist. Whatever was he to say? Certainly not that it was spirits who were lying; so he said that his subconscious was always telling lies. For how terrible for a man if his subconscious suddenly convinces him that he is a silly fool, and moreover records it in writing, so that – as the expression goes – it is there in black and white.

However he continues to behave as though spirits were speaking and asks why they do not tell the truth. To which comes the reply: Oh – that is just our way; we are spirits who have to lie, for it's part of our very nature.

This was a most apt description. Here begins a sphere where things are certainly very questionable, for, you see, when it appears that truth has its home above while below it is always being contradicted, this naturally creates an awkward situation. But if anyone is entirely at the mercy of a scientific world-conception, in a case such as this he can but conclude that the liar is in him. Staudenmaier, therefore infers that it is not objective spiritual beings speaking but his own subconscious – and in such general terms anything can be summed up.

Now it is quite typical of such spirits that they did not make use of Staudenmaier's hand to write down any new way of proving some mathematical problem, or a solution in the realm of natural science; characteristically they always said something of a different sort.

There was indeed every reason for Staudenmaier to be upset, and a medical friend of his advised him to go out shooting. Advice of that kind is popular with the medical profession; for example, doctors are very fond of recommending marriage. In Staudenmaier’s case, however, the advice was to go shooting, to shake off this foolishness by diverting himself.

But just imagine! In spite of setting out to shoot magpies in the way he described, here too everything was delusion, for all kinds of demon-like forms peeped from the trees instead of magpies. Sitting on the branches were creatures, half-cat, half-elephant, making long noses at him and putting out their tongues. And when he looked down he did not see hares, for example, on the ground but all manner of fantastic figures up to every sort of trick.

Thus it was not only that the pencil was scribbling nonsense, but now things became still more fantastic; so that instead of magpies appearing it was demons, with all their ghoulishness – in fact, more delusion.

Actually all he saw was as it is in a dream and, if his will had remained intact, he might have shot instead of a magpie some kind of horror, half-cat, half-elephant. By the time this came to the ground it would certainly have changed into something else – perhaps half-frog, half nightingale, with a devil's tail. It would certainly have changed in falling.

In any case we may say that our experimentalist gained access to a world resembling that of dreams; a world which also protested against anything to do with the laws of nature.

For what would have been the natural course of events? On lowering his gun after shooting a magpie, Staudenmaier would have found a magpie on the ground. It was not this, however, that happened, but what I have just described; which was another protest against natural law on the part of the darker side of the spiritual world into which the man was plunged. Had he kept consistently to his idea of the subconscious, he should at least have admitted: If all this is in my own subconscious then this subconscious is evidently protesting against the laws of nature. For what was this subconscious actually telling him? As I have described, it conjured up all kinds of demons; and these told him quite different things about himself from what he had ever thought. Thus, he could but conclude: If the world were organised entirely in accordance with natural law, what now constitutes my inner being could not exist – as a man I should not be able to exist. For when what is within me speaks, this has nothing to do with natural law. Within a man, therefore, an entirely different world holds sway from the one where there are laws of nature – a world that in its very conditions reject these laws.

That is the one interesting point about this maker of experiments in magic, about the magician who with his experiments impressed so many people. It shows how – even though in a different way – a man can in fact come to the perception of a world which, in its connections, is like the world of dreams we so frequently meet in life.

This leads us, through a right conception of ordinary human existence to recognise that, bordering on this ordinary world that is interwoven by natural law, there is another world where these laws are no longer valid.

If these matters are looked at rightly, we can only infer that, adjoining the world ruled by the laws of nature of which we make a study, there is another world independent of these laws and ruled by quite different ones of its own. By sinking into the world of dreams in a realistic way we come to a world where natural laws are no longer effective. That the human being, with his ordinary consciousness, perceives this world as fantastic, is due to his inability to understand the conditions he meets there. He himself introduces the fantasy. But what weaves and lives in it belongs to an altogether different world-sphere, and it is this sphere into which a man sinks in his dreams.

This leads us on directly to another thing. If we talk to somebody wedded to the usual world-conception of today, he will say: I study what law it is that governs the fall of a stone, and discover the law of gravitation. Then I go further out into the universe and apply the same law to the stars. – And this is what thinks: Here on earth I discover the laws of nature; there outside is the cosmos (drawing is made). The laws I have discovered for the earth I imagine still to be valid for the nebula of Orion, or anything else.

Now everyone knows that, for example, the force of gravity diminishes in proportion to the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker; and he knows that light too decreases. I have already told you that the truth of our natural laws also diminishes. What down on earth is true as regards them is no longer true in the cosmos; it is true only for a certain distance. Beyond that distance, out in the cosmos, the same law begins to hold sway which we meet with in our dreams. Hence we should be clear that, looking out at Orion with its nebula and in order to understand it, we must not think in accordance with the experimental method of physics, but begin to dream – for Orion shows its conformity with dream-law.

It can be said that various details of such things have actually been known in the past, and in later times an inkling of them has still been preserved, especially by those thinkers capable of genuine concentration.

Such a thinker was Johannes Müller, the natural scientist who lived not, it is true, in the second, but in the first part of the 19th century. He it was who taught Haeckel. He could at any time really concentrate, and lived absolutely in what he undertook. By being able to live thus entirely in what he was doing, a man may sometimes discover a great deal, though – as I will show you – in certain respects this may have its disadvantages. For instance, Johannes Müller, on being asked a question during a course of lectures he was holding in summer, replied: I only know about that during the winter-course – not in the summer. – During the summer-course he was so completely engrossed in the subject of the lectures he was actually giving, that he openly admitted it would only be when winter came that he could turn his thoughts to a different matter.

Another very interesting thing was admitted by Johannes Müller – that he could spend a long time dissecting bodies to discover something he wanted to know without success; but that afterwards he often dreamed about these experiments, when he would see far more deeply into the matter, and it became quite clear. This was in the first half of the 19th century, and in those days anyone, even a famous scientist, could own up to such eccentricities.

In his dreams, therefore, a man is in a quite different world with quite different laws. And weighing the matter rightly, it must be presumed that, if we want to follow in the steps of Johannes Müller, we must not think of Orion and its nebula in the way customary in observatories and other astronomical centres – we have to dream. Then we learn more than by thinking things over. This reminds us of the shepherds of old, who, sleeping in the fields at night, had dreams about the stars, thus getting to know more about them than the people who lived later. That is really so.

In short, whether we enter man’s inner nature and approach the world of dreams, or go out into the wide cosmos, we meet – as was said in olden days – beyond the circle of the Zodiac a world of dreams.

Then we reach the point of understanding what was meant when the Greeks – who still had knowledge of such things – used the term "chaos". I have seen every possible explanation of chaos but not one anywhere near the truth. For what had a Greek in mind when he spoke about chaos? He was thinking of the law concerning which dreams give us some notion, or which we must suppose to hold good in the outermost regions of the cosmos. This law that differs from natural law was ascribed by a Greek to chaos. He said indeed that chaos begins where natural law is no longer to be found, where another kind of law holds good. A Greek considered the world to have been brought forth out of chaos, out of a condition, that is, not yet in accordance with natural law, but as it is in dreams or, as is it still today, in the far reaches of the cosmos – in the Dog star near the constellation of Orion and so on. There we come to a world which still makes itself known to man in the fantastic but living land of dream-imagery.

If here we have the physical world of nature (a drawing was made), when we sink into the land of dreams we come, as it were, to a second stream. Then beyond the dream world there is a third stream without any immediate relation to natural law. The world of dreams protests against this law; but in the case of this third world it would be nonsensical to say it was guided by them at all. It absolutely opposes these laws – even boldly – for it has more to do with human beings, whereas the dream still appears as living pictures, this third world comes to expression chiefly in the moral world-conception through the voice of conscience.

If next to one another we had, on the one side, the world of nature, on the other the world of morality, there would be no bridge to connect the two. The bridge, however, is formed by the world of dreams, or by that world experienced by our friend who made experiments in the realm of magic, where things were said to him having nothing to do with natural law.

Between the world in which nature weaves her laws and the world from which the voice of conscience streams to us, there lies for ordinary consciousness the dream-world. Since this is the waking world, while this is the dream-world, and this is the world of sleep, we are led to conceive that during sleep the gods actually speak to man – not of what has to do with nature but of what is moral; and when man wakes, this remains within him as the divine voice, as conscience.

In this way the three worlds are merged together, two things becoming clear: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against natural conditions; or the other hand, the extent to which the dream-world is a bridge to a world the reality of which is hidden from ordinary consciousness – that is, the world out of which moral perceptions arise.

If we make our way into this world we find the further spiritual world that is no longer comprehensible in accordance with the laws of nature, a world with spiritual laws. In dreams the two are mingled – spiritual law with natural law, natural law with spiritual law – because the world of dreams is a stream connecting the two.

Thus we have thrown light from yet another aspect on how the human being is an essential member of these three worlds.

If we want to categorize what we can get to know as the stages of the path into the spiritual world into what is already known from ordinary life, it is important to be able to correctly assess the three states of consciousness in which a person already finds themselves in ordinary life. We have already described these three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping. And we also know how a person actually only experiences true waking consciousness in their thinking, in their imagining, and how feeling already works in such a way that, although it appears different in its experiences than the world of dreams, in its overall constitution, in the way it relates to the person, it is the same as the world of dreams. We experience feelings in our ordinary consciousness in an equally indeterminate way to dreams, but not only in such an indeterminate way, but also in a context similar to that of dreams.

The dream strings image to image. It does not care about the connections in the outside world as it strings image to image. It has its own connections. It is basically the same with the world of feelings. And the person who, for ordinary consciousness, would have such an emotional world as he has a world of ideas would be a terribly sobering, terribly dry, icy person. In the world of ideas, that is, in full wakefulness, one must pay attention to what is commonly called logic. It would be impossible to get on in real life if one were to feel everything as one thinks it.

And then we have mentioned several times: the will emerges from the hidden depths of human existence. It can be imagined, but its actual nature, how it works and weaves in the human organism, remains as unknown or unconscious to the human being as the experiences of sleep itself. And it would also be extremely disturbing for the human being if he were to experience what the will actually does.

The will is in reality a process of combustion, a process of consumption. And to always perceive how one consumes one's own organism in the act of willing, and then having to replace what has been consumed again and again through nourishment or sleep, would, if it accompanied the entire waking life, not be a very comfortable process for ordinary consciousness.

Now, in a sense, we can compare the world of human feelings in a waking state, so to speak waking dreams, and the world of dreams in a state of drowsiness or half-sleep, in their images, more so that the human being does not initially perceive these images as I, but as something that is the outside world. The dreaming person experiences what is happening as dream images so strongly as an external world that he can sometimes perceive himself within these dream images.

What should interest us particularly about these dream images today is this: we live through ordinary life, one experience after another. The dream shakes these experiences up. It pays little attention to the way a person in an awake state has experiences in context. It is a poet that unfolds the strangest inclinations.

A philosopher told of himself that he often dreams that he has written a book that he has not actually written, but in the dream he believes that he has written the book, a book that is better than all his other books. But at the same time he dreams that the manuscript has been lost. He can't find it, he has misplaced it. And now he rushes from drawer to drawer, searching through everything in his dream, but he can't find the manuscript. He is overcome by an incredibly uncomfortable feeling that he has lost this manuscript of his very best book and may never find it again. He then wakes up to this unease. Of course, this is quite an experience, especially for the philosopher I mean, who has written many books. They have been published in such large numbers that once, when I was visiting this philosopher, where the philosopher's wife was also present, the wife told me: Yes, my husband writes so many books that one always competes with the other.

It was actually always rather practical in this philosopher's house, so that I once, when I was visiting this philosopher with a publisher, actually got a little annoyed because I wanted to discuss epistemological problems with him. Now I had dragged the publisher along, actually he had dragged himself along, and the philosopher immediately started: Can you tell me from your expertise whether a great many copies of this or that work of mine are available from antiquarians? – So there was a very practical sense in the philosopher's house. I don't want to disparage that, I am just telling it as something characteristic. Now, someone else might have dreamed something else, which would have colored the experiences in a fantastic way as well.

Everyone can know that the dream does not proceed in the same way as the external experience, but that other connections are created in the dream. But on the other hand, everyone can also know how the dream is intimately connected with what the human being actually is. It is indeed the case that many dreams are actually reflections of even the physical human interior, and one already weaves in dreams as in something that is intimately connected with one.

Now one gradually becomes really aware of how the dream arranges the experiences in its own way. If you keep this very clearly in mind, you will gradually come to know that you do live in this dreaming after all. Only in this dreaming you live in the times when you either just go out of the physical body and the etheric body or when you return to them. It is actually in these transitions between waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking that the dream takes place. I have repeatedly given examples showing that the most important part of the dream takes place during waking and falling asleep. Among the characteristic examples, I have given this one – you remember it – in which a student dreams that two students are standing at the door of a lecture hall. One of them says something to the other that, after the thing called a comment, absolutely demands satisfaction. It comes to a duel. Everything is vividly dreamt, going out to the duel, first choosing seconds and so on, until the shooting begins. He still hears the bang, but it immediately turns into the blow that a chair, which he has knocked over at that moment, has done. So at that moment he wakes up. This fall of the chair triggered the whole dream. The dream thus fades at the moment of waking, it only appears to do so because it has its own time within it, not the time that it would last. Some dreams last so long according to their inner time that you don't sleep as long as you would have to sleep if the dream lasted the time it carries within itself. Nevertheless, a dream is intimately connected with what a person experiences inwardly, but experiences inwardly down to his physical body.

People in ancient times were well aware of such things, and for a certain kind of dream – you can read about it in the Bible yourself – the ancient Jews said: God has punished you in your kidneys. So they knew that a very specific kind of dream was connected with the function of the kidneys. On the other hand, you only need to read something like “The Seer of Prevorst” and you will find how people actually describe the damage to their organs in their dreams, people who are particularly predisposed to doing so, so that some diseased organ is symbolically visualized in powerful images, which can lead to the remedy being presented alongside this diseased organ. In ancient times this was even used to induce the patient himself, in a certain respect, to indicate his remedy from his own dream interpretation. And what was practiced in the authorized temple sleep must also be studied in this direction.

When we look at the whole relationship between dreams and external experiences, we have to say that dreams protest against the laws of nature. From waking to sleeping, we live by natural laws. Dreams pay no heed to these natural laws. In a sense, the dream turns its nose up at the laws of nature. And what is being researched as the laws of nature for the external physical world is not the lawfulness of the dream. The dream is a living protest against the laws of nature. If, on the one hand, you ask nature what is true, it answers in the laws of nature. If you ask the dream what is true, it does not answer in terms of natural laws. And the person who judges the course of a dream according to natural laws will say that the dream is lying. In this ordinary sense, it does lie. But this dream does come close to the spiritual and supersensible in man, even if the images of the dream belong to the subconscious, as one can say in the abstract, and one does not judge it correctly if one does not know that it comes close to the inner spiritual reality of the person.

Now, however, this is something that is difficult to admit in our time. One wants to abstract the dream. They want to judge it only by its fantastic nature. They do not want to see that in a dream we have something before us that is connected with the inner being of man. Is it not true that when a dream is connected with the inner being of man and protests against the laws of nature, it is a sign that the inner being of man itself is something that protests against the laws of nature.

Please understand that this is a weighty word, that when you get to the person, their inner being actually protests against the laws of nature. For what does that mean?

When today, the scientific way of thinking observes the laws of nature in a laboratory-like manner from what is outside in nature, then this scientific world view also approaches the human being and treats him as if the laws of nature were also continuing within him, in his inner being, or, to put it better, within his skin. But that is not the case at all. This inner being is much closer to the dream with its denial of natural laws than to the natural laws; the human inner being is such that it does not act and develop its activities according to natural laws. The dream, which in a certain sense is a reflection of this human inner being in its composition, is a testimony to this. And for those who understand this, it is simply the case that they have to say that it is actually absurd to believe that the same laws prevail within the heart and liver as externally in nature. Logic belongs to the external nature. The dream belongs to the inner being of man, and whoever calls the dream fantastic should also call the human inner being fantastic. He can feel that, because the way the human interior unfolds between birth and death here in earthly life, where an illness emerges from one corner and a sense of well-being from another, is much more similar to the realm of the 'I' than to external logic. But our present way of thinking completely lacks this way of approaching the human interior, because our present way of thinking is completely absorbed in what is observed in the outer nature or in the laboratory. One wants to find this in the human interior as well.

In this respect, it is really of great importance that we learn, for example, how the way in which science often deals with what plays a role in the physical aspect of human beings is treated today. We know that proteins, fats, carbohydrates and salts are essential to human life - in essence, of course. We know that. So what does science do? It analyzes the protein and finds so much oxygen, so much nitrogen, so much carbon in it, in percentage terms; it analyzes the fats, the carbohydrates, and so on. We now know how much of each is present. But you never learn from such an analysis what influence, for example, the potato has played in European culture. There is also little mention of this influence of potato food on European culture, because from this analysis, where you simply find how differently carbon, nitrogen and so on are distributed in one food and in another, you never find out why, for example, rye is preferentially digested by the forces of the lower digested by the forces of the lower abdomen, while the potato, on the other hand, requires forces up to the brain to digest it, so that when a person eats an excessive amount of potatoes, his brain has to be used to digest the potatoes, and so some of the brain power is lost for thinking.

It is precisely in such things that one notices how neither today's materialistic science nor the more theologically colored views come close to the truth. Science describes food in much the same way as if I wanted to describe a watch, and now I begin: the silver is mined in a silver mine; it is done in such and such a way. Then the silver is loaded up and shipped to the cities, and so on. But we stop at the watchmaker. We no longer look into his workshop. Then, perhaps, you describe the porcelain dial and how the porcelain is made. Again, they stop at the watchmaker's workshop. This is how today's science deals with food. It analyzes it. In doing so, it says something that actually says nothing about the importance of food in the human organism, because despite all the analysis, there is a big difference between enjoying the fruit of something, for example rye or wheat, and enjoying the tubers, as with potatoes.

