The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. The Nature of Sleep

[ 1 ] It is in the nature of current scientific discourse that phenomena such as the one to which we wish to devote this hour today are, in essence, rarely discussed within mainstream science. And yet every person should sense how sleep is something that enters so deeply into the fabric of our lives, as if it were precisely through sleep that the greatest mysteries of life are to be revealed to us. People have probably always sensed this mysterious and profound aspect of sleep when speaking of it as the “brother of death.” Today, however, we will have to limit ourselves to discussing sleep as such, for the subsequent lectures will return us to the consideration of death in many respects.

[ 2 ] Everything that a person must count as part of their soul experience in the immediate sense—all the thoughts that ebb and flow from morning to night, all the sensations and feelings that make up the drama of the human soul, all the pains and sufferings, and even the impulses of the will—all of these sink, as it were, into an indeterminate darkness when a person falls asleep. And some philosophers, so to speak, might be led astray when they speak of the nature of the soul, of the nature of the spiritual that reveals itself in human nature—and yet they must admit that, within the course of a single day—even if it has been so well captured in concepts and ideas and appears to have been so thoroughly explored—it seems, in essence, to vanish into nothingness. If we consider the phenomena of soul life in the way we are accustomed to viewing them—both scientifically and from a layperson’s perspective—we must essentially conclude that they are extinguished during sleep; they are gone. For those who wish to consider only what is expressed of the soul in the physical body, the human being is, in a sense, all the more of a mystery when they reflect more deeply. For the actual physical functions and activities continue during sleep. Only what we usually refer to as the soul ceases. The question now is simply whether we are speaking of the physical and the soul in a truly accurate sense when we include this soul in its entirety within what appears to be extinguished upon falling asleep. Or whether even the ordinary observation of life—if we now set aside spiritual scientific or anthroposophical considerations entirely—can still show us that this mental aspect is also active and demonstrates its effectiveness even when it is enveloped by sleep. However, if one wishes to gain some clarity regarding these concepts—or, one might say, if one wishes to observe the phenomena of life in this realm in the proper sense—one must form precise concepts in one’s mind.

[ 3 ] By way of introduction, I would like to mention right from the start that, even with regard to this topic, spiritual science or anthroposophy is not in a position to speak in such general terms as are favored today. When we speak today of the nature of sleep, we will speak only of human sleep. For spiritual science knows very well—as was touched upon in many ways in the last lecture with regard to other areas—that what outwardly appears to be expressed in the same way in this or that phenomenon among different kinds of beings may be based on entirely different causes within the beings in question. We have hinted at this in relation to death, to the entire spiritual life, and to the structure of spiritual life in animals and humans. It would take us too far afield today to discuss the sleep of animals as well. We therefore wish to state at the outset that everything said today is intended solely for human sleep. We humans are able to speak of mental phenomena within ourselves—as everyone feels—through our consciousness, in that we are conscious of what we imagine, what we will, and what we feel. The question must now arise—and it is of extraordinary importance precisely for our observations today—: May we simply equate the concept of consciousness, as we know it in relation to the normal human consciousness of the present, with the concept of the soul or the spiritual in human beings? To express myself more clearly about these concepts for the time being, I would like to resort to a comparison. A person can walk around a room and, no matter where they are in the room, cannot see their own face anywhere. Only in a single place, where they can look into a mirror, can they see their own face. There, the image of their face meets them in the reflection. Is it not, after all, a tremendous difference for a person whether they simply walk around the room and live within themselves, or whether they also see what they are living out in the mirror image? Perhaps it could be the same with human consciousness, in a somewhat expanded sense. A person could, so to speak, live out their inner life, and this inner life itself—as they experience it—would only become knowledge, become consciousness, through the fact that it confronts them in a kind of mirror. That could very well be the case. We could therefore say, for example: It is entirely conceivable that human inner life continues regardless of whether a person is awake or asleep, but that the waking state consists in a person perceiving their inner life through a reflection—let us say, for the time being, through a reflection within their physical body—and that they cannot perceive it during sleep because it is not reflected within their physical body.

[ 4 ] While this would not have proven anything at first, we would at least have gained two concepts. We could distinguish between the life of the soul as such and the becoming conscious of the life of the soul. And we could imagine that for our consciousness—for our knowledge of the life of the soul as we currently experience it in normal human life—everything depends on our receiving the life of the soul as reflected through our physicality, because if we did not receive it in this way, we could know nothing of it. We would then be in a state quite like sleep. Now that we have arrived at these concepts, let us try to bring the phenomena of waking and sleeping life a little closer to our minds.

[ 5 ] Anyone who is truly able to observe life can very clearly sense—one might say see—how the moment of falling asleep actually unfolds. They can perceive how thoughts and feelings grow weaker, diminishing in their brightness and intensity.

