The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Sleep Experiences of the Soul

[ 1 ] In recent times, the concept of the unconscious has emerged, and it is discussed extensively in psychology. Everything in the human psyche that cannot be reached, observed, or explained by ordinary consciousness is attributed to the realm of the unconscious. And when one speaks of this unconscious, one assumes that what one actually believes must remain unknown contains forces that influence conscious psychological life. The emergence of this idea of the unconscious is due solely to the fact that in recent times a certain skepticism—indeed, a sense of powerlessness—has arisen regarding the resolution of the actual philosophical, cosmological, and religious problems. The insight described here as imaginative, inspired, and intuitive now has the task of penetrating this indeterminate reservoir, which so frequently figures as the “unconscious” in modern science. Through this supersensible insight, the concrete facts that are inaccessible to ordinary consciousness are to be explored by attaining other states of consciousness in which a different state of mind—and therefore also a different capacity for perception—is present. Today I would like to present to you an example of such an exploration of an unconscious realm of the soul—namely, the experiences the human soul undergoes between falling asleep and waking up.

[ 2 ] What happens to the human soul during sleep remains a true mystery to ordinary consciousness. However, one should not believe that the soul’s experiences during sleep are any less significant or have any less profound an impact on human life than the states and experiences during waking consciousness. Certainly, for external earthly life, for our creative work and labor, and for the external progress of humanity, waking life is of primary importance. But for the shaping and development of one’s own inner being, it is above all the rich experiences of the sleep state that are of primary importance. These rich experiences of the sleep state, even if they remain unconscious, are nonetheless real, and their aftereffects play a role in waking daily life. Not only is a person’s general soul mood—from waking until falling asleep—permeated and interwoven with the aftereffects of the sleep life, but the physical and etheric organisms—which are, after all, permeated by the astral organism and by the actual spiritual organism, the “I” organism—are also influenced during waking life by the aftereffects of the sleep life.

[ 3 ] To ordinary consciousness, these phenomena initially appear as follows: external sensory perception fades, eventually ceasing entirely; this cessation also extends to thinking, feeling, and willing; and, with the exception of that transitional state in which dreams occur, the person sinks into a state of unconsciousness. But what takes place within the soul during this unconscious state is—and this must certainly be emphasized—something entirely real, and what remains unconscious to ordinary consciousness in this regard can be illuminated by imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. So today I would like to describe to you, at least in outline form, the experiences of the soul during sleep that remain unconscious—as imagination, inspiration, and intuition can perceive what is unconscious to ordinary consciousness. I will therefore describe to you the soul’s experiences from falling asleep to waking up as if they were consciously experienced, for they are consciously experienced by higher insight. This is not to say that the soul is unconscious all night long, but even what otherwise remains unconscious can be observed in the state of imagination, inspiration, and intuition, so that it can be illuminated and made manifest. The following then becomes apparent.

[ 4 ] As a person first enters the state of sleep, the sensory world around them ceases to exist for the soul. The person enters into an inner experience that is undifferentiated in itself and, in a certain sense, indeterminate. The soul feels—I say: it feels; it does not actually feel, but if it were conscious of itself, it would feel—it feels expanded, as if in a vast, spreading mist. In this inner sensing and experiencing, there is initially no distinction between subject and object in the first stage of sleep. Nor can individual phenomena and facts be distinguished; there is a general sensing of, as I said, a misty perception of the world. And one feels this misty perception of the world as one’s own existence. Now, however, what might be called a deep need to rest in the divine essence of the world arises simultaneously in the sleeping person. Mixed into this flow of experience in a general, undifferentiated state is an indefinable longing—one must use the word—to rest in God. As I said, I am describing this as if the events experienced unconsciously were being lived through consciously. Thus, for the soul, the outer world of the day—everything it perceives through the senses—is, so to speak, submerged. Also submerged are all the impulses through which the soul feels within the body, all the impulses through which the soul transmits its volitional impulses through the body. What remains, for the time being, is a general sense of the world accompanied by a longing for God.