Tubers fit into the human organism quite differently than fruits or seeds. So we can truly say that today's way of thinking no longer sees through material existence at all. Therefore, materialism is the world view that does not even know matter in its effects. Spiritual science must shine into it so that we can get to know matter. That is why the materialistically minded say: Anthroposophy is fantastically spiritual. And those who have theosophy or theology and want to stop at the abstracted spirit, which never comes to real work, where it never comes so far that it really shows how it intervenes as spirit in the material effects, they say that Anthroposophy is materialistic because it brings its insights to matter.

And so one is actually attacked from two fronts, both by those who treat everything ideally and abstractly and by those who treat everything materially. But those who treat everything ideally and abstractly do not get to know the spirit, and those who treat everything materially do not get to know matter. In this way, a way of thinking is developing more and more today that cannot reach people at all.

Now, however, something very strange has actually happened in our spiritual development in recent times. People can no longer help but admit at least the dark sides of spiritual life if they do not want to be completely stubborn. And it is a characteristic monument to the way in which people who are so completely immersed in science behave when they enter these dark areas of spiritual life, or something else that I will mention in a moment – but cannot deny.

A notable example of this is the book by Ludwig Staudenmaier: “Magic as an Experimental Science”. It is almost as if one were to say: “The nightingale as a machine”. But after all, this book could be written as something quite characteristic of our time.

So how does this man actually work? The strange thing about him is that his life has driven him to it, that the magical has been approached experimentally through himself. He had to start experimenting with himself one day, I would say, out of a dark destiny. After some of his experiences, he could no longer deny that, for example, there are writing mediums. You know that I don't recommend these things and always explain their dangers; but when there are writing mediums, as there are, something very strange happens, and one must very critically separate truth from error. Well, this writing of things that the person does not have in mind at the moment when he writes them, this mediumistic writing became an experimental problem for Staudenmaier, and he began to put the pencil to paper himself, and lo and behold, things came out that he had never thought of. He wrote the strangest things. Do you think it is also a surprise when someone who thinks entirely scientifically takes a pencil in his hand, makes himself the writing medium and now believes that it will not work. But now this pencil suddenly acquires power, guides the hand, writes down all kinds of things that amaze you. That happened to Staudenmaier.

And what surprised him most was that this pencil became moody – that's what people say – just as a dream becomes moody, writing completely different things than he had intended. It seems, you can tell from the context, that the pencil once exerted a compulsion on the hand: “You are a cabbage!” and to write similar nice things.

Now, these are things that the gentleman certainly did not think of himself! And after such things had accumulated, and the pencil had repeatedly written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked: Yes, who is it actually that is writing? – Now it answered: It is spirits who are writing. That was not true in his opinion, because ghosts do not exist for a scientifically minded person. What should he say now? He can't say that the spirits have lied to him, so he says: his subconscious is constantly lying. It's a terrible story, isn't it, when the subconscious suddenly comes to the conviction in the person himself that, for example, he is a cabbage and writes it down, so that, as they say in ordinary life, it is in black and white.

But he continued to behave as if spirits were speaking. So he asked them why they didn't tell the truth. They replied: 'Yes, that is our nature, we are just the kind of spirits who have to lie to you; it is in our character, we have to lie.

That was extremely characteristic. Now, however, we are entering a realm where things really get quite tricky, because, you see, if it turns out that the truth only sits up there and lies are constantly told down there, it naturally creates an uncomfortable situation. But if you are completely caught up in a natural scientific world view, then in such a case you cannot help but come to the conclusion that there is a liar inside you.

Nevertheless, Staudenmaier comes to the conclusion that objective spiritual beings never speak, but only the subconscious. You can put everything into such general terms.

But you see, it is characteristic that these spirits did not even try to guide Staudenmaier's hand in such a way that they might have written down a new mathematical proof for him or solved a scientific problem. That is actually the most characteristic thing, that they always said something different.

There were occasions when Staudenmaier was beside himself, and then a doctor friend would advise him to go hunting. Such instructions are common in medical advice. For example, getting married is sometimes a particularly popular piece of advice in medicine. In this case, the advice was to go hunting to get out of this crazy stuff, to distract himself, so to speak.

But lo and behold, even though he went hunting magpies, as he describes in detail, always looking out for magpies, all sorts of demonic figures peered down from the trees, not magpies. There sat on some branch such things, like something that was half a cat and half an elephant, turning up its nose at him or sticking out its tongue at him. And when he looked away from the tree into the grass, he saw not hares, but also all kinds of fantastic figures, who did their juggling with him.

So not only had the pen written down all sorts of stuff, but now the higher imagination was also stimulated in such a way that not magpies appeared, but demons, all sorts of ghostly creatures, so again a lie.

In any case, we can say that this experimenter came close to a world very similar to the world of dreams, and that this world is also a protest against the whole natural-law context. For what would the natural-law context have been? Well, he would have taken his gun off his shoulder, shot a magpie, and there would have been a magpie down there. But none of that appeared, only what I have characterized to you: once again a protest against natural law, from the spiritual world of the night side, into which the man had pushed. And if the man had stopped at the subconscious, he should at least have said to himself: If all this is down there in the subconscious, then my subconscious protests against the laws of nature. - For what does this subconscious actually tell him? Yes, it conjures up all kinds of demons and the like, as I have described. That tells him something quite different from what he has imagined about himself. So he should at least conclude from this: If the world were only organized according to natural laws, then my inner self could not exist at all, then I could not exist as a human being, because when this inner self speaks, it speaks quite differently than in natural laws. So a completely different world belongs to the inner self of man than the one over which the laws of nature are spun, a world that protests in its coherence against the laws of nature.

That, after all, is the only interesting thing about this magical experimenter or experimenting magician, who has impressed so many people so extraordinarily. It is something that shows us how, in fact, man can come to perceive such a world in other ways as well, as the world of dreams, which otherwise more or less always occurs in life, is in its contexts.

And this leads to the realization, through a correct view of ordinary life, that simply because man is there, the ordinary world, interwoven with natural laws, is adjacent to another world that is not interwoven with natural laws.

If you look at these things correctly, you have to say to yourself: there is the world interwoven with natural laws, which we study. Bordering on this is another world that has nothing to do with natural laws; quite different laws prevail in it. So, by immersing oneself in a real way in the world of dreams, one arrives in a world where natural laws cease. The fact that the human being's ordinary consciousness initially perceives this world in a fantastic way is merely due to the fact that he does not have the ability to recognize the connections that confront him. He brings the fantasy with him. But that which lives and weaves there is precisely another sphere of the world, into which the human being plunges in his dreams.

This leads us directly to something else. If you talk to someone who is completely absorbed in the world view that is currently in vogue, they will say: I study the laws of falling by looking at a falling stone. I discover the laws of gravitation. Then I go out into the world and apply them to the stars as well. And then it is thought: Here is the earth, where I find the laws of nature, and there is the cosmos. I think, blackboard 10, the laws that I have found here on earth also apply to the Orion Nebula or to anything.

Now everyone knows that, for example, gravity decreases with the square of the distance, that it becomes weaker and weaker, that the light decreases, and I have already said: So the truth of our natural laws also decreases. What is true in relation to natural laws on our earth here is no longer true out there in the universe. That is only true up to a certain distance. But out there in space, outside a certain width, the same lawfulness begins that we encounter when we immerse ourselves in a dream. Therefore, people should realize that when they look out at the Orion Nebula, they should actually not think physically, using the experimental method, to understand the Orion Nebula, but rather begin to dream, because the Orion Nebula shows its lawfulness according to dreams.

One can say that people actually knew about such things at one time, and intuitions still remained for later times, especially with thinkers who were able to concentrate quite well.

One such naturalist, who did not live in the second half of the 19th century but in the first, was Johannes Müller, who was the teacher of Haeckel. He was a man who could truly concentrate at all times. He was completely absorbed in whatever he was doing. The fact that one can really live like that, concentrated in whatever one is doing, sometimes leads to more; in some respects, as I will mention in a moment, it may have downsides. Johannes Müller, for example, was once asked about something during a summer course he taught. He said, “That is something I only know during the winter lectures, not in the summer.” He was so focused on the material for his summer lectures that he freely admitted that he only knew the rest during the winter.

But this Johannes Müller, for example, once confessed the very interesting fact that he can really cut up corpses for a long time to come to something; he does not come to it, he does not get into what he actually wants to understand. But sometimes he succeeds in dreaming about what he has experimented on, and then he sees much deeper into the matter, then things open up for him. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century. Then someone could still allow himself such extravagances, even if he was a famous natural scientist.

So, man enters into a completely different world, into a completely different order of things, when he dreams. And on proper consideration, it must be assumed that actually, if one were to do as Johannes Müller did, one would not have to think about the Orion Nebula as one does in the observatories or in the astronomical institutions, but one would have to dream about it, then one would know more about it than if one thought about it. I would like to say that this is connected with the fact that in pastoral ages, when shepherds slept in the pasture at night, they actually dreamed about the stars, and they knew more than later people know. It is really true, it is so.

In short, whether we go into the depths of man and approach the world of dreams or whether we go out into the wide universe, we meet, as the ancients said, outside the zodiac a world of dreams.

And here we are at the point where we can understand what the Greeks meant when they used the term “Chaos”. I have read all kinds of explanations of Chaos, but I have always found them far from the truth. What did the Greeks mean when they spoke of Chaos? He meant the lawfulness that one gets a glimpse of when immersed in a dream, or that one must assume in the outermost circumference of this universe. This lawfulness, which is not the lawfulness of nature but something else, the Greeks attributed to chaos. Yes, they said, chaos begins where the lawfulness of nature can no longer be found, where a different lawfulness reigns. For the Greeks, the world was born out of chaos, that is, out of a context that was not yet natural law, but rather like a dream or, as it still is today, the worlds of the constellation of Orion, the hunting dog and so on. First, you enter a world that at least announces itself to man in the fantastic but vivid world of dream images.

But now it is the case that when the physical natural world lies here, we enter into a second current, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in dreams. But then we enter into a third current, which lies beyond the world of dreams and no longer has any direct relationship to the laws of nature. The world of dreams protests in its imagery against the laws of nature. In this third world, it would be quite nonsensical to say that it follows natural laws. It completely and boldly contradicts natural laws, because it also approaches people. While the dream still comes to light in the world of vivid images, this third world first comes to light through the voice of conscience in the moral world view.

When we have the world of nature on the one hand and the world of morality on the other, there is no transition. But the transition lies in the world of dreams or in the world that the experimenter has experienced in the field of magic, where things have told him something quite different from the connections of natural law.

Between the world interwoven with natural laws and the world from which our conscience speaks as it flows into us, lies the world of dreams for ordinary consciousness. But this leads directly to the fact – because this is at the same time the waking world, this the dream world, this the sleeping world – that this brings us to the idea that during sleep the gods actually speak to man of what is not natural but moral, what then remains for man as the voice of God in his inner being when he wakes up, as conscience.

In this way, the three worlds are connected, and two things can be understood: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against the natural context, and on the other hand, to what extent this world of dreams is a transition to a world whose reality remains hidden from ordinary consciousness, to the world from which moral views also come.

If one then finds one's way into this world, one finds there the further spiritual world, which can no longer be grasped in terms of natural laws, but in terms of spiritual laws, while in dreams natural laws mix colorfully with spiritual laws, spiritual laws with natural laws, because the dream world is a transitional current between the two worlds.

Thus we have illuminated from another side how man integrates himself into the three worlds.

In the last lectures I have already drawn your attention to the way the Science of Initiation must speak of the alternating states of sleeping and waking, which are known to us from ordinary consciousness and through which we can really find a path of approach—one path of approach—to the secrets of human life. It is a life that finds expression while we sleep—soul life, dream life, a life that ordinary consciousness, if free from mystical or similar tendencies, does not take seriously at first. This attitude is certainly justified; the sober-minded man does not take his dream-life seriously and, to a certain extent, he is right, for he sees that it shows him all kinds of pictures and reminiscences of his ordinary life. When he compares his dream-life with his ordinary experience, he must, of course, hold fast to the latter and call it reality. But the dream-life comes with its re-combinations of ordinary experiences; and if man asks himself what it really signifies for the totality of his being, he can find no answer in ordinary consciousness.

Let us now consider this dream-life as it presents itself to us. We can distinguish two different kinds of dreams. The first conjures pictures of outer experiences before our soul. Years ago, or a few days maybe, we experienced this or that in a definite way; now a dream conjures up a picture more or less similar—usually dissimilar—to the external experience. If we discover the connection between this dream-picture and the external experience, we are at once struck by the transformation the latter has undergone. We do not usually relate the dream-picture to a particular experience in the outer world, for the resemblance does not strike us. Nevertheless, if we look more closely at this type of dream-life that conjures outer experiences in transformed pictures before the soul, we find that something in us takes hold of these experiences; we canmot, however, retain them as we can in the waking state, when we have full use of our bodily organs and experience the images of memory which resemble external life as far as possible. In memory we have pictures of outer life that are more or less true. Of course there are people who dream in their memories, but this is regarded as abnormal. In our memories we have, more or less, true pictures, in our dreams, transformed pictures of outer life. That is one kind of dream.

There is, however, another kind, and this is really much more important for a knowledge of the dream-life. It is the kind in which, for example, a man dreams of seeing a row of white pillars, one of which is damaged or dirty; he wakes up with this dream and finds he has toothache. He then sees that the row of pillars ‘symbolises’ the row of teeth; one tooth is aching, and this is represented by the damaged or, perhaps, dirty pillar. Or a man may wake up dreaming of a seething stove and find he has palpitation of the heart. Or he is distressed in his dream by a frog approaching his hand; he takes hold of the frog and fords it soft. He shudders, and wakes up to find he is holding a corner of his blanket, grasped in sleep. These things can go much further. A man may dream of all kinds of snake-like forms and wake up with intestinal pains.

So we see that there is a second kind of dream which gives pictorial, symbolic expression to man's inner organs. When we have grasped this, we learn to interpret many dream-figures in just this way. For example, we may dream of entering a vaulted cellar. The ceiling is black and covered with cobwebs; a repulsive sight. We wake up to fund we have a headache. The interior of the skull is expressed in the vaulted cellar; we even notice that the cerebral convolutions are symbolised in the peculiar formations constituting the vault. If Nye pursue our studies further in this direction we find that all our organs can appear in dreams in this pictorial way.

Here, indeed, is something that points very clearly, by means of the dream, to the whole inner life of man. There are people who, while actually asleep and dreaming, compose subjects for quite good paintings. If you have studied these things you will know what particular organ is depicted, though in an altered, symbolic form. Such paintings sometimes possess unusual beauty; and when the artist is told what organ he has really symbolised so beautifully, he is quite startled, for he has not the same respect for his organs that he has for his paintings.

These two kinds of dream can be easily distinguished by one who is prepared to study the world of dreams in an intimate way. In one kind of dream we have pictures of experiences undergone in the outer world; in the other, pictorial representations of our own internal organs.

Now it is comparatively easy to pursue the study of dreams as far as this. Most people whose attention has been called to the existence of these two kinds will recall experiences of their own that justify this classification.

But to what does this classification point? Well, if you examine the first kind of dreams, studying the special kind of pictures contained, you find that widely different external experiences can be represented by the same dream; again, one and the same experience can be depicted in different people by different dreams.

Take the case of a man who dreams he is approaching a mountain. There is a cave-like opening and into this the sun is still shining. He dreams he goes in. It soon begins to grow dark, then quite dark. He gropes his way forward, encounters an obstacle, and feels there is a little lake before him. He is in great danger, and the dream. takes a dramatic course.

Now a dream like this can represent very different external experiences. The picture I have just described may relate to a railway accident in which the dreamer was once involved. What he experienced at that time finds expression now, perhaps years afterwards, in the dream described. The pictures are quite different from what he had experienced. He could have been in a ship-wreck, or a friend may have proved unfaithful, and so on. If you compare the dream-picture with the actual experience, studying them in this intimate way, you will find that the content of the pictures is not really of great importance; it is the dramatic sequence that is significant: whether a feeling of expectation was present, whether this is relieved, or leads to a crisis. One might say that the whole complex of feelings is translated into the dream-life.

Now, if we start from here and examine dreams of this (first) type, we find that the pictures derive their whole character chiefly from the nature of the man himself, from the individuality of his ego. (Only, we must not study dreams like the psychiatrists who bring everything under one hat.) If we have an understanding of dreams—I say, of dreams, not of dream-interpretation—we can often learn to know a man better from his dreams than from observing his external life. When we study all that a person experiences in such dreams we find that it always points back to the experience of the ego in the outer world.

On the other hand, when we study the second kind of dream, we find that what it conjures before the soul in dream pictures is only experienced in a dream. For, when awake, man experiences the form of his organs at most by studying scientific anatomy and physiology. That, however, is not a real experience; it is merely looking at them externally, as one looks at stones and plants. So we may ignore it and say that, in the ordinary consciousness of daily life, man experiences very little, or nothing at all, of his internal organism. The second kind of dream, however, puts this before him in pictures, although in transformed pictures.

Now, if we study a man's life, we find that it is governed by his ego—more or less, according to his strength of will and character. But the activity of the ego within human life very strongly resembles the first kind of dream-experience. Just try to examine closely whether a person's dreams are such that in them his experiences are greatly, violently altered. In anyone who has such dreams you will find a man of strong will-nature. On the other hand, a man who dreams his life almost as it actually is, not altering it in his dreams, will be found to be a man of weak will.