[ 6 ] But that is not the most essential point. While a person is awake, he lives in such a way that he creates order in his entire life of imagination from his self-conscious “I,” as it were, synthesizing all his ideas with his “I.” For if, in waking life, we did not synthesize our mental images with our “I,” we would not be able to lead a normal inner life. We would have one group of mental images that we would relate to ourselves—which we would call our own mental images—and another group that we would regard as something foreign, like an external world. Only people who experience a splitting of their “I”—which is a pathological condition for modern humans—could have such a fragmentation of their imaginative life into different realms. For the normal person, the essential point is that all images are, as it were, perspectively related to a single point: the self-conscious “I.” At the moment of falling asleep, we clearly feel how, so to speak, the “I” is initially overwhelmed by the images, even as they grow dimmer. The images assert their independence, take on a life of their own; as it were, individual clouds of images form within the horizon of consciousness, and the “I” loses itself to the images. Then the person feels how the sensory perceptions of sight, hearing, and so on become increasingly dull, and finally feels how the impulses of the will are paralyzed. Now we must point out something that, in essence, is already clearly observed by only a few people. Furthermore, while in daily life a person sees things with definite outlines, they feel that at the moment of falling asleep something asserts itself like being enveloped in an indefinite mist, which at times feels cooling, at times manifests with other sensations in certain parts of the body: in the hands, the joints, the temples, the spine, and so on. These are sensations that a person falling asleep can observe quite clearly. These are—one might say—trivial experiences of the kind one can have every evening when falling asleep, if one so chooses.

[ 7 ] People who, through a more refined development of their inner life, observe the moment of falling asleep more closely have better experiences. They can then feel something like waking up, even as they fall asleep. What I am about to tell you can be confirmed by anyone who has adopted certain methods to truly observe these things, for it is a universal human phenomenon. At the very moment when people feel something like waking up as they drift off to sleep, one can truly say: Something awakens, like a spreading sense of conscience; something like the soul’s morality awakens. This is indeed the case. And this is evident in particular in the fact that such people make observations regarding their inner life in relation to what they experienced in the previous day’s life, observations that satisfy their own conscience. They feel this very strongly in this moment of moral awakening. At the same time, this feeling is completely opposite to the feeling of the day. While the feeling of the day manifests itself in the way that things come to us, the person falling asleep feels as if his soul were pouring out over a world that is now awakening—a world that is primarily characterized by a spreading out, a pouring out of feeling regarding what the soul can experience through itself, as through an expanding conscience, in relation to its moral inner life. There is then a moment—which, however, seems much longer to the person falling asleep—of inner bliss when it involves a spreading out over the things with which the soul can be at peace, and it is often a feeling of deep inner turmoil when the soul has cause to reproach itself. In short, the moral person, who is weighed down during the day by stronger sensory impressions, relaxes and feels particularly alive at the moment of falling asleep. And anyone who has acquired a certain method—or perhaps merely a sense—regarding such observations knows that a certain longing awakens at this moment, which we might describe something like this: One wishes that this moment might actually extend into the indefinite, that it might never come to an end. But then something like a jolt occurs, a kind of inner movement. This is, of course, extraordinarily difficult for most people to describe. Spiritual science, of course, can describe this inner movement very precisely. It is, as it were, a demand that the soul makes of itself: You must now expand even further, pour yourself out even more! But in making this demand of itself, the soul loses itself to the moral life of its surroundings. It is as if you were to drop a small drop of color into water and let it dissolve: at first you can still see the color, but as the drop spreads throughout the water, it fades more and more, and finally the color ceases to appear as such. It is the same when the soul is just beginning to expand, to live in its moral reflection; at that point, it still feels itself; but that feeling ceases when the impulse, the inner movement, sets in—just as the drop loses itself with its color in the water. This is not a theory; it can be observed and is accessible to everyone, just as a scientific observation is precisely accessible to everyone. If we observe the process of falling asleep in this way, we can indeed say: When a person falls asleep, they, as it were, set aside something that, in a certain sense, can no longer be present in their consciousness afterward. Human beings have—if I may now draw on the two ideas I outlined earlier—a moment, as it were, of parting from the mirror of the physical body, in which the phenomena of life are reflected to them. And because they do not yet have the possibility of having what is to be reflected in the body reflected in something else, the possibility of perceiving what they are ceases.

[ 8 ] However, one can also—unless one wishes to be utterly obstinate and stubborn regarding matters pertaining to the soul and the effects of what enters into an indefinite darkness—perceive the phenomena of the day in a certain sense. In another context, I have already pointed out how a person who is compelled to memorize this or that—that is, to learn things by heart—achieves this much more easily if they sleep on it more often, and how the greatest enemy of memorization is the loss of sleep. In fact, the possibility and ability to memorize more easily are present when we have slept on the matter than when we try to learn something by heart in one go. But this is also true of other activities of the soul.