[ 5 ] In this state, which is the first to occur after falling asleep, dreams can intermingle—dreams that are either images, symbolic representations of external experiences, memory images, symbolic images of inner physical states, and so on, or dreams into which certain true facts of the spiritual world may also intermingle, without the dreamer—who is bound by ordinary consciousness—being able to gain a clear understanding of what these dreams actually contain. Even for those who, through imaginative insight—for this is the only way to do so—look into this state of the soul, dreams are not so much a clarification of the inner reality as they are a kind of veiling of the pure truth. For this pure truth—in the sense intended here—can be recognized by a person only if he prepares himself for it of his own free will through the soul exercises described above. It is only as a result of these soul exercises that the pure contemplation of even this first stage of sleep can occur.

[ 6 ] When one looks at this first state of sleep through such an understanding, when one sees through it, it turns out to be not quite the same, but very similar to the unconscious experiences of the very earliest childhood. Just as if a person were able to bring the experiences of early childhood—which otherwise remain unconscious—into consciousness and to cast them into the concepts and ideas of ordinary consciousness that philosophy deals with—then these ideas of philosophy would indeed gain reality, one would rise in philosophy as in something real—so one can also say that in the first stage of every state of sleep, a person becomes an unconscious philosopher, becoming what they process in their soul in waking daytime consciousness in terms of ideas, dialectical, and logical laws. If one could infuse this with an experience of reality—that outflowing into the cosmic mist of the etheric world and the soul’s longing to rest in God—if one could bring these two soul experiences to consciousness and pour them into the abstract philosophical ideas, then these would come to life, and philosophy would be something like what it was in Greece before Socrates, and what it was in earlier times of human history—namely, an inner experience of reality.

[ 7 ] We have now become acquainted with two stages of human development: the stage of very early childhood, which, if brought to consciousness, would represent the reality of philosophical ideas; and we have now been able to document the experience of the first state of sleep, which is very similar to the unconscious childhood experience and which, likewise, when brought into consciousness, provides the experience of reality found in the philosophy attained in the waking state.

[ 8 ] This is a description of the initial, relatively brief states that a person experiences from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up.

[ 9 ] After the human soul has remained for a time in the state described above during sleep, this state transitions into another. This second stage of sleep manifests itself in such a way that, instead of experiencing life within one’s own physical and etheric organism—as one does during the day—one has a kind of experience in which one feels the cosmos, which one otherwise has around oneself during the day, within oneself. And whereas in the first stage of sleep there is no clear distinction in the soul’s experience between subject and object, this distinction now becomes increasingly significant—except that, during sleep, the person has, so to speak, entered a state that is the reverse of that experienced while awake. He now feels himself, experiences himself within the cosmos, and looks back upon his physical and etheric organisms as if they were objective entities. Just as in waking consciousness he experiences his organs—lungs, liver, heart, and so on—within himself in a vague way, so now, during the state of sleep, he experiences the cosmic content within himself; he becomes, so to speak, the cosmos himself in a soulful sense. Not as though he were expanding to encompass the entire cosmos, but rather he experiences something like a replica of the cosmos within himself. But the first unconscious experience—which is, however, entirely real—is, I would say, a fragmentation of this inner experience of the soul, a dispersion of the soul across many details of a manifold reality. The soul does not experience itself as a unity; it experiences itself as a multiplicity. Just as, if we were to experience ourselves during the day, we would not experience ourselves as this unified human being but as a multiplicity of eyes, ears, lungs, liver, and so on in the brain—and would miss the unity—so, in a sense, one experiences the cosmic ingredients without initially experiencing their unity during sleep. This brings about a state of the soul which, if it were conscious, would have to be described as an anxiety pervading the soul—as fear. As I said, if one were to represent this state in conscious experience, it would manifest as a state of fear. But the soul actually experiences what underlies the objective processes of this nocturnal anxiety, just as, in daily life, the organic processes of the physical and etheric organism underlie what the soul might experience here and there as an anxiety arising from within. These are, in fact, the events—one might say, anxiety-inducing events—through which the soul must live its way.

[ 10 ] At this stage of sleep, the influence of events from daily life on the dream world becomes apparent. For modern people who live in accordance with the Mystery of Golgotha, this is where the aftereffects of what they experience during their waking lives—in terms of religious inner devotion to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha—become apparent. All the contemplation and focus, all the veneration and worship that one develops for Christ and for the Mystery of Golgotha in waking daily life have an aftereffect that extends into this second stage of sleep. For those people who lived their earthly lives before the Mystery of Golgotha, it was different. They were given appropriate means by their religious leaders—religious practices—whose effects they could carry over into their sleep life, and which worked in such a way that this anxiety in the sleeping state was gradually overcome. For the person who lives after the Mystery of Golgotha, it is the case that their inner connection with Christ Jesus, their sense of belonging to Christ Jesus, the religious practices they direct toward Christ Jesus—indeed, their entire relationship to Christ Jesus and the actual living out of this relationship—all of this now influences their sleep life and, in a sense, helps to overcome the anxiety that weighs upon the soul.