Thus you see the action of the ego within a man's life expressed in the way he shapes his dreams. Such knowledge shows us that we have to relate dreams of the first kind to the human ego. Now we learnt in the last lectures that the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies in sleep. Remembering this, we shall not be surprised to learn that Spiritual Science shows us that the ego then takes hold of the pictures of waking life—those pictures that it otherwise takes hold of in ordinary reality through the physical and etheric bodies. The first kind of dream is an activity of the ego outside the physical and etheric bodies.

What, then, is the second kind of dream? Of course it, too, must have something to do with what is outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. It cannot be the ego, for this knows nothing of the symbolic organ-forms presented by the dream. One is forced to see that it is the astral body of man that, in sleep, shapes these symbolic pictures of the inner organs, as the ego the pictures of external experience. Thus the two kinds of dreams point to the activity of the ego and astral body between falling asleep and waking up.

We can go further. We have seen what a weak and what a strong man does in his dreams; we have seen that the weak man dreams of things almost exactly as he experienced them, while the strong man transforms and re-arranges them, colouring then by his own character. Pursuing this to the end, we can compare our result with a man's behaviour in waking life. We then dis-cover the following intensely interesting fact. Let a man tell you his dreams; notice how one dream-picture is linked to another; study the configuration of his dreams. Then, having formed an idea of the way he dreams, look at the man himself. Stimulated by the idea you have formed of his dream-life, you will be able to form a good picture of the way he acts in life. This leads us to remarkable secrets of human nature. If you study a man as he acts in life and learn to know his individual character, you will find that only a part of his actions proceeds from his own being, from his ego. If all depended on the ego, a man would really do what he dreams; the violent character would be as violent in life as in his dreams, while one who leaves his life almost unchanged in his dreams, would hold aloof from life at all points, let it take its course, let things happen, shaping his life as little as he shapes his dreams.

And what a man does over and above this—how does that happen? My dear friends, we can very well say that it is done by God, by the spiritual beings of the world. All that man does, he does not do himself. In fact, he does just as much as he actually dreams; the rest is done through him and to him. Only, in ordinary life we do not train ourselves to observe these things; otherwise we would discover that we only actively participate in the deeds of life as much as we actively participate in our dreams. The world hinders the violent man from being as violent in life as in dreams; in the weak man instincts are working, and once more life itself adds that which happens through him, and of which he would not dream.

It is interesting to observe a man in some action of his life and to ask: what comes from him, and what from the world? From him proceeds just as much as he can dream, no more, no less. The world adds something in the case of a weak man, and subtracts something in the case of a violent man. Seen in this light, dreams become extraordinarily interesting and give us deep insight into the being of man.

Many of the things I have been saying have, it is true, dawned upon psycho-analysts in a distorted, caricatured form. But they are not able to look into what lives and weaves in human nature, so distort it all. From what I have put before you today in a quite external way, you can see the necessity of acquiring a subtle, delicate knowledge of the soul if one wants to handle such things at all; otherwise one can know nothing of the relations between dreams and external reality as realised by man in his life. Hence I once described psycho-analysis as dilettantism, because it knows nothing of man's outer life. But it also knows nothing of man's inner life. These two dilettantisms do not merely add, they must be multiplied; for ignorance of the inner life mars the outer, and ignorance of the outer life mars the inner. Multiplying d x d we get d-squared: d x d = d². Psycho-analysis is dilettantism raised to the second power.

If we study the alternating states of waking and sleeping in this intimate way, we can perceive and understand so much of the essential nature of man that we are really led to the portal of the Science of Innitiation.

Now consider something else that I told you in these lectures: the fact that man can strengthen his soul forces by exercises, by meditations; that he then advances beyond the ordinary more or less empty, abstract thinking to a thinking inherently pictorial, called ‘imagination’. Now it was necessary to explain that man, progressing in ‘imagination’, comes to apprehend his whole life as an etheric impulse entering earthly life through conception and birth—strictly speaking, from before conception and birth. Through dreams he receives reminiscences of what he has experienced externally since descending to earth for his present life. ‘Imagination’ gives us pictures which, in the way they are experienced, can be very like dream-pictures; but they contain, not reminiscences of this earthly life, but of what preceded it. It is quite ridiculous for people who do not know Spiritual Science to say that imaginations may be dreams too. They ought only to consider what it is that we ‘dream of’ in imaginations. We do not dream of what the senses offer; the content represents man's being before he was endowed with senses. Imagination leads man to a new world.

Nevertheless there is a strong resemblance between the second kind of dream and imaginative experience when first acquired through soul exercises. We experience pictures, mighty pictures—and this in all clarity, we might say exactness. We experience a universe of pictures, so wonderful, so rich in colour, so majestic that we have nothing else in our consciousness. If we would paint these pictures, we should have to paint a mighty tableau; but we could only capture the appearance of a single moment just as we cannot paint a flash of lightning, but only its momentary appearance, for all this takes its course in time. Still, if we only arrest a single moment we obtain a mighty picture.

Let us represent this diagrammatically. Naturally, this will not be very like what we behold; nevertheless, this sketch will illustrate what I mean.

Look at this sketch I have drawn. It has an inner configuration and includes the most varied forms. It is inwardly and outwardly immense. If, now, we become stronger and stronger in concentrating, in holding fast the picture, it does not merely come before us for one moment. We must seize it with presence of mind; otherwise it eludes us before we can bring it into the present moment. Altogether, presence of mind is required in spiritual observation. If we are not only able to apply sufficient presence of mind in order to seize and become conscious of it at all, but can retain it, it contracts and, instead of being something all-enibracing, becomes smaller and smaller, moving onward in time. It suddenly shrinks into something; one part becomes the human head, another the human lung, a third the human liver. The physical matter provided by the mother's body only fills out what enters from the spiritual world and becomes man. At length we say: what the liver is we now see spiritually in a mighty picture in the pre-earthly life. The same is true of the lung. And now we may compare it with the content of the second kind of dream. Here, too, an organ may appear to us in a beautiful picture, as I said before, but this is very poor compared to what imagination reveals.

Thus we gain the impression that imagination gives us some-thing created by a great master-hand, the dream something clumsy. But they both point in the same direction and represent, spiritually, man's internal organisation.

It is but a step from this to another and very true idea. When, through imagination, we discern the pre-earthly human being as a mighty etheric picture, and see this mighty etheric picture crystallise—as it were—into the physical man, we are led to ask what would happen if the dream-pictures, those relating to the inner organs, began to develop the same activity. We find that a caricature of the inner organs would arise. The human liver, so perfect in its way, is formed from an imaginative picture that points to the pre-earthly life. If the dream-picture were to become a liver, this would not be a human liver, not even a goose-liver, but a caricature of a liver. This gives us, in fact, deep insight into the whole being of man. For there is really some similarity between the dream-picture and the imaginative picture, as we now see quite clearly. And we cannot help asking how this comes about.

Well, we can go still further. Take the dream pictures of the first kind, those linked to outer-experiences. To begin with, there is nothing resembling these in imaginative cognition. But imaginative cognition reaches back to a pre-earthly experience of man's, in which he had nothing to do with other physical human beings. Imaginative vision leads to an image of pre-earthly experiences of the spirit. Just think what this implies.

When we look into man's inner life we receive the impression that certain symbolic pictures, whether they arise through imagination or in dreams [of the second kind], refer to what is within man, man's internal organisation; on the other hand, the imaginations which refer to outer experiences are connected, neither with man's internal organisation nor with outer life, but with experiences of his pre-earthly state. Beside these imaginations one can only place dream experiences of the first kind, those relating to external experiences of earthly life; but there is no inner connection here between these imaginations and these dreams. Such a connection only exists for dreams of the second kind.

Now, what do I intend by all these descriptions? I want to draw your attention to an intimate way of studying human life, a way that propounds real riddles. Man really observes life in a most superficial manner today. If he would study it more exactly, more intimately, he would notice the things I have spoken about in this lecture. In a certain sense, however, he does notice them; only, he does not actually know it. He is not really aware how strongly his dreams influence his life. He regards a dream as a flitting phantom, for he does not know that his ego is active in one kind of dream, his astral body in another. But if we seek to grasp still deeper phenomena of life, the riddles to which I referred become more insistent. Those who have been here some time will have already heard me relate such facts as the following: There is a pathological condition in which a person loses his connection with his life in memory. I have mentioned the case of an acquaintance of mine who one day, without his conscious knowledge, left his home and family, went to the station, bought a ticket and travelled, like a sleep-walker, to another station. Here he changed, bought another ticket and travelled further. He did this for a long time. He commenced his journey at a town in South Germany. It was found later, when the case was investigated, that he had been in Budapest, Lemberg (Poland), etc. At last, as his consciousness began to function again, he found himself in a casual ward in Berlin, where he had finally landed. Some weeks had passed before his arrival at the shelter, and these were quite obliterated from his consciousness. He remembered the last thing he had done at home; the rest was obliterated. It was necessary to trace his journey by external inquiries.

You see, his ego was not present in what he was doing. If you study the literature of this subject you will find hundreds and hundreds of cases of such intermittent ego-consciousness. What have we here? If you took trouble to study the dream-world of such a patient you would discover something peculiar. To begin with, you would find that, at least at certain periods of his life, the patient had had the most vivid dreams imaginable, dreams that were especially characterised by his making up his mind to do something, forming certain intentions.

Now, if you study the dreams of a normal person you will find intentions playing a very small part, if any. People dream all sorts of wonderful things, but intentions play no part, as a rule. When intentions do play a part in a dream, we usually wake up laughing at ourselves for entertaining them. But if you study the dream-life of such people with intermittent consciousness, you will find that they entertain intentions in their dreams and, on waking, take these very seriously; indeed, they take these so seriously that they feel pangs of conscience if unable to carry them out. Often these intentions are so foolish in the face of the external physical world that it is not possible to carry them out; this hurts such people and makes them quite excited. To take dreams seriously—especially in regard to their intentions (not wishes)—is the counterpart of this condition of obliterated consciousness.

One who is able to observe human beings can tell, in certain circumstances, whether a person is liable to suffer in this way. Such people have something which shows they never quite wake up in regard to certain inner and outer experiences. One gradually finds that such a person goes too far with his ego out of his physical and etheric bodies in sleep; every night he goes too far into the spiritual and cannot carry back into the physical and etheric bodies what he has experienced. At last, because he has so often not brought it completely back, it holds him outside—i.e. what he experiences too deeply within the spiritual holds the ego back and he passes into a condition in which the ego is not in the physical body.

In such a radical case as this it is especially interesting to observe the dream-life. This differs from the dream-life of our ordinary contemporaries; it is much more interesting, but of course this has its reverse side. Still, objectively considered, illness is more interesting than health; from the subjective side—i.e. for the person concerned, as well as from the point of view of ordinary life, it is another matter. For a knowledge of the human being the dream-life of such a patient is really much more interesting than the dream-life of an ordinary contemporary.

In such a case you actually see a kind of connection between the ego and the whole dream-world; one might say, it is almost tangible. And we are led to ask the following questions: What is the relation of the dream pictures that refer to internal organs, to the imaginations that also refer to internal organs?

Well, viewed ‘externally’, the pictures of man's inner organisation that are given in imagination, point to what was within man before he had his earthly body, before he was on the earth; the dream-pictures arise when once he is here. The imaginations point to the past, the dream-pictures to the present. But though an ordinary dream-picture that refers to an internal organ would correspond to a caricature of that organ, while the imagination would correspond to the perfect organ, nevertheless the caricature has the inherent possibility of growing into a perfect organ.

This leads us to the studies we shall be pursuing tomorrow. They centre in the question: Does the content of such an imagination relate to man's past life, and is the dream the beginning of the imagination of the future? Will a dream-picture of today evolve into the imagination to which we shall be able to look back in a future life on earth? Is the content of the dream perhaps the seed of the content of the imagination?

This significant question presents itself to us. What we have gained through a study of dreams is here seen in conjunction with the question of man's repeated lives on earth. You see, moreover, that we must really look more deeply into the life of man than we usually find convenient; otherwise we shall find no point of contact with what the Science of Initiation says about the being of man.

By such a lecture as this I wanted especially to awaken in you some idea of the superficial way man is studied in the civilisation of today, and of the need of intimate observation in all directions. Such intimate observation leads at once to Spiritual Science.

This is the 7th of 10 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin between 24 January and 20 April, 1918. (No. 67 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961). The title of this series of lectures is: The Eternal in the Human Soul, Immortality and Freedom. They were published in German as: Das Ewig in der Menschenseele. Unsterblichkeit und Freheit.

Everyone who is to some extent eager for knowledge and has realised how useful a true understanding of reality can be to human life desires to familiarise himself with the content of Spiritual Science as presented here. On the other hand, its methods for the attainment of knowledge are often irksome, because Spiritual Science is bound to show that the ordinary faculties of cognition—including those applied in orthodox science—cannot lead deeply into the spiritual life; and to be obliged to turn to different sources of knowledge is not an easy matter. True, if the study of Spiritual Science is free from preconceived notions and ideas, it will become more and more evident that ordinary, healthy human reason—provided it really gets to grips with life—is capable of grasping what Spiritual Science has to offer. But people are not willing, above all in the case of Spiritual Science, to apply this healthy human reason and ordinary knowledge of life, because they do not want to turn to something that can be achieved only through actual development of the soul. Although the facts presented by Spiritual Science can be investigated only by the methods to be described here, once the facts have been investigated they can be grasped by healthy human reason and ordinary experience. But because a certain mental laziness makes people hesitate to penetrate into Spiritual Science, even those who at the present time have an urge to know something about it prefer to turn to sources more in line with the methods applied in the laboratories, dissection-rooms and other institutions of modern science. And so in order to acquire a certain insight into the spiritual life, people who cannot bring themselves to approach Spiritual Science itself often prefer to concern themselves with abnormal phenomena of human life to be observed in the outer world of the senses. These people believe that the study of certain abnormal phenomena will elucidate certain riddles of existence. That is why Spiritual Science is so repeatedly and so mistakenly associated with endeavours to gain knowledge of spiritual reality by investigating all kinds of abnormal, borderline regions of human life.¹

For this reason I must also speak of borderline regions which through their very abnormality point to certain secrets of existence but can only really be understood through Spiritual Science and without it are bound to lead to countless fallacies about the true nature of spiritual life. The vast range, the interest and enigmatic character of the borderline region of which I shall speak is to some extent known to everyone, for it points to certain connections between external life and its hidden foundations. I am referring to man's life of dream. Starting from this life of dream it will be necessary also to consider other borderline regions of existence whose phenomena, if experienced in an abnormal way, might induce the belief that they lead a man to the foundations of life. I shall therefore also speak of the phenomena of hallucination, of visionary life and of somnambulism and mediumship, as far as this is possible in the framework of a single lecture.

Anyone who would have these borderline regions of human life explained in the light of Spiritual Science must bear in mind those essentials of genuine spiritual investigation through which they can be elucidated. From the range of what has been described in previous lectures I want therefore to select certain matters which will provide a basis for study of the phenomena in question. Spiritual Science must depend upon development of forces of the human soul which lie hidden in the everyday consciousness and also in the consciousness with which ordinary science works. As I have indicated, through certain exercises, certain procedures carried out purely in the life of soul and having nothing whatever to do with anything of a bodily nature, the human soul is able to evoke powers otherwise slumbering within it and so to gain insight into the true spiritual life. I must now briefly describe the essential preliminaries which enable the soul to make itself independent of the bodily element in acts of super-sensible cognition.

I have said in previous lectures that the attitude to be adopted to spiritual reality must differ from that adopted to external physical reality. Above all it must be remembered that what is experienced in the spiritual world by the soul when free from the body, cannot, like an ordinary mental picture, pass over into the memory in the actual form in which it is experienced. Whatever is experienced in the spiritual world must be experienced each time anew, just as an outer, physical reality must be confronted anew when it is actually in front of us and not merely remembered. Anyone who believes he can have genuine spiritual experience in the form of mental pictures which he can remember just as he remembers those arising in everyday life, does not know the spiritual in its reality. When, as is possible, a man subsequently recollects spiritual experiences, this is due to the capacity to bring such experiences into his ordinary consciousness, just as in,the case of perceptions of some outer, physical reality. Then the pictures can be recollected. But he must learn to distinguish between this recollection of mental pictures formed by himself and a direct experience of a spiritual happening, a direct encounter with a spiritual being. A special characteristic of body-free experience, therefore, is that it does not immediately penetrate into the memory.

Another characteristic is that when, in other circumstances, a man practises in order to be able to achieve something, the exercises enable him to do this more easily and with greater skill. In the domain of spiritual knowledge, strangely enough, the opposite is the case. The oftener a man has a certain spiritual experience, the more difficult it is for the soul to induce in itself the condition where this same spiritual experience is again possible. It is therefore also necessary to know the methods by which a spiritual experience can again become accessible, because it does not allow itself to be repeated in the same way.

The third characteristic is that genuine spiritual experiences pass so rapidly before the soul that alert presence of mind is required to capture them. Otherwise a happening passes so quickly that it has already gone by the time attention is directed to it. A man must learn to be master of situations in life where it is impossible to procrastinate and reflect upon what decision to take, but where decision must be rapid and sure. This alert presence of mind is essential if spiritual experiences are to be held in the field of attention. I mention these characteristics of spiritual experience because they at once show the great difference between an experience in the spiritual world and an experience in the outer, physical world of the senses and how little justification there is for people who know nothing to insist that the spiritual investigator simply brings ideas and concepts acquired from the outer world of the senses as reminiscences into some kind of imaginary spiritual world. Anyone who really knows something about the characteristics of the spiritual world, knows too that it differs so entirely from the world of the senses that nothing can be imported into it from the latter, but that the development of special faculties is essential before the spirit can confront spiritual reality.