[ 9 ] However, we could very easily convince ourselves that it would be impossible to learn anything at all—to acquire anything in which the soul plays a part—if we could not always incorporate states of sleep into our waking lives. The natural conclusion that must be drawn from such phenomena is that our soul needs to withdraw from the body from time to time in order to draw strength from a realm that lies outside the body, because within the physical realm the corresponding forces are precisely being depleted. We must imagine: when we wake up from sleep in the morning, we have brought with us strength from the state in which we were, in order to develop abilities that we could not develop if we were always bound to our body. Thus, the effect of sleep manifests itself in our ordinary being when one wishes to think clearly and not be stubborn.

[ 10 ] What generally manifests itself—and for which, if one remains in ordinary life, one already needs a certain amount of good will to hold the individual phenomena together—becomes quite clear and distinct when a person undergoes developments that can lead them to truly look into spiritual life. I would like to elaborate here on what occurs when a person has developed the powers slumbering within the soul to reach that state where one can perceive not through the senses and comprehend not through the intellect. — More details on this will follow in the lecture “How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?”, where the methods will be discussed in a fairly comprehensive manner. — But for now, let us highlight some of the experiences that a person can have who truly undergoes such exercises, which endow the soul, as it were, with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, enabling them to look into the spiritual world—a world that is not merely a subject of speculation, but just as much a reality as colors and forms, warmth and cold, and sounds are for a person who perceives through the senses. It has already become clear from the earlier lectures how one attains true clairvoyance. This spiritual development, these exercises, actually consist in a person drawing out from within themselves something they possess, gaining other organs of perception, so to speak, giving their soul—as it is in its normal state—a jolt upward, and thereby perceiving a world that is always around them but cannot be perceived in the normal state. When a person undergoes such exercises, their sleep life does indeed change at first. Everyone who has embarked on their own genuine spiritual research knows this. I would now like to speak about the very first stage of change in sleep life experienced by the truly clairvoyant, spiritually seeking individual.

[ 11 ] At first, this form of spiritual inquiry does not actually seem very different from the ordinary, normal state of consciousness. For when a person engages in the exercises we will discuss later, he initially sleeps just like anyone else and is just as unconscious as any other person. But the moment of waking reveals something quite special to those who have undergone spiritual and psychological exercises. And I would like to describe to you some very concrete phenomena that are, in fact, real.

[ 12 ] Suppose a person who does such exercises is thinking very intently about something that another person might also be thinking about; perhaps because he is facing a very difficult problem, he tries to muster all his mental powers to get to the bottom of the matter. He may find himself in the same situation as a schoolboy: his mental strength is not sufficient to solve the problem. That can certainly happen. If, however, through his exercises he has already gained greater insight into inner psychological states in connection with physical ones, then he does indeed feel something quite special when he is unable to do something. He then feels, in a different way than usual, a resistance in his physical organs—for example, in the brain. He truly feels as if the brain were offering resistance, just as we feel resistance, for example, when we try to drive a nail with a hammer that is too heavy. That is when the brain begins to take on a sense of reality. The way people usually use their brains, they do not feel it in the same way as when using a tool, such as a hammer. The researcher of the mind feels his brain; he feels independent of his thinking. That is an experience. But when he cannot solve a problem, he feels that he no longer has the ability to perform certain mental activities that he must carry out while thinking. He loses control over the instrument and feels this very clearly. This is a fact that can be experienced with great precision.

[ 13 ] When the spiritual researcher falls asleep while pondering the problem and then wakes up, it can very often happen that he immediately feels up to the task. But at the same time, he senses quite precisely that he did something before waking up, that he worked on something. He feels that while asleep, he was able to bring about a certain degree of flexibility and activity within himself. In the waking state, he was forced to use his brain. He knows this. He has no choice but to use his brain while awake. But he could no longer use it properly because—as I have described—it offered him resistance. In the sleeping state—he feels this—he was not dependent on using his brain. He was able to create a certain agility without the brain, which is otherwise too fatigued or otherwise overtaxed. Now he feels something quite peculiar: he perceives the activity he carried out in his sleep, but not directly. After all, the Lord does not grant him this while he sleeps. He is not spared the necessity of solving the problem now while awake. It may happen to him; but usually this is not the case, and especially not with matters that must now be solved by the brain.

[ 14 ] Then, a person feels something he had never before experienced in the sensory world; he feels his own activity unfolding before him as images—strange, moving images—as if the thoughts he needs were living beings entering into all sorts of relationships with one another. So they feel their own—call it mental activity, which they have carried out in sleep—as a series of images. This feeling is difficult to describe, because one is immersed in it in a very peculiar way and must say to oneself: That is you yourself! But on the other hand, one can distinguish this feeling quite precisely from oneself, just as one can distinguish an external movement one makes from oneself. So one has images, imaginings of an activity that took place before waking up. And now, if one has learned to pay attention to oneself, one can notice that these images of an activity that took place before waking up connect with our brain and turn it into a more agile, more useful instrument, so that one is able to carry out something that one could not do before because there was resistance—for example, to think certain thoughts. These are subtle things, but without them one cannot truly fathom the mystery of sleep. One thus feels that one has not engaged in an activity as one does while awake, but rather in an activity that served to restore certain aspects of the brain that had been depleted, and that one has rebuilt the instrument in a way that was previously impossible. One feels like a master builder working on one’s own instruments.