[ 11 ] As I said, I am describing how things appear to the inspired consciousness, yet how they are experienced by the soul as entirely real. Therefore, I introduce concepts that are actually concepts of conscious life, but the real processes corresponding to them are certainly present in the life of the soul. In fact, if we have developed a relationship with Christ during the day, we encounter the guiding power of Christ during this second stage of the sleep life. It is through this guiding power of Christ that we overcome that anxiety that weighs upon the soul. And out of this anxiety, a cosmic relationship with the world develops. As a result of the development of this relationship, the movements of the planetary system of our solar cosmos stand before the soul—though in such a way that the soul experiences this as part of its inner life. Not as if the soul were expanding out into the planetary world during this sleep life, but rather an inner replica of the planetary world unfolds within the soul. It actually experiences the planetary cosmos in a replica. Even though what the soul thus experiences every night—like a small inner globe, a celestial globe—does not shine into the consciousness of daily life, it does nevertheless radiate into the reality of daily life, and it continues to live on from waking until falling asleep in the physical and etheric organisms. For when we look deeply into the physical and etheric organisms—in the respiratory system, in the circulatory system, in the entire rhythmic system—we find that living within them, accompanying the respiratory currents and the circulation, stimuli and impulses that influence waking life from what the soul experiences as a planetary inner experience between falling asleep and waking up, so that, in fact, during waking life, the planetary movements of our solar system pulsate in our breathing and in our blood circulation as a lingering stimulus. And during sleep—when the astral and ego organisms are outside the physical and etheric organisms, as such observation indeed reveals—the planetary movements do not act directly; rather, they are experienced by the soul outside the physical and etheric organisms. But within the sleeping physical organism, these stimuli—which come from the previous night and have pulsed through the respiratory processes and blood circulation during the day—continue to reverberate and vibrate. During the following night, their aftereffects are present, and the next morning these stimuli are renewed as a consequence of what the soul has experienced during the night as an inner re-creation of the planetary cosmos.

[ 12 ] In addition to this cosmic experience, however, something else occurs during this second stage of the sleep life. The soul gains a clear experience of all the relationships it has ever had with human souls in its various earthly lives. After all, we carry within us—I would say—the “traces” of all the relationships we have ever had with human souls in our successive earthly lives. All of these now appear before the soul in a certain pictorial way. The soul experiences—albeit unconsciously, yet truly—everything it has ever had to do with other people, whether right or wrong. And in the same way, it experiences its relationships with spiritual beings who inhabit the cosmos and who never live in a physical body—beings who, therefore, always lead a supersensible existence in contrast to physical human life. Thus, during sleep, the human soul also immerses itself in a rich network of relationships with the human souls with whom it has formed such bonds. These relationships reappear, and likewise everything that has remained within these relationships—as the aftereffects of right or wrong done to others, the good and evil inflicted upon them—also reappears. In short, what has become a person’s destiny presents itself to the soul at this stage of sleep.

[ 13 ] What an older philosophy called “karma” appears before the human soul every night in this state of sleep. And when planetary experiences continue to exert their influence as stimuli on respiration and blood circulation—that is, on the physical and etheric organism of the human being—then it becomes apparent to those who, through inspired insight, are able to observe such things that this experience of repeated earthly lives also carries over into waking consciousness, even if it is not immediately present there. For the inspired insight that contemplates what the soul experiences, the fact of repeated earthly lives is simply a given, for in the vision of inspiration, these repeated earthly lives present themselves directly in connection with the relationships one observes with people one has ever had. By surveying these relationships, one perceives the development through repeated earthly lives. One relationship is seen as pointing back to a specific earthly life, another as pointing to a different one, and so on. Likewise, karma presents itself to the individual as a fact.