Certain other conditions must also be fulfilled by one who wishes to be capable of genuine spiritual investigation. The first condition is that the soul must be immune as far as possible from inner passivity. A man who likes to give himself up dreamily to life, to make himself ‘passive’, as the saying goes, in order that in a dreamlike, mystical state the revelations of spiritual reality may flow into him—such a man is ill-adapted to penetrate into the spiritual world. For it must be emphasised that in the realm of true spiritual life the Lord does not give to his own in sleep! On the contrary, what makes a man fit to penetrate into the spiritual world is vigour and activity of mind, zeal in following trains of thoughts, in establishing connections between thoughts seemingly remote from each other, quickness in grasping chains of ideas, a certain love of inner, spiritual activity. This quality is indispensable for genuine spiritual investigation. Mediumistic tendencies and a talent for genuine spiritual knowledge are as different as night from day.

Another condition is that in his life of soul a genuine spiritual investigator must to the greatest possible extent be proof against suggestion, against allowing himself to be influenced by suggestion; he must confront the things of external life too with a discriminating, sceptical attitude of mind. A person who prefers to be told by others what he ought to do, who is glad not to have to arrange his life according to his own independent judgment and decisions, is not very suitable for spiritual investigation. Anyone who knows how great a role is played by suggestion in normal everyday life, also realises how difficult it is to combat the general tendency to succumb to it. Think only to what extent, in public life particularly, people allow things to be suggested to them, how few efforts they make to create in their own souls the conditions for independence of judgment and for governing their affairs by their own will. Those who study the findings of spiritual research because their healthy intelligence makes them desire relationship with the spiritual world are very often accused of blind belief in the investigator. But the fact is that blindly credulous adherents are anything but welcome to an investigator who tries to penetrate with conscious vision into the spiritual world. A society composed of credulous followers would be the caricature of a society suitable for the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. The genuine spiritual investigator will find, to his joy, that sooner or later those who come close to him develop independence of judgment and a certain inner freedom also in regard to himself, that they do not adhere to him blindly, under the influence of suggestion, but because of common interest in the spiritual world.

I shall speak now of yet another characteristic which can elucidate the relation of spiritual reality to physical reality and the attitude to be adopted by the human soul to the spiritual world. It is very often said that the spiritual investigator takes with him from the physical world of sense preconceived ideas which he then uses to describe some imagined spiritual world. But as I have already said, genuine experience of the spiritual world takes a different form each time. We may be quite sure that what we experience in the spiritual world always proves to be different from anything we previously believed. For this reason it is clear that the spiritual world can be reached only when the soul has been made fit for the experience of it. There is no question of carrying reminiscences of the physical world into an imaginary world. But there is something else which—paradoxical as it seems—will be confirmed by decades of experience of the things of the spiritual world. It is that however highly trained a person may be in body-free cognition, however well practised in seeing into the spiritual world, when he contemplates a particular being or happening—especially a happening which indicates a relationship between the spiritual world and outer, physical reality—he will very often find that his first experience is false. Hence the spiritual investigator acquires the caution which leads him to anticipate that the first experience will be misleading. Then, as he perseveres, it becomes evident to him why he was on the false track, and by comparing what is subsequently correct with what was formerly fallacy, he finally recognises the truth of the matter in question. As a rule, therefore, a genuine spiritual investigator will not communicate his findings to his fellow-men until a long time has elapsed since particular researches were made, because he knows that above all in the realm of the spiritual life, delusion and error have to be encountered and overcome in order finally to recognise the truth. This delusion and error are due to the fact that in investigating the spiritual life we take our start from the material world; we bring our powers of judgment, our mode of perception, from the material world into the spiritual world. At first we are always inclined to apply what we have thus carried into the spiritual world—hence the erroneous conclusions. But the very fact of having to realise each time anew how different the attitude adopted to spiritual things must be from that adopted to physical things, enables us for the first time to perceive the intimate characteristics of spiritual experience. It certainly seems paradoxical as compared with ordinary, everyday experience. But one who is able to look into the spiritual world knows, firstly, that the eternal, immortal essence of the human soul cannot come to conscious expression in the ordinary experiences connected with the body; the immortal essence of the soul is concealed, because here, in physical life, through his bodily constitution, a man can acquire knowledge of the physical only. That is why it is so necessary for the spiritual investigator to emphasise unambiguously that knowledge of the spiritual is acquired outside the body. The moment the body is in any way involved in the acquisition of such knowledge, this knowledge is falsified, even when remembrance—which is preserved in the body—plays a part.

Another outcome of a real grasp of the spiritual life is the knowledge that a man expels himself from the spiritual world to which the eternal core of the human soul belongs, when he surrenders his free will in any way and under the sway of coercion or suggestion allows what is in his soul to come to expression through his body in actions or even only through speech—that is to say, when anything that comes to expression through his body has not been mediated through the will. One fundamental condition for experiencing the spiritual world, therefore, is to recognise that the bodily functions must play no part in this knowledge. The other fundamental condition is that a man must make every effort to ensure that whatever he accomplishes through his body is the outcome of his own power of judgment, of the free resolve of his own will.

I was obliged to speak first of these conditions because they provide the basis for studying the abnormal provinces of the life of soul which we shall be considering. In true spirit-knowledge, what otherwise remains unconscious is revealed and this revelation sheds light upon the eternal, essentially free, core of being in the human soul. It is therefore possible to compare what is thus revealed with abnormal manifestations of the life of soul. The upsurging and ebbing world of dream which beats against human consciousness rather than actually passing into it, cannot really be counted among these abnormal manifestations. The world of dream has become the subject of much scientific and philosophical research, although it cannot be said that the methods applied with such brilliance in natural science are particularly suited to penetrate into the real nature of this borderline province of human life. The same may be said of the contention that thinking must be in strict keeping with that of natural science and surrender completely to the conceptions arising from it. Although, understandably enough, modern people claim to be free from any tendency to believe in authority, they are very inclined, under certain conditions, to do so. Whenever somebody who is publicly reputed to be a great thinker produces a bulky volume dealing with the investigation of abnormal psychic phenomena, numbers of people who really do not understand much about the subject, praise the book to the skies, and then, as a matter of course, our contemporaries, while disclaiming belief in authority, accept it as a reliable basis.

Among philosophical treatises on the life of dream, I want to refer particularly to a book on dream-phantasy by Johannes Volkelt, a German scholar of brilliant intelligence and at present Professor of Philosophy and Education at Leipzig University. He wrote the book in 1875, before he had reached professorial status. Even today this really valuable book is still held against him and is doubtless responsible for the fact that he is still only an Assistant Professor. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the very significant Swabian aestheticist, wrote a fine treatise about Volkelt's book. But academic prejudices, which during recent decades have led to a definite view of what is or is not ‘scientific’, are to blame for the fact that what might have been inaugurated, even if only meagrely, by that book, lies fallow and is obscured by current prejudices which prevent any real penetration into the life of dream.

In the framework of one short lecture I can give little more than a sketch, but I want for all that to speak of particular points in such a way that they can be illumined by Spiritual Science.

Everyone is familiar with the external characteristics of the upsurging and ebbing life of pictures arising in dreams. I shall speak of a few of these characteristics only. The dream arises as the result of some definite instigation. Firstly, there are dreams which have been instigated by the senses. A dream may arise because a clock is ticking away beside us. In certain circumstances the pendulum-beats become the trampling of horses, or perhaps something else. Certain sense-images, therefore, are found in the dream. I lay particular stress on this, for dream-experience bases itself upon numerous impressions received by the outer senses. But what works upon the outer senses never works in the dream in the same form as in the ordinary waking life of day. The sense-impression is always transformed into symbolism—a transformation that is actually brought about by the life of soul.

Such dreams occur very frequently. Johannes Volkelt narrates the following in his book. A schoolmaster dreams that he is giving a lesson; he expects a pupil to answer ‘ja’ to a question. But instead of answering ‘ja.’ the pupil answers, ‘jo’—which may well be a source of irritation to the teacher. He repeats the question and now the pupil does not answer ‘jo’, but ‘j-o’, whereupon the whole class begins to shout ‘fire-jo!’ The teacher wakes up as the fire-engine is racing past and the people are shouting, ‘fire-jo!’ The impression made upon the senses has been symbolised into the complicated action of the dream.

Here is another example given by Volkelt—wherever possible I shall only quote examples actually recorded in literature. A Swabian woman dreams that she is visiting her sister in a large town. The sister is the wife of a clergyman. The two sisters are in church listening to the sermon. The clergyman starts in a perfectly decorous way but suddenly seems to get wings and begins to crow like a cock. One sister says to the other: ‘What a very peculiar way to preach!’ And the sister replies: ‘The Consistory Court has decreed that this is how sermons are to be preached.’ Then the woman wakes up and hears a cock crowing outside. The crowing of the cock which would otherwise have been heard simply as such, has been transformed in this way in the soul; everything else has grouped itself around the crowing. These are examples of dreams instigated by the senses.

But dreams can also be due to inner stimuli, and again it is not the stimuli as such which appear, but the sense-image which has been transformed, cast into symbolism, by the soul. For example, someone dreams of a very hot stove; he wakes up with his heart thumping. Dreams of flying which occur very frequently, are due, as a rule, to some kind of abnormal process taking place in the lungs during sleep. Hundreds of such examples could be quoted and the different categories of dreams enumerated at great length. Although we cannot enter exhaustively into the deeper aspects of sleep, I want still to speak of certain points.

Literature offers no evidence of particular success in discovering elements in the human soul capable of showing what is actually going on in the soul when bringing about such transformations of the outer stimuli of dreams. But the question of paramount interest is this. What, in reality, is it in the soul that causes such different imagery to be connected with an outer stimulus, or also with a memory-picture emerging from the darkness of sleep? Here it must be said that what is actually working in the dream is not the faculty which in ordinary waking life enables man to link one mental picture to another. I could give you hundreds of examples which would prove what I can illustrate now only by one, for the sake of comparison. Think of the following. A woman dreams that she has to cook for her husband—sometimes an arduous duty for a housewife. She dreams that she has made one suggestion after another to him. To the first suggestion he answers: ‘I don't want that!’ To the second suggestion ‘I don't want that either!’ To the third suggestion: ‘Don't for heaven's sake inflict that upon me!’ And so it goes on. In the dream the woman is very miserable about all this and then an idea occurs to her. ‘There is a pickled grandmother on the floor; she is rather tough, but what about cooking her for you tomorrow?’ That too is a dream actually recorded in literature! Nobody who knows anything about the subject will doubt that the dream took such a form. You will at once say to yourselves : Anxiety is at the bottom of it. Something has happened to make the woman anxious. The mood of anxiety—which need not have anything whatever to do with the idea of the cooking and the rest—is transformed into a dream-picture of this kind. The picture is merely a clothing for the mood of anxiety. But during sleep the soul needs this picture in order to throw off the mood of anxiety. Just as you laughed about the pickled grandmother, so does the soul devise this grotesquely comic image as an adjunct to the other content of the dream, in order to overcome the anxiety and to induce an ironic, humorous mood. An oscillation, an alternation of moods can always be perceived in dreams and—like the pendulum of a clock—a swing between tension and relaxation, between anxiety and cheerfulness, and so on. What is of paramount importance in man's life of feeling is always the decisive factor in the structure assumed by the pictures of dream. From this point of view, therefore, the dream takes shape in order that certain tensions in the soul may be overcome. The picture which, as such, has no special significance, is born from this need to lead tension over to relaxation, relaxation over to tension. The soul conjures before itself something that can be an imaginative indication of the real gist of the matter.

Examination of the whole range of the life of dream brings to light two peculiar features which must be particularly borne in mind. The one is that what is usually called logic plays no part in dreams. The dream has a rule entirely different from that of ordinary logic for the way in which it passes from one object to the other. Naturally you will be able to insist that many dreams take a perfectly logical course. But this is only apparently the case, as everyone who can observe these things intimately, knows. If dream-pictures present themselves in logical sequence, the reason is not that you yourself produce this sequence during the dream but that you are placing side by side, mental images which you have already connected together logically at some time or which have been so connected by some agency in life. In such a case, logic in the dream is reminiscence; the logic has been imported into the dream; the action of the dream does not in itself proceed according to the rules of ordinary logic.

It can always be perceived that a deeper, more intimate element of soul underlies the action of the dream. For example—I am quoting something that actually happened. Someone dreams that he must go to see a friend and he knows that this friend will scold him for some reason. He dreams that he gets to the door of the friend's house, but at that moment the whole situation changes. On entering the house he comes into a cellar in which there are savage beasts intent upon devouring him. Then it occurs to him that he has a lot of pins at home and that they spurt fluids which will be able to kill these beasts. He finds then that he has the pins with him and he spurts the fluids at the savage animals. They suddenly change into little puppies which he feels he want to pat.—This is a typical course taken by a dream and you can see that here again it is a matter of the tension caused by the anxiety as to what the friend is going to say—the anxiety takes expression as the savage beasts—being relaxed as a result of the soul having brought about the transformation of the wild beasts into lovable puppies. Obviously, something quite other than logic is in evidence here.—And anyone who is familiar with examples of dreams knows that the following has often happened. Before going to bed, someone has made efforts to solve a problem, but has failed. Then, in a dream, as he says, he discovers the solution and can write it down in the morning when he wakes up. His story is quite correct but those who cannot rightly investigate such things will always misunderstand them. It must not be thought that the actual solution was found in the dream. What was found in the dream and is then thought to have been remembered, is something quite different. It is something that need have very little logic about it, but produces in the soul the beneficial effect of tension being led over to relaxation. Before going to sleep the man was in a state of tension because he could not solve the problem. He brooded and brooded; something was amiss with him. He was healed by the form taken by his dream and was therefore able to solve the problem when he woke up.

Moral judgment is also silent in dreams. It is well known that in dream a man may commit all kinds of misdeeds of which he would be ashamed in waking life. It can be argued that conscience begins to stir in dream, that it often makes itself felt in a very remarkable way. Think only of the dreams contained in Shakespeare's plays—poets generally have a good reason for such things—and you will find that they might appear to suggest that moral reproaches make themselves particularly conspicuous through dreams. Again this is an inexact observation. What is true is that in the dream we are snatched away from the faculty of ordinary moral judgment which in connection with human beings in outer life we must and can exercise. If the dream seems to present moral ideas and moral reproaches in concrete pictures, this is not due to the fact that as dreamers we form moral judgments, but that when we act morally the soul feels a certain inner satisfaction; we are inwardly gratified about something to which we can give moral assent. It is this state of satisfaction, not the moral judgment, that presents itself to the soul in the dream. Neither logic or moral judgment play any part at all in dreams. If the search for truth is sincere it is essential to set to work with far greater exactitude and depth than is usual in life and in science too. Such matters elude the crude methods usually applied. It is extremely significant that neither logic or moral judgment gain admittance into the world of dream.

I want to speak of still another characteristic of the dream which even when considered from the external point of view, indicates how the soul, when it dreams, is related to the world. This relation can, it is true, be fully clarified only by Spiritual Science. Anyone who studies the sleeping human being will be able to say, even from the external standpoint, that in sleep the human being is shut off alike from the experiences arising from his own life and also from the environment. Spiritual Science does of course make it clear that when man falls asleep he passes as a being of soul and spirit into the spiritual world and on waking is again united with his body. It is not necessary to take this into consideration at the moment, but simply to keep clearly in mind what can also be apparent to ordinary consciousness. The human being is shut off from his environment, and what rises out of his body into his ordinary consciousness is also stilled during sleep. Pictures do indeed surge up and fade away in dreams but their actual relation to the external world is not changed; the form assumed by the pictures is such that this relation remains as it was. The relation to the external world, that which as bald environment giving contour to the outer impressions, approaches man as he opens his senses during waking life—this does not penetrate into the dream. Impressions can indeed be made upon a man, but the characteristics of what the senses make out of those impressions are absent. The soul puts an emblem, a symbol, in the place of the ordinary, bald impression. Therefore the actual relation to the outer world does not change. This could be corroborated in countless cases. In the normal dream the human being is as shut off from the external world as he is in normal sleep; he is also shut off from his own body. What rises up from his bodily nature does not come to direct expression as is the case when he is united in the normal way with his body. If, for example, someone's feet get overheated because of a too warm covering, he would be aware in the ordinary waking state that his feet are too hot. In the dream he is not aware of it in this form, but he thinks he is walking on burning coal or something of the kind. Again it is a matter of transformation brought about by the soul.

Attempts to explain the nature of dream simply by using methods and sources available to external science will always be in vain, because there is nothing with which the dream can truly be compared. It occurs in the ordinary world as a kind of miraculous happening. That is the essential point. The spiritual investigator alone is in the position of being able to compare the dream with something else. And why? It is because he himself knows what is revealed to him when he is able to penetrate into the spiritual world. He realises that the ordinary logic holding good for explanations of the outer life of sense, no longer avails. Those who rise into the spiritual world must be capable of expressing in images what is experienced in that world. That is why I have called the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world, ‘Imaginative Cognition’. At that stage it is realised that the images themselves are not the reality but that through the images the reality is brought to expression. These images must, of course, be shaped in accordance with the true laws revealed by the spiritual world and not be the outcome of arbitrary phantasy. The spiritual investigator learns to know—quite apart from the physical world of sense—how one idea or mental picture is related to another, how images are given shape. This first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world is then capable of being compared with the unconscious activity at work in dreams. There a comparison is possible, and moreover something else comes to light as well.