[ 15 ] There is a considerable difference between the sensation one experiences during such an activity and that of a daytime activity. With a daytime activity, one has a feeling that can be compared to tracing something from a template or a model. There, I am compelled to follow the image before me in every stroke or splash of color. With those images that appear at the moment of waking—and which, as it were, depict an activity that took place during sleep—one has the feeling of inventing the strokes oneself and creating the figures from within, without being bound to a model. With such a phenomenon, one has, as it were, captured what the soul was doing before it woke up: one has captured the brain’s regenerative activity. For one gradually comes to realize that what one perceives as a kind of overlaying of the brain’s organs with what one recalls as figures is nothing other than a rebuilding of what was destroyed there during the day. One really feels like a builder working on oneself.

[ 16 ] Essentially, the difference between a spiritual researcher who perceives such things and an ordinary person lies solely in the fact that the spiritual researcher does indeed perceive them, whereas the ordinary person is unable to pay attention to them and does not perceive them. For the same activity carried out by the spiritual researcher is carried out by every human being; it is just that the ordinary person does not register the moment when, during sleep, the organs are rebuilt through this activity.

[ 17 ] Let us take such an experience and compare it now with what we said earlier—with the dulling and numbing, with the dimming of the brightness of our daily life of imagination as we fall asleep. This latter phenomenon can truly be viewed in the right light only if one either frees oneself from the ideas—which are very persuasive today—of that worldview that believes it stands on the firm ground of natural science, or if one genuinely engages with the current findings of modern natural science. There—for example, in brain research—people who think more rigorously will have no choice but to acknowledge, based on the findings of natural science, the independence of the spiritual from the physical. And it is very interesting that a popular book was recently published in which, essentially, everything concerning spiritual life and its sources is presented in a distorted manner, completely lacking in insight. But in this book, *The Brain and Man* by William Hanna Thomson, many very intelligent things are said. Above all, it addresses contemporary brain research and certain phenomena that present themselves, for example—as I have often pointed out—the symptoms of fatigue, which are so instructive. But I have already explained that muscles or nerves do not tire except through conscious activity. As long as our muscles serve only organic functions, they cannot tire, for it would be disastrous if, for example, the heart muscle and other muscles were to have to rest. We become fatigued only when we engage in an activity that is not innate to the organism—that is, when we engage in an activity that belongs to conscious mental life. Therefore, one must say: If mental life were as innate to human beings as the activity of the heart, then this enormous difference between becoming fatigued and not becoming fatigued would be entirely inexplicable. Consequently, the author of that book feels compelled to admit that the soul relates to the body just as a rider relates to a horse—that is, it is entirely independent of the body. This is a tremendous concession for someone who thinks in terms of the natural sciences. And one might be overcome by quite peculiar feelings when a person, compelled by contemporary scientific research, comes to admit that the relationship between mental life and physical life must be conceived roughly as the relationship between a rider and a horse—that is, according to the image of the centaur that people imagined in earlier times, when they looked more deeply into the spiritual realm. There is no indication that the author of this book had this in mind, but this idea emerges once again through the scientific conception, and one is struck by feelings evoked by such images, which stem from times when a certain clairvoyance was still present in many people. Admittedly, certain contemporary conceptions of the centaur do seem to correspond better to what a gentleman once told me. The man in question said: “The Greeks saw the Scythians or other horsemen coming from the north, but they may have seen them emerging from the fog; since they could not distinguish those figures clearly, they imagined that they had grown out of the horses.” A materialist might be satisfied with such an explanation. But it is precisely contemporary scientific research that compels us to acknowledge the independence of the spiritual from the physical.