[ 14 ] What the soul experiences during sleep influences our waking consciousness in such a way that a person’s general state of mind—which manifests as a vague sense of self throughout the day—depends on what we go through during this stage of sleep. Whether we feel happy or unhappy in our vague inner life, whether we feel refreshed or weary, is to a large extent a consequence of what is experienced in these described states during sleep. And so, during this stage of the sleep state, we actually find ourselves in the cosmos outside, even though what we experience as inner life in the soul is a reflection of the cosmos, and even though what we experience regarding our repeated earthly lives and karma appears before the soul in images, in afterimages. What we have there before the soul as such afterimages—cosmic and fateful afterimages—contains what can be called the human inner being in the cosmos. And when one takes what can be attained in this way through inspired insight—by allowing it to radiate back into ordinary consciousness—and expresses it in concepts and ideas, one thereby possesses a true cosmology that encompasses the whole human being. This cosmology is then a lived cosmology. We can say: When a person consciously reflects this stage of the sleep life back, they learn to recognize themselves as a link in the cosmic order, whereby this cosmic order manifests itself on a planetary scale—that is, in a sense, as the cosmic order of nature.

[ 15 ] But now, within the cosmic order, the moral world order also comes into play. It is not as it is here in earthly existence, where on the one hand we have the natural order—which has its own laws and is free of morality—and on the other hand the moral world order, which is experienced only in the soul during earthly existence; rather, we have a unified world before us. What we experience as the planetary cosmos is permeated and imbued with moral impulses in a continuously unfolding process of development. We live simultaneously in a natural and a moral cosmos.

[ 16 ] They recognize the full significance of these nighttime events for daily life as well. Thus we can say that, for the outer constitution of the human being, what the soul experiences in the cosmos between falling asleep and waking up is more essential and significant than what it encounters during waking life, for both the physical and etheric life functions and one’s moral state of being are the results of the cosmic experience between falling asleep and waking up.

---

[ 17 ] The third stage of the sleep state is characterized by the fact that the experience within the planetary cosmos gradually transitions into an experience of the world of the fixed stars, so that in the inner life of the soul, the world of the fixed stars is experienced as a kind of replica, but not in the sense that there are mere replicas of those external sensory images of the constellations as we see them in our waking daily life; rather, the soul immerses itself in those beings of whom it was said in earlier discussions that intuition recognizes them as the corresponding spiritual beings for the stars. Here in the sensory world, we experience the sensory images of the stars in physical consciousness. When intuition, as I have described, passes over into the spiritual world, it recognizes in certain spiritual beings that which the Sun and the other fixed stars are merely physical reflections of for our waking sensory perceptions. Within these spiritual beings of the stars, the soul lives during the third stage of sleep. It senses afterimages of the constellations—but this actually refers to the relationships that exist between the activities of the spiritual star beings. It experiences such constellations.

[ 18 ] In earlier dream research, particular emphasis was placed on describing the experience of the fixed-star constellations and the zodiac. After all, these are the main focus of the psychological experience during sleep. In the sensory world, one finds a much closer correspondence to the individual spiritual beings when one considers the constellations as a whole rather than the individual stars. Thus, between falling asleep and waking up, when the soul is free from the physical and etheric bodies—so free that it perceives these two as objects before itself, just as we otherwise perceive external sensory objects before us—the soul actually lives as a spiritual being within a cosmos of spiritual beings. What the soul unconsciously experiences there can be illuminated by intuitive insight. But what is experienced there also has its aftereffects in waking daily life, in that, essentially, the constitution of human health—the totality of the health and vitality of the human body, not of the soul as in the first stage of sleep—is an aftereffect of what the soul experiences during the night among the star beings.

[ 19 ] But in particular, the entire event of birth in the broadest sense—that is, the soul’s entry into a physical human body through conception and the embryonic life—presents itself to the soul as soon as it is experienced, even if not consciously. And again, the soul is confronted with the leaving of the body at death—the transition into the spiritual-soul world on the part of the human spirit being. Thus, the truth about the events of birth and death truly presents itself to the human soul every night. And another consequence of these nocturnal experiences is that, during the day, a person has a vague inner sense: birth and death in human life never mean merely what they appear to be to sensory observation. It is simply not true that a person with a healthy consciousness could believe that birth and death are in reality merely the events as they appear in external sensory life. It is not true that a person does not hold this belief simply because they imagine themselves to be an eternal being, to have an existence beyond death. No, the reason a person cannot believe this stems from the fact that what the soul experiences every night—as an image of the human being’s entry from a spiritual world into earthly life and their subsequent return to the spiritual world—shines into daily life in the form of a vague feeling about the world and human life.