A man who makes real progress in knowledge of the spiritual world gradually begins to experience that his dreams themselves are changing. They become more and more rational, and crazy images such as that of the pickled grandmother and the like gradually turn into pictures which have real meaning; the whole life of dream becomes charged with meaning. In this way the spiritual investigator comes to know the peculiar nature of the relation between the life of dream and the kind of life he must adopt in the interests of spiritual investigation. This puts him in the position of being able to say what it is in the soul that is actually doing the dreaming. For he comes to know something besides, namely, the condition of soul in which he finds himself while experiencing the pictures and ideas of genuine Imagination. He knows that with his soul he is then within the spiritual world. When this particular condition of the life of soul is experienced, it can be compared with the condition of the soul in dreams. This scrupulous comparison reveals that what is actually dreaming in the soul, what is active in the soul while the chaotic actions of dreams are in play, is the spiritual, eternal core of man's being. When he dreams, man is in the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul.

That is what emerges as the one result of spiritual investigation. I will characterise the other by telling you about a personal experience. Not long ago, after a lecture I had given in Zürich on the subject of the life of dream and cognate matters, I was told that several listeners who, on the basis of training in what is called Analytical Psychology or Psycho-Analysis, wanted to be considered particularly clever, were saying after my lecture: ‘That man is still labouring under mistaken notions which those of us who are schooled in Psycho-Analysis have long since outgrown. He believes that dream-life should be taken as something real, whereas we know that it is merely a symbolic form of the life of the psyche.’—I shall not go further into the subject of Psycho-Analysis today but simply remark that this ‘cleverness’ is based upon gross misunderstanding. For under no circumstances will a genuine spiritual investigator take what presents itself in dreams as reality in the actual form in which it is there presented. Unlike the psycho-analysts, he does not take even the course of the dream as being directly symbolic; he knows that the gist of the matter is something entirely different. Anyone who is familiar with dreams knows that ten or even more people may tell of dreams with utterly different contents, yet the underlying state of affairs is the same in all of them. One man will say that in his dream he was climbing a mountain and on reaching the top had a delightful surprise; another says that he was walking through a dark passage and came to a door which opened quite unexpectedly; a third will speak of something else. In the course they take the dreams have no outer resemblance whatever, yet they originate from an identical experience, namely tension and relaxation which are symbolised in different pictures at different times. What is of essential importance, therefore, is not the factual reality of the dream, not even its symbolism as the psycho-analysts maintain, but its inner dramatic action. From the sequence of the meaningless pictures we must be able to recognise this dramatic action, for that is the reality in which the soul with its spiritual core of being is living while it dreams. This is an entirely different reality from what is expressed in the pictures presented in the dream. There you have the gist of the matter. The dream therefore points to deep subconscious and unconscious grounds of the life of soul. But the pictures unfolded by the dream are only a clothing of what is actually being experienced in the course of it.

Again and again I must emphasise that as far as I am concerned there is no question whatever of wishing to revive ancient notions in any domain. The antecedents of what is said here are not derived from any medieval or so-called oriental occult science, as was the case with Blavatsky and with others who draw upon all kinds of obscure sources. Whatever is said here is based on the consciousness that it can hold its own in the face of modern scientific judgment. If an opportunity for proving this were to occur, it could certainly be used. Spiritual Science is presented with full consciousness of the fact that we are living in the scientific age, with full cognisance of what natural science is able to say about the riddles of existence, but with full cognisance, too, of what it is not able to say about the regions of the spiritual life.

Where do the pictures which form the course of the dream, originate? It is like this. A man who is really free from his body in spiritual experience has the spiritual world before him with its happenings and its beings, whereas the dreamer has not yet awakened his consciousness to the degree where this is possible for him. His soul resorts to the reminiscences of ordinary life and the dream arises when the soul impacts the body. The dream is not experienced in the body but it is caused by the impact of the soul with the body. Hence the things which constitute the course of his life present themselves to the dreamer, but grouped in such a way that they bring to expression the inner tendencies of which I have spoken. In reality, therefore, the dream is experienced by a man's own essential being of soul-and-spirit. But it is not the Eternal that is experienced; what is experienced is the Temporal. It is the Eternal that is consciously active in the dream; but this activity is mediated by the Transitory, the Transient. The essential point is that in the dream the Eternal is experiencing the Temporal, the Transitory—the content of life.

I have now briefly explained the nature of dream as viewed in the light of Spiritual Science and why it is that the content of the dream is not an expression of what is actually going on in the soul when relaxation follows tension and tension follows relaxation. In the life of dream the soul is in the world of the Eternal, free from the body. But what enters into the consciousness as the clothing of this experience arises from the connection with the ordinary circumstances of life.

I pass now to the second borderline region of the life of soul where manifestations of the unconscious may occur in the form of hallucinations, visions and the like.² Even philosophers capable of sound judgment, such as Eduard von Hartmann for example, whose powers of discrimination and discernment I rate exceedingly highly, have been led to the mistaken belief—because they could not grasp the nature of the dream from the standpoint of Spiritual Science—that what comes as a picture before the soul in dream is really identical with a picture arising as an hallucination or vision. But these phenomena are essentially different from each other. Because the genuine spiritual investigator knows what condition of soul is present when he stands within the spiritual world and can compare this with the condition of the soul prevailing in dream, he is able to assess the meaning of certain peculiarities of the life of dream, for example, the absence of logic. The spiritual investigator knows that sensory experience is not without significance but that equally with body-free experience between death and a new birth it has its meaning and purpose in the life of man. It is precisely in our intercourse with the outer, material world that we can assimilate the logic streaming into the soul from that world. The spiritual investigator knows too that moral judgment comes to direct expression in physical life, in the experiences arising from civilisation. Genuine Spiritual Science will never lead to escapism or false asceticism but rather to a full appreciation of physical life, because logic, the capacity for moral judgment and moral impulses, are inculcated into the soul through its contact with the outer world during physical life.

In point of fact the dream passes only slightly into the abnormal life of soul. Spiritual Science shows that the soul is free from the body in dream, that the experiences of dream are independent of bodily experiences; they are separated from the link with the outer world that is present in waking life. In the dream, man is actually free from his body. Is this also the case in hallucinations, in visionary experiences? No, it is not! Hallucinations and visions are due precisely to abnormalities of the physical body. Visionary, hallucinatory activity in the life of soul can never occur independently of bodily experiences. Something in the body must always be disturbed or diseased, must be functioning improperly or too feebly, thus preventing a man from entering into the full connection that is present when he is using his nerves and senses in such a way that in experiencing himself, he is also experiencing the outer world. If an organ connected in any way with the faculty of cognition is diseased or too weak, a phenomenon such as an hallucination or a vision may arise: it resembles spiritual experience but is fundamentally different from it. Whereas in spiritual experience a man must be free from the body, this hallucinatory, visionary life sets in because something is either diseased or functioning too feebly in the body. Now what really lies at the bottom of hallucinations and visions? The ordinary process of ideation (Vorstellen) taking place normally in sensory life succeeds in being independent of those forces in the human organism which cause growth in childhood, bring about the inner functions of the body—metabolism, digestion, and so forth. I cannot speak in greater detail today of how that which as a bodily function underlies the normal life of ideation arises through part of the organism being lifted out of the sphere of purely animal life, of the processes of growth, digestion, metabolism and so forth. The basis of the normal life connected with the nerves is that a kind of soul-organism develops like a parasite out of the process of digestion, metabolism, etc. Now when, owing to particularly abnormal conditions, some organ of cognition is so affected that this soul-organism does not work through itself alone but that the bodily organ with its animal functions is working as well—this is due to disease or weakness of the organ concerned—the result is that the man does not devote himself to mental life independently of the forces of growth, digestion and metabolism, but that hallucinations and visions arise. What is organic activity in the vision ought really to be promoting growth, bringing about digestion and the distribution of the more delicate processes of metabolism. What happens in this condition is that animal functions are surging upwards into the soul-organism.

Life is not by any means sublimated in hallucinations and visions; on the contrary it is far rather permeated by the animal functions which do not, in other circumstances, extend into the soul-organism. What ought to be serving quite different processes is carried up into those of cognition, of mental perception. Hence hallucinations and visions are always an expression of the fact that something is not in order in the human being. True, what makes its appearance is a manifestation of the spiritual, but one of which Spiritual Science cannot make use; for Spiritual Science can make use only of what is experienced independently of the body.

You now see what an utter lack of foundation there is for the very general misconception that Spiritual Science acquires its knowledge through visions, hallucinations and the like. On the contrary, Spiritual Science shows that these states are always connected in some way with abnormalities in the body and that they must play no part whatever in its findings. Neither are hallucinations and visions ever identical in character with the pictures of dreams. The pictures of dreams arise outside the body and are only mirrored in it; hallucinations and visions arise because some bodily organ so to speak leaves a space free. If it were functioning normally the man would stand firmly in the physical world with healthy senses. But because a space is left free, the spiritual-eternal element which ought to remain invisible in the bodily organism comes to light through it. This condition is not merely a physical illness, it is a psychical abnormality, something that can only cloud and falsify the pictures from the spiritual world. Hence the fact that pictures arise when some bodily function is weakened, need cause no surprise. For how do sense-pictures come into being? They come into being because the forces which promote metabolism, digestion and the like in the normal way, are toned down and assert themselves in the soul-organism in a different form. If, then, these forces are toned down in the human being to a greater extent than is proper, abnormal consciousness is the result. The sense-pictures we have in normal consciousness are conditioned by bodily life that has been toned down to the normal extent. If the weakening is excessive, something that originates entirely from this improper condition makes its appearance. It can therefore be said that hallucinations and visions represent a striving that has been obstructed. As the human being develops from childhood to mature age, he is really striving to penetrate into his bodily organism. He endeavours so to develop his nature of spirit-and-soul that the body becomes the instrument for soul-activity. This is obstructed when something in the body is unhealthy. When the human being develops in such a way that his body becomes his servant, he grows into physical independence, into his egoity in the world of the senses, into the amount of egoism that is necessary to make him a self-based being, able to fulfil his destination as man. This egoism must of course be mingled with the necessary selflessness. The important thing is that a man shall permeate his life with the forces of his Ego. If certain obstructions make him incapable of doing so, his search for the requisite amount of egoism takes an abnormal path. This comes to expression in hallucinations and visions which are always due to the fact that through his bodily constitution a man cannot acquire the due amount of egoism necessary to his life.

To the borderline regions of the life of soul also belong the conditions produced when catalepsy or coma have led to somnambulism—which is akin to mediumship. Just as man's organism of thinking—I say expressly ‘organism of thinking’, not ‘mechanism of thinking’—must be constituted in a certain way to prevent the disorder I have just characterised as hallucination and vision from taking effect, so too the mechanism of the will—here I say ‘mechanism’—must be constituted in a certain way for normal life in the world of the senses. Just as the organism of thinking can bring about hallucinations and visions as manifestations of abnormal soul-life, so the will can be undermined when its mechanism is disturbed, quashed or paralysed in catalepsy, coma, or mediumship. True, if the spirit is not working upon it, the body is not able directly to evoke the will, but it is able, when certain organs are put out of action, when the mechanism of the will is brought to a standstill, to enfeeble the will, whereas the spiritual investigator, as I said at the beginning, can stand firmly in the spiritual world because his will works in full consciousness upon his body. If the body is paralysed in respect of the will, it quashes, suppresses, this will; man is then lifted away from the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul, as a being of eternity, and is cast into the physical environment which is, of course, also permeated with spiritual forces and entities. He is then thrust out of his real world into the element of spirit which unceasingly pervades and weaves through the physical. This is the case in somnambulism, this is the case in mediumship.

Those who in the sense indicated at the beginning of this lecture adopt an easy-going attitude where Spiritual Science is concerned, would like to investigate the spiritual world in the same way. But such people cannot reach the true spiritual world which guarantees eternal life for the soul; they can work only with what permeates and pervades the physical environment. What is working in the somnambulist, in the medium, works in the normal human being too, but differently. This may indeed sound strange, but it is nevertheless a finding of Spiritual Science. What is really working in the medium, in the somnambulist? In ordinary life we have a certain moral link with other human beings; we act out of moral impulses. I said that these moral impulses are generated by way of the physical body. We perform acts in the field of external civilisation, we learn to write, to read, we learn what the human will inculcates as a spiritual element into the outer physical world. With the forces employed by our soul in the activity of learning to read, of assimilating other cultural endowments, of entering into moral relationships with the world—with all these forces the soul of the somnambulist or the medium is connected in an abnormal way. This activity which is otherwise exercised only in the moral domain, in the domain of the cultural life, is transferred directly into the bodily constitution of the medium or the somnambulist; this is possible because the consciousness has been lowered and the soul disconnected. Whereas in normal life the human being is in contact with the surrounding world solely through his senses, in the case of the somnambulist and the medium, the whole man comes into connection, through his will-mechanism, with the surrounding world. This makes it possible for influences from a distance to take effect; a thought can also work into the distance and distant vistas—both spatial and temporal—can arise. But in most of these cases, what penetrates into the human organism is the spiritual element which pervades the physical world to which we belong as physical men, it is the spiritual element belonging to the cultural and moral life. But it penetrates in such a way that the soul is disconnected from the organism. Hence what is made manifest through the medium or the somnambulist does not lead to the being of spirit-and-soul in man but is simply a caricature of the workings of the spiritual upon man's bodily nature. Whereas in normal life the soul itself must be the intermediary between the truly spiritual and the body, in these abnormal states the spiritual is working directly on the body—but only in the sense I have described. The result is that with his consciousness disconnected, such a man becomes a kind of automaton; only those elements which belong externally to cultural or moral life are expressing themselves in him. From this it will be clear to you that, although it is disguised and masked in the most diverse way, what is to all appearances the spiritual does come to expression through mediumship and somnambulism, but only provided certain combinatory factors and associations are present; these cannot be discussed here because it would lead us too far afield. The essentials which come to expression in this way originate from the physical environment. Men who stand firmly on the ground of natural science but do not outgrow its established notions, would like to penetrate into the spiritual world to which the eternal core of man's being belongs, by taking to their aid the phenomena of somnambulism and mediumship. But this leads to countless fallacies and errors.

I shall now speak of one recent example. It is of great interest because it is characteristic of this whole domain. Here we have a scientist very highly esteemed in his own country, a scientist well versed in all the niceties of scientific methods and who therefore does not by any means go carelessly to work when he approaches these matters. I am referring to Sir Oliver Lodge, the celebrated English scientist. It is a very remarkable case, one that is connected with the present catastrophic events. Lodge was always attracted to the question of how a link could be established between the outer, physical world and the world to which man belongs when he has passed through the gate of death. But he wanted to remain firmly on a scientific foundation.—This attitude is of course characteristic of people who are not willing to have anything to do with the methods of Spiritual Science.—Lodge had a son who was serving on the French Front during the war, and one day the father received a strange letter from America. This letter informed Lodge that his son was facing great danger, but that the spirit of Myers—who had died ten years previously—would hold a protecting hand over the young man while the danger threatened. Frederick Myers had been President of the Society for Psychical Research; he had been occupied deeply with the study of super-sensible matters and Lodge and his family knew him well. It could therefore be presumed—if it is in any way accepted that a connection is possible between some happening in the super-sensible world and human life—that Myers would certainly hold a protecting hand over young Lodge when danger was looming before him. But the letter was extremely ambiguous—as letters of such a kind are always wont to be. Obviously young Lodge might be in danger, but he might also be saved from it, and then the writer of the letter would be able to say: ‘Did I not receive through a medium a message to the effect that Myers is protecting Lodge's son? Through the help of Myers the boy has been saved from the danger of death.’ But if the boy had been killed, the writer of the letter would equally well be able to say: ‘Myers is protecting him in the other world.’ If a third eventuality were possible, the letter could have been interpreted in that sense too.—It does not do to be unsceptical if we wish to get at the real truth of these matters.—Naturally, Lodge did not attach particular weight to the communication, for he was well aware that such things are capable of many interpretations.—The son was killed. Then his father received a second message to the effect that Myers was indeed protecting his son in the other world, and that there were people in England who would provide proof of it.—Certain ways of organising such matters do exist.—There were several mediums who were received into the circle of Sir Oliver Lodge's family—most of whom were sceptics. Manifestations of all kinds took place and Lodge has described them in detail in a bulky volume which is extremely interesting for many reasons. The phenomena there described do not, for the most part, differ greatly from others that have been put on record and there was no need for any particular excitement about them—nor indeed was any shown. Lodge would not have thought it worth while to describe these manifestations if something else had not happened. Because he was familiar with all the devices used in the scientific mode of research, in this instance too he set to work like a chemist making investigations in a laboratory and used every conceivable precautionary measure in order to establish the facts without possibility of dispute. People feel therefore that this book makes it possible to form a real judgment about the case in point, for Lodge describes it as a scientist would do.

Among all kinds of other cases he describes the one that may be regarded as a veritable experimentum crucis, and it caused a tremendous stir. Even the most incredulous journalists—and journalists are usually sceptical, whether or not always from well-founded judgment I could not say—were impressed by this crucial test case. The circumstances were as follows : A medium who claimed to be in communication with the soul of Myers as well as with the soul of Lodge's son, said that a fortnight before the latter was killed at the French Front, he had been photographed together with a number of his companions, and the photograph was minutely described—the placing of the officers, how young Lodge was sitting in the front row, how he was holding his hands, and so forth. It was then said that several photographs had been taken and that the grouping had altered slightly while this was being done. The different grouping was also indicated with the same precision—the position of young Lodge's hands and arms had changed, he was inclining towards the man next him, and so forth. An exact description was given of this photograph too. Now the photographs were not in England; nobody—neither the medium, nor any of the family, nor Sir Oliver Lodge himself—had seen them. It could only be assumed that the medium was rambling in imagination when describing the photographs. But lo and behold, after fourteen days these photographs arrived and tallied exactly with what the medium had said. That this was an experimentum crucis for Lodge and those intimately concerned, cannot be wondered at; and it is here that the real interest of the book lies. A genuine spiritual investigator will not, of course, be taken in—as in a certain respect Lodge himself was taken in—because the scrupulously exact presentation enables him to form an independent, objective judgment.