[ 18 ] One thing will certainly strike us in this regard, and we can best understand such matters by bringing to mind certain phenomena that are not commonplace; yet such phenomena do exist and cannot be denied. The spiritual researcher is familiar with the case of that simple man in the countryside who, at the hour of his death, suddenly began to speak in Latin—a language he had never actually used—and it was proven that he had heard it only once as a young boy in church. This is no fable, but a reality. Of course, he did not understand any of it when he heard or recited it. But it is true nonetheless. From this, every person should form the idea that what influences us from our surroundings contains something quite different from what we take in through our ordinary consciousness. For what we take in through our ordinary consciousness depends in many ways on our education, our understanding, and the like. But it is not only what we can comprehend that becomes part of us; we also have within us the capacity to take in infinitely more than what we consciously take in. We can even observe in every person how, at certain times, images arise in them that were not paid much attention to at the time they were experienced here or there, so that they may not even be able to remember anything at all. But certain things cause them to resurface, perhaps even placing them at the center of our inner life. We must certainly admit that the scope of our inner life is infinitely greater than what we take into our everyday consciousness and can encompass with it. This is extraordinarily important. For it directs our gaze, so to speak, toward an inner realm within us that, in truth, can make only a slight impression on our physical being—precisely because it has scarcely been noticed—and yet, on the other hand, continues to live on within us. It thus draws our attention to the underlying layers of our inner life, which ought to be present in every rational human being. For every rational person should say to themselves: What exists in the world around them in their consciousness, while they consciously observe the world, is fundamentally dependent on the structure of their sense organs and on what they are capable of understanding. And no one is justified in attempting to limit reality to what they can perceive. It would be completely illogical to deny the spiritual researcher that there is a spiritual world beyond the physical world, for the simple reason that a person may only speak of what he sees and hears and what he can think about, and must never pass judgment on what he cannot perceive. For the world of reality is not the world of the perceptible. The world of the perceptible is limited by the sense organs. Therefore, one should never—as in the Kantian sense—speak of the limits of knowledge, or of what a person might or might not know, but only of what one has before oneself in accordance with one’s sense organs.

[ 19 ] When one considers this, one must conclude: Behind the tapestry of colors in the sensory world—behind what the sense of temperature perceives as heat or cold, and so on—lies an infinite reality. Should, therefore, only what we perceive influence us, or only the reality that we perceive? The only logically tenable view is that, through our perception, we are given a part, a fragment, of the whole of reality; that behind what can be given to us through our perception lies an infinite reality, which is nonetheless real for us as well, for we are situated within it, so that what surges and lives out there—and influences us—continues to exist for us. But how, then, does our waking daily life actually present itself? We would have to conceive of waking daily life—and there is no other possibility—in such a way that we say: We open our senses and our cognitive faculties to an immeasurable vastness and confront this immeasurable vastness. Because we have eyes of this kind, ears of this kind, a sense of warmth of this kind, and so on, we place a specific segment of reality before us; the rest we reject, we resist it, as it were, and exclude it from ourselves. What, then, does our conscious activity consist of? It consists of a resistance, of an exclusion of something else. And by exerting our sense organs, we are holding back what is not perceived. What we perceive is the remnant that remains of what spreads out around us—and which we, for the most part, repel. In this way, we feel actively placed within the world; we feel connected to it. Through our sensory activity, we defend ourselves, as it were, against the multitude of impressions, in that—figuratively speaking—we cannot bear the whole immeasurable infinity and take in only a fragment of it. If we think in this way, we must conceive of relationships between our entire organism, between our entire physicality, and the external world that are quite different from those we can perceive or grasp with our intellect. Then it is no longer so far-fetched for us to consider that these relationships we have with the external world live within us, that the invisible, the supersensible, or the extrasensory is also at work within us, and that the extrasensory, in being active within us, makes use of the senses to fabricate a fragment out of the entire immeasurable vastness of reality. But then our relationship to reality is quite different from what we can perceive through our senses. Then there is something in our soul—a relationship to the external world—that is by no means exhausted by sensory perception, that eludes our waking daytime consciousness;—then it is as if we were to step before a mirror with our very being and have to say to ourselves: You are, in essence, something entirely different; the mirror shows you only the form, perhaps also the colors; but what you think inside, what you feel inside—the mirror cannot show you any of that; it shows you only what is subject to its own laws. But just as you, as a soul, stand in relation to your organism, so you are something entirely different from what your senses show you; they limit you to what is in accordance with their laws. So in fact, when you face the world—in much the same way as is the case with the mirror—you are confronted with a world that is made possible only by the nature of your senses!

[ 20 ] If you think this idea through to its conclusion, you will no longer be surprised that, fundamentally, all of our waking, daytime consciousness depends very much on the structure of our sensory organs and our brain, just as what we see of ourselves in a mirror depends on the nature of the mirror. Anyone who looks into a garden mirror and sees the distorted face staring back at them will readily admit that the image in it depends not on them but on the mirror. Thus, what we perceive depends on the structure of our reflective apparatus, and our mental activity is limited—as it were, reflected back upon itself—by being mirrored in our physical life. It is therefore not surprising that the scope of perception—which can also be demonstrated physiologically—depends on the physical, in that this or that takes place in consciousness in one way or another; for everything the soul does depends on the constitution of our body if it is to become consciousness and knowledge for us. Observation shows us that the concepts we initially merely constructed do indeed correspond to the facts. The only difference is that our physicality is a living mirror. We leave the mirror we look into just as it is. However, there is one way in which we can also impair the reflection: if we breathe on the mirror, it no longer reflects properly. But the reflection in our physicality—which the activity of our soul experiences—is connected to the fact that, while we are reflected in our physicality, the reflection itself is an activity, a process within our physicality, and that we present what appears there as a reflection as an activity before ourselves.