[ 20 ] What therefore manifests itself during waking life as religious longing, as religious consciousness, is an aftereffect of the soul’s experience of the stars during the night. And it is this—what I have just described—that constitutes the stage of the deepest human sleep. Thus, human beings actually live out their religious feelings during the day from within their sleep. Just as religious life today can be intellectually grounded through an experience of primal humanity—one grasped and permeated by intuitions arising from a fully developed consciousness—so too can it be said that this religious insight can be gained when human supersensible intuition intellectually illuminates the stage of the deepest sleep. For what lies in the depths of sleep was at the same time the source that preserved the divine. And since our waking consciousness is but a reflection of the possibilities of consciousness available to human beings, what humans carry within themselves as a natural religious feeling also appears as such a reflection of what the soul experiences—albeit unconsciously—in all its glory and grandeur during the third stage of sleep. Human beings do not sink into the life of sleep merely to restore their weary bodies, nor merely to draw from sleep the stimuli that their breathing and blood circulation require; not only to acquire from the spiritual world the other stimuli they need, but also that which permeates human beings religiously rises to the surface of the soul, to the conscious realm of the day, from the deep underlying layers through which human soul life flows between falling asleep and waking up.

[ 21 ] One might say: Just as a person lives a philosophical life during the first stage of sleep—much like in early childhood, however paradoxical this may sound to present-day consciousness—and just as a person lives a cosmological life in the second stage of sleep, so too does a person live a life imbued with God in the third stage of sleep. A person must then return from this third stage of sleep to waking consciousness.

---

[ 22 ] From the final stage of sleep, a person returns to waking daytime consciousness by passing through the aforementioned stages in reverse order. At first, the human being exists as a soul, as a spirit, outside of his physical and etheric organisms; and if one wishes to fully understand the phenomenon of sleep, one must answer the following question through intuitive insight: Why is the human being drawn back to his physical and etheric organisms? What impulse is at work here? One recognizes this impulse when one continues the intuitive exploration of sleep far enough. One then recognizes—just as one recognizes those spiritual beings corresponding to the Sun and the constellations of the other fixed stars—as the impulse behind this those spiritual beings whose image in our physical sensory world is the Moon. The forces of the Moon, after all, permeate our entire cosmos. And when, through intuition, we recognize not only the physical existence of the Moon but also the spiritual counterpart of this physical existence, we find in these spiritual beings—who correspond to the physical existence of the Moon— precisely those beings whose combined action provides the impulses that, when we have reached the deepest stage of sleep, bring us back into our physical and etheric bodies. It is the lunar forces, in fact, that bind the human astral and ego organisms to the physical and etheric organisms.

[ 23 ] Every night when the soul seeks to enter a physical and etheric organism from the spiritual world, it must attune itself to the currents of the lunar forces. In this process—as will of course seem obvious to you—it does not matter whether it is a new moon or a full moon. For even when the moon is not visibly perceptible as a new moon, the forces that bring the soul back from the spiritual worlds into the physical and etheric organism are nevertheless at work throughout the cosmos, although the transformations that the sensory image of the moon undergoes—and which are perceived as a half-moon, full moon, and so on—even though these sensory phases correspond to processes within the Moon’s soul-being that do, in fact, have something to do with the human spirit and the human soul within the physical and etheric organism. One might say that the particular configuration of the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-etheric aspects of the human being is determined by those forces that reign and weave throughout the cosmos and that find their sensory expression in that sensory being which we have before us in the lunar being in its various metamorphoses.

[ 24 ] In this way, we can also gain insight into the hidden aspects of human waking and sleeping life and learn what brings a person back to waking life in the morning. The person returns by passing through the same stages in reverse order. And as they pass through the final stage, which is steeped in a longing for God, dreams once again intermingle with their sleep, and the person gradually submerges back into their physical and etheric organism.

[ 25 ] Why the human being, upon passing through the gate of death, is no longer subject to these lunar forces, and to what extent he withdraws from them by entering the spiritual world for a long time—this, as well as the mysteries of birth, death, and repeated earthly lives in general—will essentially be the subject of the next and the following lecture.