How comes it that a man who is not willing to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of true spiritual investigation does nevertheless find on such a path something that convinces him of the influx of a spiritual world? The genuine spiritual investigator would not be brought to a like conviction, because he knows what has actually happened in this case. Moreover he will be astonished that such a man as Lodge, in spite of his experience in scientific research, is an out and out amateur in these matters.

Anyone who has only a superficial acquaintance with these phenomena, perhaps by no means through independent vision but simply from literature, knows that in somnambulists and mediums there is a connection with the environment in the sense I have described, that the whole man is as it were transformed into sense-organs—with the result that automatic pre-visions in time arise. These pre-visions are always due to a sick or enfeebled life of soul. They have nothing to do with the world to which man belongs with the immortal part of his being; they have to do with what is spiritual in the physical sense-environment, especially with what the will of man brings to pass there. Just because Lodge describes conscientiously it becomes quite evident that the medium simply had a pre-vision, that he ‘saw’ the photographs a fortnight before they arrived in England. This may seem miraculous enough but these are quite ordinary phenomena. At all events this is not, as Lodge thinks, a proof that Myers was protecting his son. It may have been so, of course, but it would have to be investigated in research carried out in a body-free condition.

When there is unwillingness to take the path of Spiritual Science the temptations and allurements even for those who are conscientious researchers and confront such phenomena cautiously and critically, are very great. What can be learnt through these abnormal manifestations, whereby man is made into an automaton, must never become the content of a true science of the super-sensible world to which the eternal part of man's being belongs.

A great deal that might still be added would show in the same way how these borderline regions of man's life of soul point to something which, although it too rests in the realm of the Unconscious, can never reveal to man that which, in that same realm, is of the greatest significance of all—namely the spiritual world to which man belongs with the free, immortal part of his being. Among all these manifestations the life of dream alone remains within the sphere of the normal, because in dream the human being is not experiencing through the bodily constitution but through the spirit-and-soul; as a being of spirit-and-soul he strikes up against the body and the physical experiences. Hence in respect of the life of dream too, man is able to exercise correctives and to give it its right place in the rest of life; whereas in the case of what he experiences through his body in the way of hallucinations, visions, manifestations of somnambulism and mediumship he is not able to do this with his normal powers of discrimination.

In the next lecture we will go more deeply into something which in the course of cultural development brings constant blessing and upliftment to human life, namely ART. In dream, man experiences the spiritual world in such a way that as the result of impact with the bodily constitution, sense-images take shape. The experiences which arise in a true artist and in one who finds delight and inspiration in Art, also lie in regions beyond those of merely physical experience. True Art is brought from the super-sensible into the sense-regions of life, but in this case the process of clothing the experiences in pictures is not an unconscious one. Just as in the dreamer the soul's actual experience remains in the unconscious but reveals itself through what the soul—again unconsciously—adds as clothing to the experience itself, so the super-sensible experience of the artist and of the one who finds delight in a work of art, is brought into the sense-world. But in this case the clothing with the picture, with the Imagination which, arising from external life, gives the super-sensible experience a place in the sense-world, is consciously achieved. The gist of the next lecture will be that Art is in very truth a messenger from a super-sensible world, that delight in Art is a power which lifts the soul to the super-sensible world by way of sensory form, through sense-imagery.

And now to sum up what has been said today. It is true that man is led towards the region of spirit when he confronts these abnormal manifestations; for it is the spiritual world that shines into the life of man even if he is experiencing it in an abnormal way. But these abnormal manifestations may never be induced artificially, any more than pathological states may be induced for the purpose of acquiring knowledge.

What is it that remains from all these manifestations and phenomena as a vital admonition? It is that man shall find the way to true experience of the spiritual. We have heard that in the light of Spiritual Science the realm of dream is saved from the suspicion of being one of pathological experience—although naturally there may now and again be slight tendencies towards it. But when it is realised that through the seemingly chaotic life of dream man is admonished to find the path into the true spiritual world, the significance of such study becomes evident. A great world-riddle is knocking here at the door of human life. This world-riddle is the dream with its strange pictures in which logic and moral judgment are lacking but which are a definite signpost to the spiritual world itself. Hence we can find ourselves in agreement with what is said by the clear-sighted aestheticist and philosopher Vischer in his critique of Volkelt's book:

‘When the dream with all its rich meagreness, its meagre richness, with its ingenious stupidity and stupid ingeniousness, is contemplated in its unconscious creative activity, it will be recognised that it does nevertheless point to what is spiritual in the human being and can be sought after.’
And Vischer is also right when he says:

‘A man who believes that this spirit-realm of dream is not worthy to be a matter for genuine investigation, merely shows that he has not much spirit in him.’

The realm of dream is an admonition to man to seek for the spiritual world, and the aim of Spiritual Science is to fulfil this admonition. Whereas in the life of dream there can be pictures of the transitory only, for all that the soul's eternal core of being is active there, through spiritual-scientific knowledge it is possible for the soul also to be filled with pictures that give expression to the spiritual reality corresponding to its own inherent nature, thereby pointing to its allotted place in the world of spiritual reality as the senses point to its allotted place in the physical world.

REFERENCES (among many others):

Lecture-Courses by Rudolf Steiner.

True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. New edition, 1969.

Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. Lecture One.

The Occult Movement in the 19th Century (typescript).

History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Eleven lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Torquay, August, 1924. See also references below.

• 2. See references below.

If one resorts to dream phenomena in order to acquire knowledge of the soul's nature, one ultimately is forced to admit that the object of one's search is wearing a mask. Behind the symbolizations of bodily conditions and processes, behind the fantastically connected memory experiences, one may surmise the soul's activity. It cannot be maintained, however, that one is face to face with the true form of the soul.

On awaking, one realizes how the active part of the dream is interwoven with the function of the body and thereby subject to the external world of nature. Through the backward-directed view of self-observation one sees in the soul life only the images of the external world, not the life of the soul itself. The soul eludes the ordinary consciousness at the very moment one would grasp it cognitively.

By studying dreams one cannot hope to arrive at the reality of the soul element. In order to preserve the soul activity in its innate form one would have to obliterate, through a strong inner activity, the symbolizations of the bodily conditions and processes, along with the memory of past experiences. Then one would have to be able to study that which had been retained. This is impossible. For the dreamer is in a passive state. He cannot undertake any autonomous activity. With the disappearance of the soul's mask, the sensation of one's own self disappears also.

It is different with the waking soul life. There the autonomous activity of the soul can not only be sustained when one erases all one perceives of the external world; it can also be strengthened in itself.

This happens if, while awake in the forming of mental pictures, one makes oneself as independent of the external world of the senses as one is in a dream. One becomes a fully conscious, wakeful imitator of the dream. Thereby, however, the illusory quality of the dream falls away. The dreamer takes his dream pictures for realities. If one is awake one can see through their unreality. No healthy person when awake and imitating the dream will take his dream images for realities. He will remain conscious of the fact that he is living in self-created illusions.

He will not be able to create these illusions, however, if he merely remains at the ordinary level of consciousness. He must see to it that he strengthens this consciousness. He can achieve this by a continually renewed self-kindling of thinking from within. The inner soul activity grows with these repeated kindlings. (I have described in detail the appropriate inner activity in my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and An Outline of Occult Science).

In this way the work of the soul during the twilight of dreams can be brought into the clear light of consciousness. One accomplishes thereby the opposite of what happens in suggestion or auto-suggestion. With these, something out of the semi-darkness and within the semi-darkness is shifted into the soul-life, which is then taken to be reality. In the fully circumspect activity of the soul just described, something is placed before one's inner view in clear consciousness, something that one regards, in the fullest sense of the word, only as illusion.

One thus arrives at compelling the dream to manifest itself in the light of consciousness. Ordinarily this occurs only in the diminished half-awake consciousness. It shuns the clarity of consciousness. It disappears in its presence. The strengthened consciousness holds it fast.

In holding the dream fast it does not gain in strength. On the contrary it diminishes in strength. Consciousness, however, is thereby induced to supply its own strength. The same thing happens here in the soul. It is just as it is when, in physical life, one transforms a solid into steam. The solid has its own boundaries on all sides. One can touch these boundaries. They exist in themselves. If one transforms the solid into steam, then one must enclose it within solid boundaries so that it will not escape. Similarly the soul, if it would hold fast the dream while awake, must shape itself, as it were, into a strong container. It must strengthen itself from within.

The soul does not need to effect this strengthening when it perceives the images of the external world. Then the relationship of the body to the external world takes care that the soul is aroused to retain these images. If, however, the waking soul is to dream in sensory unreality, then it must hold fast this sensory unreality by its own strength.

In the fully conscious representation [Vorstellen] of sensory unreality one develops the strength to behold the spiritual reality.

In the dream state the autonomous activity of the soul is weak. The fleeting dream content overpowers this autonomous activity. This supremacy of the dream causes the soul to take the dream for reality. In ordinary waking consciousness the autonomous activity experiences itself as reality along with the reality of the sense world. This autonomous activity, however, cannot behold [anschauen] itself; its vision is occupied with the images of sense reality. If the autonomous activity learns to maintain itself by consciously filling itself with content unreal to the senses, then, little by little, it also brings to life self-contemplation [Anschaung] within itself. Then, it does not simply direct its gaze away from outer observation and back upon itself; it strides as soul activity backward and discovers itself as spiritual entity; this now becomes the content of its vision [Anschaung].

While the soul thus discovers itself within itself, the nature of dreaming is even more illumined for it. The soul discerns clearly what before it could only surmise: that dreaming does not cease in the waking state. It continues. The feeble activity of the dream, however, is drowned by the content of sense perception. Behind the brightness of consciousness, filled with the images of sense reality, there glimmers a dream world. And this world, while the soul is awake, is not illusory like the dream world of semi-consciousness. In the waking state man dreams—beneath the threshold of consciousness—about the inner processes of his body. While the external world is seen through the eye and is present in [vorgestallt] the soul, there lives in the background the dim dream of inner occurrences. Through the strengthening of the autonomous activity of the soul the vision of the external world is gradually dampened to the dimness of dream, and the vision of the inner world, in its reality, brightens.

In its vision of the external world the soul is receptive; it experiences the external world as the creative principle and the soul's own content as created in the image of the external world. In the inner vision, the soul recognizes itself to be the creative principle. And one's own body is revealed as created in the image of the soul. Thoughts of the external world are to be felt [empfunden] as images of the beings and processes of the external world. To the soul's true vision, achieved in the way described, the human body can be felt [empfunden] only as the image of the human soul which is spiritual.

In dreams, the soul activity is loosened from its firm union with the body, which it maintains in the ordinary waking state; it still retains, however, the loose relationship that fills it with the symbolic images of bodily senses and with the memory experiences that also are acquired through the body. In spiritual vision of itself the soul so grows in strength that its own higher reality becomes discernible, and the body becomes recognizable in its character of a reflected image of this reality.

Between a man's waking life and his life in sleep—which yesterday I was able to picture for you at least in outline—there comes his dream life. It may have little significance for the immediate actualities of daily existence, but it has the greatest imaginable significance for a deeper knowledge of both world and man. This is not only because what a dream signifies must, in the Spiritual Science spoken of here, be fully recognised, so that the study of it may lead on to many other matters, but also because of the particular importance of dream life as a chink, shall we say, through which certain other worlds, different from the one experienced by human beings when awake, shine into this ordinary world. So it is that the puzzling elements in dream pictures often call attention both to other worlds, below or above the one normally accessible, and also give some indication of the nature of these worlds.

On the other hand it is extraordinarily difficult, from the standpoint of higher consciousness, to go deeply into the enigmas of dream life, for dreams have power to lead people into the greatest imaginable illusions. It is precisely when dreams are in question that people are inclined to go wrong over the relation of something illusory to the reality behind it. In this connection let us consider what I have said about sleep life and repeated lives on Earth.

An example of dream life, constantly recurring in one form or another, is this. We dream we have made something that, when awake, we never would have thought of making—something indeed outside the scope of anything we could have achieved in real life. We go on to dream that we cannot find this article we think we have made, and start frantically hunting for it.

Let us look at this example more closely. In the form I have described it figures in the dream life of everyone, with variations. But let us take a concrete instance. Let us say that a tailor, though a tailor only in a small way, dreams that he has made a ceremonial coat for a Minister of State. He feels quite satisfied with his work on the coat, which should now be lying ready. Suddenly, however, the mood of the dream changes and when he looks all round for the coat that has to be delivered, it is nowhere to be found.

Here you have a dream of something that could never happen to the dreamer, but of something he can very well imagine as highly desirable. He is only a small tailor for lowly folk, who never could order such a coat. But occasionally, in his ambitious day-dreams, he may have had the wish to make some high-rank garment; though perhaps incapable of it, he might still have cherished it as an ambition.

But what underlies all this? Something very real. When in sleep a man is out of his physical and etheric bodies with his Ego and astral body, he finds himself within the being who goes through repeated lives on Earth. What gives inner strength to the sleeping man, what above all is inwardly active in his being, is the Ego together with the astral body. These need not be limited to memories of experience in the life just over, but can go back to other lives on Earth. I am not theorising, but telling you of something rooted in reality, when I say: It may be that our dreamer once had something to do—let us say in an earlier, Roman incarnation—with an order for a certain ceremonial toga. He need not have been the tailor in this case; he may have been the servant, or perhaps even the friend, of a Roman statesman. And because at that time he had such a lively desire for his lord to appear before the world in the most dignified possible guise, destiny may have brought him to his present-day calling. For in human life generally, wishes, thoughts, have an extraordinary significance; and it is possible for the memory of what has been lived through in a former life on Earth to play into a man's soul and spirit, his Ego and astral body. Then, in the morning, when he dives down with his Ego and astral body into his etheric and physical bodies, a lingering memory of the splendid ceremonial toga comes up against the conceptions possible for the tailor in his present life—conceptions always there in his etheric body. Then what remains of the old Roman experience is checked; it has to accommodate itself to ideas which are limited to making garments for quite lowly people. Now the soul that sinks down in this way may find it very difficult to transpose into another key the feeling it has had about the splendid toga; it is hard to relate this to a picture of the terrible clothes the tailor is obliged to make. So the picture of the toga, encountering this obstacle, changes into a picture of a present-day official uniform; and only later, when the man is well down into his etheric and physical bodies is this picture lost.

So between falling asleep and waking we have our whole human life. We have to bring to bear on it all that as earthly beings we can conceive and think, and by this means try to unravel the strange forms taken by dreams. The great difficulty is to distinguish the immediate content of the dream, which may be sheer illusion, from the reality which lies behind it, for the reality may be something quite different. But anyone who gradually gets accustomed to finding his way among all the intricacies of dream life will finally see that we need not pay much attention to the pictures conjured up before the soul, for these pictures are shaped by the etheric body left behind in bed. This etheric body is the bearer of our thoughts and conceptions and these are absent from our real being during sleep. We have to separate the content of these conceptions from what I would call the dramatic course of the dream, and learn so to fix our attention on the dramatic element that it prompts questions such as: If I had this experience in waking life, would it give me immense pleasure? And, if I felt pleasure and had a sense of relief in this dream, was I heading in the dream for a catastrophe? Was I leaving some kind of exhibition and suddenly everything got into confusion—there was a crash and a disaster? Such questions must be given first place in the study of dreams—not the thought-content but the dramatic incidents.

Someone may dream he is climbing a mountain, and the going is becoming more and more arduous. Finally, he reaches a point where he can go no further; huge obstructions tower up in front of him. He feels as though they were something important hanging over his life. That is certainly a dream a man could have; one could enlarge on it. But either he or someone else may have another dream: he is entering a cave leading to some kind of mountain cavern. After passing the entrance, there is still a certain amount of light, but it gradually becomes darker, until he arrives at a place where he is not only in complete darkness but meets with such appalling conditions, including cold, that he can penetrate no further into the cave.

Here, you see, we have two dreams quite different from one another in content. From the dramatic standpoint both deal with an undertaking that begins well, and then runs into great difficulties, ending in an insurmountable obstacle. The pictures are quite different, the dramatic course is much the same. In the super-sensible world, as it were behind the scenes of life, both dreams can have the same basis. In both dreams the same thing can have affected the soul; the same thing can symbolise itself in a wide variety of picture-forms.

All this shows how we have to look for the key to a dream not—as is often done—by considering its content in an external way, but by studying its dramatic course and the effect it has on the dreamer's soul and spirit. Then, when our conceptual faculty has been strengthened by the exercises referred to in the past few days, we shall gradually progress from the illusory picture-world of the dream and be able to grasp through the dramatic element the true basis of all that we experience as super-sensible reality between going to sleep and waking.

Before speaking in detail—as I shall be doing—of the dream and its relation to the physical body of man and to his spiritual element, I should like to-day to describe how, through the dream world, he is found to belong to the Cosmos as a whole. We can see how in dreams the connection between single events in life is quite different from anything we experience when we are awake. We have just seen in the example given that in waking life things appear in a certain connection according to the laws holding good in the sense-world—a later event always follows an earlier one. The dream takes events that could happen in the sense-world and makes them chaotic. Everything becomes different; everything is broken up. All that is normally bound to the Earth by gravity, like man himself, is suddenly—in a dream—able to fly. A man will perform skilful flying feats without an aeroplane. And a mathematical problem, for instance, such as we may strain every nerve to solve in ordinary life, appears in a dream to be mere child’s play. The solution is probably forgotten on waking—well, that is a personal misfortune—but at any rate one gets the idea that the obstacles which hamper our thinking in daily life have disappeared. In effect, everything in daily life with definite connections loses them to a certain extent in dreams. If we want to picture what actually happens—or appears to happen—in a dream, we can imagine the following. Into a glass of water we put some kind of soluble salt in crystalline form, and watch it dissolve. We see how its clear-cut forms melt away, how they take on fantastic shapes, until all the salt is dissolved, and we are left with a glass of more or less homogenous fluid.