[ 21 ] Thus, physical life actually presents itself to us as if, in a certain sense, we were writing down what we think and then had the letters before us. In this way, we inscribe the activity of the soul into our physical life. What the anatomist demonstrates are merely the letters—the external apparatus—for we do not observe our soul life completely when we observe it only within physical life; we observe it completely only when we observe it independently of physical life. But this is possible only for the spiritual researcher when he observes the soul life as it is reflected upon awakening into waking daily life. It becomes apparent that the life of the soul is like an architect who builds something during the night and is the one who dismantles it during the day.

[ 22 ] So now we have before us the life of the soul in both the waking and sleeping states, and we must conceive of it in the sleeping state as independent of bodily life, just as a rider is independent of the horse. But just as the rider uses the horse and expends its strength, so the soul expends the body’s activity, so that chemical processes unfold as the letters of the life of the soul. This brings us to a point where we have worn down bodily life—as it is limited to the senses and the brain—to such an extent that we have, for the time being, exhausted it. Then we must begin the other activity, initiate the reverse process, and rebuild what has been broken down. This is the life of sleep, so that, from the soul, we perform two opposing activities on our body. While awake, we do indeed have around us our world of ebbing and flowing ideas, joy and sorrow, feelings, and so on. But while we have these before us, we wear down our physical life—in essence, we are constantly destroying it. While we sleep, we are the architects, rebuilding what we have destroyed during our waking life.

[ 23 ] What, then, does the researcher of the spirit perceive? He perceives the architectural activity in peculiar images—such as movements intertwining within themselves—this process of rebuilding: a real process that is the reverse of ordinary waking daily life. It is truly no fantasy to say that in these intertwining movements one recognizes that mysterious activity which the soul carries out during sleep, and which consists in our restoring what we have destroyed in our waking life. Hence the restorative and necessary nature of sleep.

[ 24 ] Why is it that life in sleep is such that it does not enter into consciousness? Indeed, why is it that waking life enters into our consciousness? This is because the processes we carry out in daily life have something like mirror images; but when we engage in the other activity—the restoration of what has been worn down—we have nothing in which it can be reflected. We lack the mirror for this. Only the spiritual researcher can reveal what underlies this. From a certain point onward, the spiritual researcher experiences the soul’s activity—as I have described it—not merely as a dream memory from sleep, but as if he were not at all dependent on the instrument of the body, so that he can then perceive an activity that takes place solely in the spiritual realm. There he can say to himself: “Now you are not thinking with your brain, but now you are thinking in entirely different forms; now you are thinking in images, independent of your brain.” However, the spiritual researcher can only come to experience something like what has been described when he experiences that the whole phenomenon that envelops him like a nebula as he falls asleep does not disappear, but rather when the mist that is perceptible at the temples, at the temples, along the spine—becomes something from which his actions are reflected—just as what we experience in our gross physical life is reflected back—when he is able to limit and withdraw his activity within himself. The entire difference between true clairvoyance and ordinary waking life lies in the fact that waking life, in order to attain awareness of soul activity, requires another mirror—namely, the physical body—whereas the clairvoyant’s activity, when it radiates as soul activity, is so strong that the outgoing ray is drawn back into itself. Thus, a reflection takes place, as it were, in one’s own inner experience, in a spiritual organism. In this spiritual organism, our soul is essentially present even at night, even if we are not researchers of the spiritual realm. It pours itself into this state. And we cannot come to terms with the entire life of sleep unless we realize that, in fact, our bodily processes—everything that anatomy and physiology can investigate—bring about nothing other than the reflection of soul processes, and that these soul processes always exist within a spiritual reality, from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. If we think otherwise, we simply cannot make sense of it. We must therefore speak, as it were, of a mysterious soul life that cannot at all enter into the consciousness mediated through the body. So when one observes ideas in a person’s consciousness that he has long ignored, one must say: There is something else present in the human being besides the ideas of conscious soul life that are taken in through attention.

[ 25 ] I have already hinted that it is child’s play to refute the things that are a reality for the spiritual researcher. Yet they are true nonetheless. Spiritual research must acknowledge that, when it comes to human beings, we are dealing first and foremost with the human physical body—the one we can see with our eyes, touch with our hands, and which is also known to anatomy and physiology. Furthermore, as an inner component of the human being, we have the astral body—the vehicle for everything that a person consciously takes in, everything they actually experience during their daily life in such a way that it is reflected back to them through the body. Between the astral body and the physical body lies the vehicle for those ideas that remain unnoticed for years, which are then drawn up into the astral body and played out there. In short, we are speaking of the fact that between the astral body—the vehicle of consciousness—and the physical body, the human etheric body is at work. This etheric body is not only the vehicle of such unnoticed ideas, but is, in fact, the very builder of the entire physical body.

[ 26 ] What actually happens during sleep? What happens is that the astral body—the vehicle of consciousness—leaves the physical body and the etheric body together with the “I,” resulting in a division of the human nature. When a person is awake during the day, the astral body, together with the “I,” is contained within the physical and etheric bodies, and the processes of the physical body act as a kind of mirroring, through which everything that takes place in the astral body comes into consciousness. Consciousness is the reflection of experiences through the physical body, and we must therefore not confuse consciousness with the experiences themselves. When the astral body leaves the body during sleep, the ordinary person is initially unable to perceive anything in the astral world. The person is unconscious there.

[ 27 ] What ability does the spiritual researcher acquire when, even in sleep, he becomes aware of things without relying on his brain? He acquires the ability to perceive and reflect in his soul activity that which weaves and lives among things in such a way that it can be perceived in waking daytime consciousness just as one’s own etheric body is perceived. The human etheric body is woven from that which the clairvoyant perceives; thus, for the clairvoyant, the outer world becomes a mirror, just as physical corporeality becomes a mirror for the soul life of the normal human being.

[ 28 ] There are intermediate states between waking and sleeping. One such intermediate state is dreaming. With regard to its origin, spiritual research shows that dreaming is in fact based on something similar to clairvoyance; however, the latter is a trained ability, whereas dreaming is always fantastical. When a person goes out with the astral body, they lose the ability to have their soul life reflected through the physical body. But under certain abnormal conditions—which occur for every person—they can acquire the ability to have their soul experiences reflected through the etheric body. For in fact, we must regard not only the physical body as a mirroring apparatus, but also the etheric body; for as long as the external world makes an impression on us, it is indeed the physical body that functions as a mirroring apparatus. But when we become still within ourselves and process the impressions the external world has made on us, we are working within ourselves, yet our thoughts are nonetheless real. We live out our thoughts, and we also feel that we are dependent on something more subtle than our physical body—namely, the etheric body. Then the etheric body is what is reflected within us during solitary contemplation, which is not initially based on external impressions. But we are immersed in our etheric body during our waking daytime consciousness; we perceive what is reflected, but we do not directly perceive the activity of the astral body. Since, in an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, we lack the ability to receive external sensory impressions—though we can still, in a certain sense, perceive something connected to our etheric body—the etheric body can reflect to us what we experience in our soul life through our astral body. These are the dreams which, because the person is in a completely unfamiliar state, exhibit that lack of order.

[ 29 ] If we bear this in mind, many aspects of the world of dreams—which are otherwise quite enigmatic—will become clear to us. We must therefore regard the deeper layers of the soul life as closely linked to the dream life. While the physical body serves as a mirror of the soul life and our daily concerns influence it, through the etheric body we are often connected—in the most remote way—to experiences that lie far behind us and that, because daily life exerts such a strong influence on us, only faintly come to our consciousness. Consequently, they remain something utterly unknown to us. But when we examine dreams that are truly based on careful observation, all sorts of curious things may reveal themselves to us. For example, a great composer experiences the image of a somewhat devilish figure playing a sonata for him. He wakes up—and is able to write down the sonata. Something within him has become active that seemed like a foreign influence. And this was possible because there was something within him for which the composer’s soul was ripe, but which could not manifest itself in waking daily life because physical life was merely an obstacle and unsuited to reflecting it. Here we see that physical life is an obstacle and that this is where its significance lies. In daily life, we can experience only what physical life—figuratively speaking—is “oiled” for, like a machine. Physical life is always an obstacle to us. But we manage, to a certain extent, to make use of physical life. After all, “brakes” are needed everywhere. When a locomotive travels along the tracks, it is the brakes—the friction—that enable it to move, for without friction the wheels could not turn. Our physical processes are, in truth, what acts as a brake against our soul life, and these braking processes are at the same time the processes of reflection. If we are ready for something in our soul but have not yet managed to lubricate our machine properly, then waking life serves as a good brake. But when we step out of our physical body, our etheric body—which must appear to us as something entirely foreign because it is of a finer nature—can give expression to what lives in our soul life. When it is strong enough, it forces its way into the dream life, as in this case with the composer. This has less to do with daytime interests than with hidden interests that lie deeper in the subtle undercurrents. This is also the case, for example, in the following. I should note that I am recounting only what I have actually observed. A woman dreams—even though she has children whom she loves very much and a husband who loves her extraordinarily—that she is getting engaged for the second time, and she experiences all the events that accompany this with great joy. What is she dreaming? She is dreaming of experiences that are very far removed from her present life—experiences she once went through but does not recognize, because her ordinary daily concerns are connected only with the physical body. And what still lives on within her in her etheric body is now reflected from the etheric body through another event—perhaps because some joyful sensation triggered the dream.