This is very like the kind of experience we have inwardly in dreams. The dream we have as we go to sleep and the dream we have just before waking both draw on the experiences of the day, break them up and give them all sorts of fantastic forms—at least we call them fantastic from the point of view of ordinary consciousness. The dissolving of a salt in a liquid is a good simile for the kind of thing that happens inwardly in a dream.

It will not be easy for those who have grown up in the world of present-day ideas to grasp without prejudice facts of this kind; for people to-day—especially those who regard themselves as scientific—know remarkably little about certain things. In truth I am not saying this because I like picking holes in science. That is not at all my intention. I value the scientific approach and should certainly never wish to see it replaced by the work of amateurs or dilettanti. Even from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the great progress, the strict truthfulness and trustworthiness, of science to-day, must be given full recognition. That is an understood thing. Nevertheless, the following has to be said.

When people to-day wish to know something, they turn to earthly objects and processes. They observe these and from their observations they work out laws of nature. They also make experiments to bring to light the secrets of nature, and the results of their experiments are further laws. Thus they come to laws of a certain type, and this they call science. Then they turn their gaze to the vastness of the heavens; they see—let us say—the wonderful spiral nebulae, where they see individual cosmic bodies emerging, and so on. To-day we photograph such things and see much more detail than telescopic observation can give. Now how do astronomers proceed to learn what is going on in those far celestial spaces? They turn to the laws of nature, laws founded on earthly conditions and earthly experiments, and then start speculating as to how, in conformity with those laws, a spiral nebula could have taken form in distant space. They form hypotheses and theories about the arising and passing away of worlds by treating facts discovered in their laboratories about manganese, oxygen, hydrogen, as laws that still hold good in heavenly spheres. When by such means a new substance is discovered, unconscious indications are sometimes given that science here is not on firm ground. Hydrogen has been found everywhere in the vastness of space, and helium, for example; and another substance that has been given a curious name, curious because it points to the confused thinking that comes in. It has been called nebulium. Thinking itself becomes nebulous here, for we find nebulium in company with helium and hydrogen. When people are so simple that they apply as laws of nature knowledge acquired in earthly laboratories, and indulge in speculation about what goes on outside in the wide realms of space, after the manner of the Swedish thinker Arrhenius [Svante August Arrhenius, a pioneer of modern physical chemistry; gained Nobel prize for his work on electrical conduction in dilute solutions. In one of his books, Das Werden der Welten, 1907 (English translation, Worlds in the Making, 1908), he suggested the name “nebulium” for a hypothetical gas represented by certain then unidentified lines in the spectra of gaseous nebulae. In 1927 it was shown that the lines are due to singly and doubly ionised atoms of oxygen.]—who has done untold harm in this connection—they are bound to fall from one error into another, if they are unable to consider without prejudice the following.

Again I should like to start with a comparison. From the history of science you will know that Newton, the English physicist and natural philosopher, established the theory of what is called gravitation—the effect of weight in universal space. He extended this law, illustrated in the ordinary falling of a stone attracted by the Earth, to the reciprocal relation between all bodies in the Cosmos. He stated also that the strength of gravity diminishes with distance. For any physicists who may be present I will remind you of the law—gravity decreases with the square of the distance. Thus if the distance doubles, gravity becomes four times weaker, and so on.

For such a force it is quite right to set up a law of this kind. But while we are bound to purely physical existence, it is impossible to think out this law far enough for universal application. Just imagine in the case of a cosmic body how the force of gravity must diminish with distance. It is strong at first and then grows weaker, still weaker, always weaker and weaker.

It is the same with the spreading out of light. As it spreads out from a given source, it becomes always weaker and weaker. This is recognised by scientists today. But they fail to recognise something else—that when they establish laws of nature in a laboratory, and then clothe them in ideas, the truth and content of these laws diminish as distance from the earth increases. When, therefore, a law is established on Earth for the combining of elements—oxygen, hydrogen or any others—and if a law of gravity is set up for the earth, then, as one goes out into cosmic space, the efficacy of this law will also decrease. If here in my laboratory I set up a law of nature and then apply it to a spiral nebula in far-off cosmic space, I am doing just the same as if I were to light a candle and then believe that if I could project its rays through cosmic space on to the spiral nebula, the candle would give the same amount of light out there. I am making precisely the same mistake if I believe that a finding I establish in my laboratory is valid in the far reaches of the Cosmos. So arises the widely prevalent mistaken idea that what is discovered quite rightly to be a natural law in a laboratory down here on earth can be applied also throughout the vast spaces of the heavens.

Now man himself is not exempt from the laws we encounter when earthly laws, such as those of gravity or of light, no longer hold good. If anyone wished to discover a set of laws other than our laws of nature, he would have to journey further and further away from the Earth; and to find such laws in a more intimate, human way, he goes to sleep. When awake, we are in the sphere where the laws of nature hold sway and in all that we do we are subject to them. For example, we decide to lift a hand or arm, and the chemico-physical processes taking place in the muscles, the mechanical play of the bony structure, are governed by the laws discovered in earthly laboratories, or by other means of observation. But our soul goes out in sleep from our physical and etheric bodies, and enters a world not subject to the laws of nature. That is why dreams are a mockery of those laws. We enter an entirely different world—a world to which we grow accustomed in sleep, just as when, awake in our physical body, we accustom ourselves to the world of the senses. This different world is not governed by our laws of nature; it has laws of its own. We dive into this world every night on going out of our physical and etheric bodies. Dreams are a power which forcibly opposes nature's laws.

While I am dreaming, the dream itself shows me that I am living in a world opposed to these laws, a world which refuses to be subject to them. While going to sleep in the evening and moving out of my physical and etheric bodies, I am still living half under the laws of nature, although I am already entering the world where they cease to be valid. Hence arises the confusion in the dream between natural laws and super-sensible laws; and it is the same while we are waking up again.

Thus we can say that each time we go to sleep we sink into, a world where the laws of nature are not valid; and each time we wake we leave that world to re-enter a world subject to those laws. If we are to imagine the actual process, it is like this. Picture the dream-world as a sea in which you are living, and assume that in the morning you wake out of the waves of dream-life—it is as if you arose out of the surge of those waves. You move from the realm of super-sensible law into the realm of intellectual, material law. And it seems to you as though everything you see in sharp outlines on waking were born out of the fluid and the volatile. Suppose you are looking, say, at a window. If you first dream of the window, it will indeed appear as though born out of something flowing, something indefinite perhaps, imbued with all manner of fiery flames. So the window rises up, and if you had been dreaming vividly you would realise how the whole sharply outlined world of our ordinary consciousness is born out of this amorphous background—as if out of the sea arose waves which then took on the forms of the everyday world.

Here we come to a point where—if as present-day men we are investigating these things anew—we feel reverent wonder at the dreamlike imaginations of earlier humanity. As I have said during these days, if we look back to the imaginations experienced even in waking life by the souls of those early peoples, imaginations embodied in their myths, legends and sayings of the gods, which all passed before them in so hazy a way compared with our clear perception of nature—when we look back on all this with the help of what can now be discovered quite independently of those old dreamy imaginations, we are filled with veneration and wonder. And if in this sphere we search again for truth, it echoes down from ancient Greece in a word which shows that the Greeks still retained some knowledge of these things. They said to themselves: “Something underlies the shaping of the world, something out of which all definite forms arise, but it is accessible only when we leave behind the world of the senses while we are asleep and dreaming.” The Greeks called this something, “Chaos”. All speculation, all abstract inquiry into the nature of this chaos, has been fruitless, but men to-day come near to it when it plays into their dreams. Yet in mediaeval times there was still some knowledge of a super-sensible, scarcely material substance lying behind all material substance, for a so-called quintessence, a fifth mode of being, was spoken of together with the four elements: earth, water, air, fire—and quintessence.

Or we find something that recalls the mediaeval vision when the poet with his intuitive perception says that the world is woven out of dreams. The Greeks would have said: The world is woven out of the chaos you experience when you leave the sense-world and are free of the body. Hence, to understand what the Greeks meant by “chaos” we must turn not to the material but to the super-sensible world.

When from the point of view of what is revealed to us on the path I have been describing here—the path leading through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, to higher knowledge and super-sensible worlds—when we follow all that goes on during our dreaming, sleeping and re-awaking, then we see that a man sleeps himself out of his daytime state into his life of sleep, out of which dreams may arise in a way that is chaotically vague, but also inwardly consistent. Behind, in bed, the physical body is left with the etheric body which is interwoven with the physical, giving it life, form, and power of growth. This twofold entity is left in the bed.

But another twofold entity goes out during sleep into a form of super-sensible existence which I might also describe to you in relation still to dream existence. For the higher knowledge given by Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, it presents itself in the following way.

When a man goes out from his physical body and etheric body, his individuality resides in his astral body. As I said before, there is no need to be held up by words. We must have words, but we could just as well call the astral body something else. I am about to describe something concerning the astral body, and we shall see that the name is not important but rather the concepts that can be attached to it. Now, this astral body is made up of processes. Something happens in a man which develops out of his physical and etheric bodies, and it is these happenings which represent the astral body; whereas our concepts, our thoughts, are left behind in the etheric body.

Within the astral body there is spiritualised light, and cosmic warmth permeated by the force of the capacity for love. All this is present in the astral body, and at the time of waking it dives down into the etheric body. There it is held up and appears as the weaving, the action, of the dream. It may also appear in this way when, freeing itself from the physical and etheric bodies, it leaves the world of concepts. Thus it belongs to the nature of the astral body to carry us out from our physical and etheric bodies.

As I have already said, the astral body is that part of our being which actually opposes the laws of nature. From morning to night, from waking till going to sleep, we are subject to these laws—laws which in relation to space and time we can grasp through mathematics. When we sleep, however, we extricate ourselves both from the laws of nature and from the laws of mathematics—from the latter laws because our astral body has nothing to do with the abstractions of three-dimensional space. It has its own mathematics, following a straight line in one dimension only. I shall have to speak again about this question of dimensions. It is truly the astral body that releases us from the laws of nature, by which we are fettered between waking and sleeping; it is also the astral body that bears us into a completely different world, the super-sensible world.

To describe this process schematically we must say: When we are awake we carry on our life in the sphere where the laws of nature hold good; but on going to sleep we go out from there with our astral body. While we are living here in our physical and etheric bodies, our astral body, as a member of our being, is subject to the laws of nature, and in all its movements and functions lives entirely under those laws. On leaving the physical and etheric bodies, the astral body enters the super-sensible world and is subject to super-sensible laws, which are completely different. The astral body, too, is changed. While we are awake it is, as it were, in the straitjacket of nature's laws. Then it goes to sleep, which means that it leaves the physical and etheric bodies and moves in a world whose laws are in tune with its own freedom. Now what is this world? It is a world giving freedom of movement to the Ego-organisation which, together with the astral body, is then outside the physical and etheric bodies. Every night the Ego becomes free in the world to which the astral body carries it—free to carry out its own will in this world where the laws of nature no longer prevail.

In the time between going to sleep and waking, when our astral body is no longer subject to these laws, and we are in a world where the force of gravity, the law of energy, in fact all laws of that kind have ceased to be valid, the way is clear for those moral impulses which down here, during waking life, can find expression only under the constraint of the world of the senses and its ordering. Between sleeping and waking the Ego lives in a world where the moral law has the same force and power as the laws of nature have down here. And in that world where in sleep it is set free from laws of nature, the Ego can prepare itself for what it will have to be doing after death. In coming lectures we shall be speaking about this road from death to a new birth.

Between going to sleep and waking, the Ego can prepare in picture form, in Imaginations—which are not concepts, but strong impulses—for what it will have to strive for in the later reality of the spirit. When the Ego has gone through the gate of death, moral laws take the place that the laws of nature hold in the physical world of the senses.

Thus we can say that the Ego, even as a quite small spiritual seed, works upon what it has to carry through after death in the world of the spirit. Here, in what the Ego works upon in picture form during sleep, are indications of what we shall be able to carry over—not through any laws of nature but by reason of the spiritual world—from this life on Earth to the next. The causal effects of the moral impulses we have absorbed can be followed up here only when we have disposed ourselves in inward obedience to them. Just as the Ego during sleep works upon the moral impulses, and continues its work between death and a new birth, so these impulses acquire the force that otherwise the laws of nature possess, and in the next human body, which we shall bear in our following life on earth, they clothe themselves in our moral disposition, in our temperament, in the whole trend of our character—all wrongly ascribed to heredity. This has to be worked upon during sleep by the Ego when, freed by the astral body from the world of nature, it enters a purely spiritual world. Thus we see how in sleep a man prepares and grows familiar with his own future.

What, then, do the dreams show us? I would put it like this. During sleep too the Ego is active, but what it does is shown us by dreams in illusory pictures. In earthly life we are unable to take in what is already being woven during sleep for our next life on Earth. At the beginning of this lecture I explained how the dream, in the same confused way in which it presents the experiences of a past incarnation, also shows, in a chaotic form, what is prepared as a seed for humanity in future times.

Hence the right interpretation of dreams leads us to recognise that they are like a window through which we have only to look in the right way—a window into the super-sensible world. Behind this window the Ego is actively weaving, and this weaving goes on from one earthly life to the next. When we can interpret a dream rightly, then, through this window from the transitory world in which we live as earthly men, we already perceive that everlasting world, that eternity, to which in our true inner being we belong.

Yesterday I tried to show how the confusion in dreams arises from the fact that during sleep a man crosses the so-called Threshold unconsciously or half-consciously. Leaving the physical world of the senses, he enters the spiritual world and there encounters three worlds—a memory of the ordinary physical world, the soul world, and the real world of spirit. Events both inward and outward, experienced in our ordinary earthly life, are gathered together from what these three worlds reveal. But they are split apart when in sleep we enter the super-sensible world, and what we experience is not then related to the world where it belongs. That is why, for the usual memory-consciousness, deceptions and illusions arise in dreams. Imaginative consciousness does not see the dream merely in this way, but makes it an object of observation, just as we look towards a distant point in physical space—though now, with Imagination, we look towards something distant in time. We do not simply remember what is dreamt; we look at it, and so for the first time we arrive at a true conception of what a dream is. Thus we find how a dream is interpreted rightly only when we do not relate it to the physical, naturalistic world, but to the spiritual—above all, in most cases, to the moral world. The dream will never tell what it is expressing if its content is given a physical interpretation, but only when the interpretation is in accordance with the spiritually moral.

To illustrate this, let us turn to the confusion of the dream I told you about yesterday—the dream in which someone going for a walk is suddenly overcome with shame at finding himself without clothes in a crowded street. I remarked how the whole mood of soul in dream-consciousness is due to our confronting three different worlds. Looking at a dream of this kind in the right way, however, we see that although its content appears to belong to the realm of the senses, yet through this medium the spiritual-moral is seeking to reveal itself. Hence, anyone having such a dream ought not to look at the immediate, symbolical course it takes, but should ask himself: Haven't I sometimes had a tendency in daytime consciousness not to be completely truthful about myself with others? Haven't I perhaps been too fond of following the fashion in what I wear—altogether too apt to take refuge in convention? Is it not a characteristic of mine to give people a false impression of what I really am?

When anyone lets his thoughts take this course, he gradually arrives at the moral, spiritual interpretation of the dream. He says to himself: When during sleep I was in the super-sensible world, I met with spiritual beings there—they told me that I should not be present in a cloak of falsehood, but as I really am inwardly, in soul and spirit.

When we interpret dreams in this way, we come to their moral, spiritual truth. A whole host of dreams can be interpreted thus.

People of an older chapter in history, who even in the dreamy symbolism of sleep were conscious of the Guardian of the Threshold, took to heart his warning not to carry with them what belongs to the physical world of the senses when they enter the spiritual world. Had these men dreamt they had no clothes on in the street, it would never have occurred to them that they ought to have been ashamed; this is something that holds good for the physical world, for a man's physical body. They would have given heed to the warning that what holds good for the physical does not hold good in the spiritual world, and that what appears in the spiritual world is being said to human beings by the Gods. A dream, therefore, had to be interpreted as an utterance of the Gods. Only during the course of human evolution have dreams come to be interpreted in a naturalistic sense.

Or let us take another common dream. The dreamer is going along a path that leads him into a wood. After a while he realises that he has lost his way and cannot go any further. He tries to do so, but the path comes to an end and trees block the way. He begins to feel uneasy.

Now in ordinary consciousness this dream is easily taken at its face value. But if on thinking over it we forget all naturalistic associations, the spiritual world will say to us: This confusion you have met with is in your own thoughts. In waking consciousness, however, people are often loath to admit how confused their thinking is and how easily they reach a point where they can make no progress but only go round in a circle. This inclination is particularly characteristic of our present civilisation. People consider themselves enlightened thinkers, but in reality they dance around in a circle with their thoughts—either about conventional trivialities or about atoms, which are intellectual constructions of their own. In ordinary consciousness, naturally, they are not disposed to admit this.

In a series of symbolical pictures the dream brings out a man's true nature, and it is spiritual beings who are speaking through it. When anyone takes his dream experience in the right way, his self-knowledge will be greatly enhanced.