[ 30 ] A man dreams that he is reliving childhood experiences. And these childhood experiences are reflected in a truly wonderful way. An event that is particularly important to him—because it touches him deeply—causes him to wake up. At first, the dream is something very dear to him, but he soon falls asleep again and continues dreaming. A whole series of unpleasant experiences now passes through his mind, and a particularly painful event wakes him up. All of this is far removed from his present experiences. He gets up, deeply shaken by the dream, walks around the room for a while, but then lies down again and now experiences events in his dream that he has never actually lived through. All the events he has gone through become jumbled, and he now experiences something entirely new. The whole thing turns into a poem, which he is even able to write down afterward and set to music. This is an entirely real fact. Now it will not be difficult, using the concepts we have already acquired, to imagine what happened there. For the researcher of the spiritual realm, it presents itself as follows: At a very specific moment in his life, the man suffered, so to speak, a rupture in his development. He had to give up something that lay within his soul. But even though he had to give it up, it did not thereby vanish from his etheric body. His ordinary interests were simply so strong that they suppressed it. And where it was strong enough through inner resilience, it forced its way out in a dream, because there the person is freed from the inhibitions of waking life. This means that the person in question was indeed close to reaching what was expressed in the poem; but then it was drowned out.

[ 31 ] Thus, in dreams we clearly see the independence of the life of the soul from the external life of the body. And this must make it abundantly clear to us that the idea of the life of the soul being reflected in the life of the body must have great validity. Precisely the fact that the concerns in which we are entangled do not directly imprint themselves on our immediate experience shows us that, alongside the life as it unfolds in everyday existence, another life runs parallel to it—one that I have described, in terms of conscious, more subtle observation, as a kind of awakening. In this realm lives everything that is independent of physical life for our spiritual life—even in a conceptual, ideal sense—such as conscience; everyone feels this. But in daily life, this other life proves to be something that is very limited by our everyday concerns. In sleep, our soul reveals itself as fully imbued with this moral quality of its own. It is truly a living into the spiritual realm, which we can describe as a jolt, as an inner movement. What we call spiritual scientific research will reveal itself to us as something through which we consciously live into the world into which the ordinary person unconsciously lives every time they fall asleep. People will gradually have to come to terms with the fact that the world is far vaster than what we can grasp with our senses and follow with our intellect, and that the life of sleep is a realm we need because, in our waking life, we experience wear and tear precisely on the noblest faculties that serve our imaginative life. In sleep, we restore them so that they can face the world with strength and vigor and reflect our inner life back to us in our waking daily existence. Everything characteristic of our inner life could thus become clear to us. Who doesn’t know that after a good, deep sleep, one feels drained and tired? People often complain about this; but this is by no means a symptom of illness, but rather entirely understandable. For, strictly speaking, complete recovery through sleep does not set in until an hour or an hour and a half later. Why? Because we have worked hard on our organs so that they can function not just for a few hours, but for the entire day. And immediately after waking up, we are not yet accustomed to using them; we must first get them into the swing of things, and only after some time can we use them effectively. In a certain sense, when it comes to a specific kind of exhaustion, one could say that after an hour and a half, one can rejoice in how one can feel the organs restored to good working order. For sleep provides us with what we need: the restorative forces for the organs that have been worn down and exhausted during the day.

[ 32 ] So we may now say: Our inner life is a life of independence, a life of which we experience a reflection through our consciousness in our waking daily life. Consciousness is a reflection of the soul’s interaction with its surroundings. In our waking daily life, we are lost to our surroundings, to something foreign; we are devoted to something that is not ourselves. During sleep, however—and this is the essence of sleep—we withdraw from all external activity in order to work on ourselves. The analogy is apt: a ship that has served its purpose at sea is repaired and refurbished when it enters the harbor.

[ 33 ] Anyone who believes that nothing happens to us while we sleep might just as well believe that nothing needs to happen to a ship once it has returned to port after a voyage. But it will set sail again, and then he will see what happens if it is not repaired. That is how it would be if our souls were not working on us from within while we sleep. In sleep, we are returned to ourselves, whereas in daily life we are lost to the outside world. The average person is simply unable to perceive what the soul does during sleep as clearly as he perceives the outside world during the day.

[ 34 ] In the lecture “How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?” we will see that even in the spiritual realm, reflection can be attained as knowledge, through which a person can then come to perceive the higher worlds. All of this shows us that the soul, precisely when it is not conscious of itself, knows nothing of its own activity; yet it is engaged with itself, works within itself, and—independent of all physicality—draws upon the forces that are intended to serve the very building up of the physical body.

[ 35 ] We may thus summarize what we have said and describe the nature of the soul using words that, based on an understanding of the nature of sleep, form a kind of foundation for many aspects of spiritual science:

It returns to itself
The soul, enveloped in sleep
Flies into the vastness of the spirit,
When the bonds of the senses weigh upon it!