Another common human characteristic is that people allow themselves to be led by their instincts and impulses to do what is most congenial to them. For example, they find pleasure in doing something or other, but they are not ready to admit that they are doing it for their own satisfaction. They invent some way of interpreting it differently for their ordinary consciousness—they say perhaps that they are doing it for anthroposophical or occult or esoteric reasons, connected with a high mission or something of that sort. With this kind of self-justification they cover up—and this occurs with extraordinary frequency—an endless amount of all that rules and rages in the depths of our animal life. A dream—which wishes to reveal through symbolical pictures the forces which really hold sway even in the soul and spirit of the dreamer—may present a picture of the man pursued by wild beasts and trying vainly to escape. We shall interpret truly the moral significance of such a dream, not by looking at its outward events, but by accepting the self-knowledge it offers us. We have to recognise it as a warning to search for the inner truth about our own nature and to consider whether this does not resemble—if only slightly—animal instinct rather than what we ideally conjure up.

Hence it is possible for dreams to warn people in countless ways and to set them right. When a dream is related in the true way to the higher world, it can have a guiding influence on a man's life, and then, when the stage of conscious Imagination is reached, one can see how the dream, which at first naturally offers even to Imaginative knowledge pictures drawn from the sense-world, is metamorphosed entirely into moral-spiritual happenings.

Thus we see how the dream can be said to lead ordinary consciousness into the spiritual world, if only it is taken in the right way. But I have said also that on raising ourselves through Imagination to the spiritual world, we are not in the same state of soul as during our life here on Earth. In this life, I stand here, the table is there outside me; there is a physical gap between me and the table. The moment I enter the spiritual world, this separation ceases. I no longer stand here with the table over there; it is as if my whole being were spreading out over the table and the table were taking me into itself. In the spiritual world we sink right into whatever we perceive. Hence our experience, either in dreams or consciously in Imagination, should not be related merely to our inner life, but we can speak in a spiritual-scientific sense if we say with the poet that the whole world is woven out of dreams. It is certainly not woven out of the play of atoms, which is a dream of the scientists, but out of what I have described as the “chaos” of the Greeks, out of the weaving of our dreams and of our conscious Imagination. I have called it both subjective and objective, for the world is not woven purely subjectively; but we have to explain certain aspects of the world as being woven out of dreams.

For example, if we are looking at a seed, we should not be content to explain it by the laws of physics and chemistry. A scientist who sees nothing more than those laws in a seed, or in an embryo, cannot possibly explain them; for nature is dreaming in seed and embryo—their very essence is the weaving life of a dream. Take the seed of a plant—in it a dream is living and weaving. You can never enter into this with the intellect, for that is limited to nature's laws; you must approach it with the human faculty which lives otherwise in a dream or in conscious Imagination.

The same kind of dreaming that lives thus in the seed is active also in our whole organism throughout our life on Earth. Hence we should not look in our organism merely for the working of chemical and physical forces. When a man is there before us physically, we have to look upon him in his external physical form as a being who is living just for a time in the physical world of the senses. Behind him lives something else, invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, in so far as these are physical. But it can be perceived in Imagination, and also in what can be experienced in the unconscious Imagination of a dream. In the whole of a man's body nature is dreaming. Nature's way of thinking is not like man's intellectual thinking—it is a dreaming. Out of this dreaming the forces of our digestion and of our growth are guided, and everything is given form.

When we look back in earthly existence we generally start from this age—what shall we call this age of ours? We could take one of its symptoms and call it the age of the typewriter. Thus we go back from this age of the typewriter to the time when printing was first introduced; and going still further back we come perhaps to the time of the Romans, to the time of the Greeks, and then we arrive at the age in the East from which the Vedic records come. We are then left with no external documents. Many treasures have been excavated from the tombs of the Egyptian kings, but we still come at last to a time with no records, where we have to rely on Imaginative and Inspired spiritual knowledge. There we meet with a frontier beyond which, for ordinary consciousness, the past is vague, very much as sleep lies beyond the dream. By going back in this way through the temporal evolution of the world, we come in fact to that dream-veil we can experience every night.

If we reach that point with conscious Imagination, the further past lights up in a spiritual way. But it appears different from the world we learn about intellectually and from ancient records. This remote past in world-evolution, lying behind a veil of dreams, reveals man in direct connection with divine Spirits. He is himself still a divine soul-being; and the divine-spiritual Beings, whose destiny does not include entering an earthly body, meet together with him while he awaits his incarnation on earth.

When, therefore, we look back through history to this veil of chaos, to the dream-veil of which we have been speaking during the last few days, we see the divine Spirits foregathering with the still spiritual souls of men destined to dwell on Earth.

Moreover, we shall see how these things, connected as they are with human evolution, are at the same time connected with cosmic evolution. Where in a remote past this veil appears to Inspired Imagination, we see, too, how within cosmic evolution—of which we shall have to speak more precisely—the Moon, previously united with the Earth, detaches itself and goes out into cosmic space, there to circle the Earth. Thus we gaze back on a dream-veil, a veil of Imagination, and looking through it we find the Earth united with the Moon, and human beings in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. When this dream-veil appears to the retrospective gaze of Imagination, we perceive the momentous cosmic event of the Moon, in a quite different form, sliding out of the Earth and going forth into cosmic space as a separate body. So we look further back to the evolution of the Earth, of mankind, and of the world, when these were all united with the Moon. Man was already there, but as a being of soul and spirit only.

As we gaze further and further back, we find no epoch in cosmic evolution when man was not there, at least in some primal form. So that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we cannot say that for millions of years the Earth was evolving merely inorganically or with creatures of a lower order, with man emerging only after that. We find man in a different form connected at every stage with that cosmic evolution to which we look back when, behind the veil of chaos and the dream, we can rise through conscious Imagination to that which appears to us as the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

As I have said, when we look at a seed or anything in an embryonic state, Imaginative cognition reveals in it the weaving of a dream. We see how something real, though expressed in dream-pictures, holds sway over the material part of the seed. Anyone able to perceive the spiritual in the world will find it everywhere, though in a great variety of forms. It is precisely the spiritual that goes through the most varied metamorphoses. And when we have thoroughly grasped how in the seed of a plant, in the embryo of an animal, this real dream-weaving prevails, we are justified in asking: How is it, then, with the apparently dead world of the minerals? If here we look out of the window or go along the street, we see the bare hills, a world that seems entirely lifeless, and the question at once arises: If in any plant seed we pick up there is a dream-picture ruling, how is it with these rocky mountainous masses, and with all the lifeless substance that forms the ground we tread on in the physical world? If in the plants we see the ruling of spirit, which in the weaving of a dream seizes with comparative ease upon the material element, so in the same way through Imaginative cognition we find the spiritual in these rocky masses, but here the spiritual consists of individual spiritual beings.

These spiritual beings, however, are in a state not of dreaming but of deep sleep. When you look at these rocks and hills you must not think of them as permeated by a slumbering amorphous mist; you should think of individual spiritual beings sleeping there. Presently we shall see how these spiritual beings have come into existence through having been split off from higher beings with a higher consciousness. We shall see how they themselves, having in their present state only a sleep-consciousness, are the result of that separation, and how these elemental beings are asleep everywhere out there in the inanimate world. When we walk over this mountainous mass of rock, we should be aware that all around us there slumbers the creative weaving of the spirit in concrete form. And when we enter further into the sleeping of the spirit-weaving forms in the lifeless world, we become aware in these elemental beings of a certain mood. Imagination shows us these beings, but it is Inspiration that teaches us about their mood. In these elementals of the mountains, the rocks, and the soil, there lives what we can discover in ourselves when we are waiting for something with justified expectation. The weaving and creating of soul and spirit in the seemingly lifeless rocks is permeated by this same expectant mood.

In fact, these beings are waiting to awake from deep sleep into a state of dreaming. We learn this through Inspiration, and more particularly when we enter right into these beings through Intuition. All that confronts us out there, in those hills, is expecting that one day it will be able to dream, and so with dream-consciousness to take hold of earthly substance that is ground down into lifeless matter, and from these rocks and hills to conjure forth once more as embryos, as seeds, living plants. It is indeed these beings who bring before our souls a wonderful magic of nature, a creating from out of the spirit.

And so, as we go about here among these rocks and look at them in the physical light they reflect, they can reveal to us, not in any symbolical sense but as real knowledge, how they are now sleeping, how in the future they will be dreaming, and how, later still, they will come to the fully awake life of elemental nature-beings, who will one day become beings of pure spirit.

The physical material in a plant is still in a condition accessible to the dream-weaving of the spirit. In the rocks, matter is crumbling away. Looking back with Imagination and Inspiration, we realise how everything lifeless has arisen from the living. It is when the living becomes lifeless that the sleeping spirituality can sink into it. This sleeping spirit waits in the lifeless until it can wake into dreams and lead over the lifeless into cosmic embryonic life.

Now the various parts of the Earth show in different ways this sleep of spiritual beings in the mountains, in the firm crust of the Earth. It might be said: The sleep of beings awaiting their future is different in regions such as this from their sleep in other parts of the Earth. Here in Penmaenmawr we find that the particular configuration of the Earth, and the historical character of the rocks, enable these sleeping beings to rise to the aeriform, to interweave even with the light, while in other parts of the Earth this has long ceased to be so. Thus it is that here, if we look on the weaving as due not to the aerial atmosphere alone, but to the prevailing soul-atmosphere, which permeates the air just as the human soul permeates a man's body, then in Penmaenmawr we find that this soul-element in the atmosphere is different from elsewhere. I will give just one example to make this clear.

Suppose that in a certain region Imaginative cognition exerts itself to call up an Imagination of what is really going on there. This Imagination may be more or less easy or difficult to hold on to, for the possibility of retaining an Imagination in consciousness varies in different regions. Here we are in a region where Imaginations continue for a remarkably long time and so are able to become very vivid.

The wise men of the Druids, or others of that kind, sought out regions for their temples and sanctuaries where the conditions were such as to allow Imaginations to remain and not immediately to vanish away like clouds. Hence we can understand how it was that such centres for the holy places of the Druids were still sought for up to comparatively recent times. In this region it has always been felt that the difficulty of holding an Imagination is not so great as in other places. Everything, of course, has a light side and a shadow side. When an Imagination remains, Inspiration is made harder, though it gains in strength. Because of that, whatever the spiritual world has to say in this place streams down with—one might say—greater intensity, but in words which are weightier and more difficult.

Therefore, even where the spiritual is in question, differentiations are to be found throughout the Earth. A map might be drawn indicating the places where, for Imaginative consciousness, there is no difficulty in holding Imaginations. Those regions where they soon pass away could be given a different colour, and we should get an extraordinarily interesting map of the Earth. For the prevailing character of soul-atmosphere here, we should need a particularly strong colour—a sparkling, shining colour, full of life.

Hence I fully believe that those taking part in this lecture-course will be able to perceive here something of what I would call the esoteric mood of the elementals. It looks in at the windows, meets us on our walks, in fact is present everywhere in a quite special way. I am particularly grateful to the organisers of the course for having thus chosen a spot where the esoteric may be said to meet one at every turn. It does so indeed in other places, but not with the same ease and directness. So I am especially thankful for the choice of this place, out of many possible for the holding of a course such as this. From the point of view of the subjects discussed, this course may be said to take its place, in a wonderfully beautiful way, in the whole evolution of the Anthroposophical Movement.

It will be clear from the descriptions I have been giving you that between the physical world of the senses and the spiritual, super-sensible world, there is a barrier which with a certain rightness we call the Threshold of the spiritual world.

I have already pointed out in various ways how necessary it is that we should be able to cross this Threshold, and we have still to speak about it in greater detail. But you will have gathered already from my lectures that in older periods of human evolution this crossing of the Threshold was a rather different matter from what it is at the present day. In those ancient times people were able to cross in another way because even by day their consciousness was dreamlike, but for that very reason more alive to the super-sensible. Thus, in the way I have pictured, they passed the Guardian of the Threshold half-consciously, dreamily, both on going to sleep and on waking.

Here we can see a transition from men of an older type, with little freedom, to those who were becoming increasingly free. This former determinism was bound up with the fact that on going to sleep, and on awaking, men had some perception of the Guardian of the Threshold, who stood there giving warning. Now, in place of this unfree situation, we have the incapacity of present-day consciousness to see into the spiritual world, which signifies an increasing freedom: herein lies a principle of human progress.

Hence we can say that, looked at from the spiritual world, people have lost a great deal precisely because in the course of their evolution they have had to be led towards freedom. What has been lost, however, must be regained, in the way that Anthroposophy, for example, would show. And now is the historical point of time when a striving to regain what has been lost must begin.

But everywhere, among people of very various kinds, there still rises up something inherited from an earlier age, when man's relation to the spiritual world was different. So that to-day, in the consciousness of those given up to intellectualism, there is a strict frontier set up, as a rule, between what they experience in the world of the senses and what lies beyond in the spiritual world. The frontier is in fact so rigorously maintained that even enlightened spirits are unwilling to admit the possibility of crossing it.

In my brief sketch of the way into the super-sensible world, I have indicated that it is possible to cross the frontier and to enter that world in full consciousness. But as a relic from the time when a man entered the spiritual world in a more instinctive, unconscious way, and even in his day-consciousness had more in him of the spiritual world, there still rises up into his evolution to-day a certain heritage from the past. And this is something we must imperatively understand through conscious spiritual cognition. For, if not rightly understood, it manifests itself in many deceptive ways, and in these matters such errors can become very dangerous. Hence in the course of these lectures, intended to describe the evolution of man and of the world, I must speak about this question of a boundary, where what was natural and taken for granted among the people of former epochs re-appears to-day, and can lead to dangerous illusions in those who have not the requisite clear knowledge for dealing with it.

Among these phenomena, situated for ordinary consciousness at the frontier between the sense-world and the super-sensible, are visions. I mean the visions where, in a state of hallucination more or less controlled by the person concerned, pictures arise which have quite definite forms and colours—they may even seem to speak—but correspond to nothing external. For normal perception, the object is outside; the image, in a shadowy way within; and a person is perfectly conscious of how the shadowy, conceptual image is related to the external world. The vision arises of itself, claiming to be a reality on its own account. A person subject to such visions becomes incapable of estimating rightly what reality there is in the pictures which appear before him without his initiative.

How, then do visions come about? They come about because the human being still possesses the capacity for carrying over into his waking world what he experiences during sleep, and of bringing it into conceptual form just as he does with his sense-perceptions. Whether, after perceiving a clock that exists physically for the senses, I make an inner picture of it, or whether, after experiencing in a dream the form and inner reality of an external object, I wake up and make a picture of my experience, the only difference between the two processes is that I am in control of one of them—hence the image of it is more shadowy and flat—while the other process is outside my control. In the latter case I carry nothing of the real present into my conceptual life, but something experienced when the soul was outside in a past—perhaps long past—sleep, and out of this dream-experience I build up a vision.

In an earlier age of human evolution, when the relation of people both to the physical world and to the spiritual world was ruled by instinct, such visions were perfectly natural; it is human progress that has made them the uncontrolled, illusory things they are to-day. We must therefore be quite clear that modern man lacks something: when he has some experience in the spiritual world during sleep and is returning to the physical world, he no longer hears the warning of the Guardian of the Threshold: “All that you have experienced in the spiritual world you should note well and carry back to the physical world.” If he does carry it back, he will know what is contained in the vision. But if the vision appears to him only in the physical world, without his realising that he has brought it back from the spiritual world, so that he fails to understand what it really is, then he is without guidance, and at the mercy of illusion where his visionary experience is concerned. So we can say: Visions come about because a man carries over unawares his sleep-experience into his waking life, and in his waking life he then forms conceptions of the experiences—conceptions which are much richer in content than the ordinary shadowy ones, and these he builds up into vivid visions complete with colour and sound.

Another thing that comes about is this. A man carries over into his life of sleep the feelings and perceptions of the kind he has in physical life. Then, when he is in the act of carrying this over into the open sea of sleep-life, he is warned to be careful not to do anything foolish. If the sleep is very light—a far more common condition in ordinary life than is realised, for we are often just a little asleep when walking about quite normally, and we ought to be more aware of this—we may then, without noticing it, carry over the Threshold our everyday faculty of perception. Then arise those obscure feelings, as if one were inwardly watching something happening in the future, either to oneself or to someone else, and we have a premonition. Thus, whereas a vision comes about when experience during sleep is carried down into waking life and the threshold is crossed unconsciously, premonition comes about when we are in a light sleep without realising it and, thinking we are awake, carry over the Threshold, again ignoring the Guardian, our daytime experience. This, however, lies so deep down in the subconscious that it is not noticed. We are, of course, at all times connected with the whole world; and if we could draw this knowledge up out of the subconscious, we should be able to draw up much else also.

You will now see how, because these legacies from the evolutionary past can still be experienced, visions arise on one side of the Threshold, premonitions on the other. But a man may also halt at the Threshold and still not notice the Guardian. There may then be moments when inwardly, in his soul, he is as if he were enchanted. But the word “enchanted” does not quite meet the case, for he is not enchanted in the sense we generally associate with the term—it is rather that his attitude of soul undergoes a change. When he comes to the Threshold in such a way that he still perceives what is in the physical world while already perceiving what is in the super-sensible, he experiences something which is widespread in certain regions of the Earth—second sight, a half-conscious experience at the Threshold. Hence to sum up these legacies from the past, these phenomena in a man's life when his consciousness is dimmed, we have those appearing on this side of the Threshold as visions; those appearing beyond the Threshold as premonitions; those actually at the Threshold as second sight.

To-morrow I shall have to speak in greater detail of the characteristics of these three regions, going on from these to describe the worlds dimly indicated by vision, premonition and second sight—worlds which new knowledge will have to bring into the full clarity of enhanced consciousness.