Sleeping, Waking, Dreaming

SLEEPING, WAKING, DREAMING.
Sec. XIV.

The soul, as we have concluded on biblical grounds, as well in respect of the spirit whose self-manifestation it is, as in respect of the body, by means of which it brings itself to manifestation in the midst of its sensible surroundings, is sevenfold (septiformis). In virtue of its seven spirit-like forms of life, it is the doxa of the spirit; and as it fills the seven soul-like forms of life of the body with its life, it must make this body its own doxa, and mediately that of the spirit also. When these twice seven forms of life are conceived of, in full activity of their interacting, ascending, and descending functions,—so that even the bodily life is disclosed outwardly, and, so far as this is possible, serviceably accompanies conscious and voluntary emotions of the soul,—this is the condition of waking, the condition of "flj? (Hellenistic yprpyopeiv, formed from iyprjyopevai), or, so far as it is purposely maintained, of Ipt? (aypxrrrveiv).

But sleep is the periodical sinking of the seventh, sixth, fifth form of life, back into the fourth, even to the first. To this nature of sleep corresponds in the most marked manner the Greek Karacf>opd, from Karcupepeadai (Acts x. 9). The Old Testament appellations of sleep form a climax of three degrees: 1. nDun (nDU), from DW, LXX. I»i/i7to7/io?, from vwrrd&iv (Matt. xxv. 5); 2. mB>, from LXX. wrvo<; (fcrvovv), the intensive of the previous word (Isa. v. 27; Ps. cxxi. 4); 3. nDi)"iri, from BTi3, LXX. eKOTaai<;, for which other translations have Korcuf>opd or Kapo< ; or Kwfio, i.e. deeper (Acts xx. 9) or heavier sleep (Luke ix. 32). The highest degree of profound sleep, effected or ordained by God for a special end, is designated by 'n nDTW (1 Sam. xxvi. 12; comp. Gen. ii. 21, xv. 12).

When man falls asleep, the first thing is, that the activity which unites everything that characterizes waking, and which is the essence of the seventh form of life, retires. The activity, moreover, of the sixth form of life ceases, in that the speech, which proceeds from the understanding that prepares the ideas and words, as far as it is outwardly spoken, with the organic functions that co-operate to produce it, and generally every action that is related to the outer world, and accomplished by the muscles, are suspended. Thirdly, the outer senses are closed; the origination of perceptions and ideas caused by sensation, and thus also the subjective impression of them on the mind, ceases; the receptivity of sensible perception, wherein subsists the essence of the fifth form of life, is checked. It is no extinction of these manifestations of life, only a binding; still more correctly expressed, an involution. A further retrogression is not possible. The activity of the fourth form of life continues, in the pulsation of the heart; that of the third, in the flow of the blood; that of the second, in the breathing , in and out; that of the first, in the incessant renovation of the organism from the fountains of its origin. A sick man's sleep affords hope of his recovery (John xi. 12; Ecclus. xxxiv. (xxxi.) 2),¹ because that renovation is more intensive in sleep than in waking. It resembles the embryonic plastic power, as sleep, when it is profound, recalls in other ways also the embryonic condition. ^u Every night we sink back into that state whence we came; and the spiritual, as the bodily, life of every day contracts itself to its first roots, in order to spring up again on the following morning with new living vigour. In sweet distraction of thought, our spirit retires at first out of the hemispheres of the brain, into the chain of the large cerebral ganglions. They also become paralyzed, however: the corpus striatum, the tlialamus opticus, and corpora quadrigemina are

¹ It may be translated: Sleep recovers heavy sickness, i.e. (with special reference to feverish disease) heals it; or, since ixvi<pun is elsewhere only used intransitively—according to the reading, ixrl\pu—sleep washes away (eluit) severe sickness. But this occurs, moreover, in the reading S*»o», which gives a more fitting meaning to the first half verse; as this, that heavy sickness does not suffer sleep to come on.

able no longer either to enliven the glance or to support the limbs; the eyelid droops, forsaken by the paralyzed nerve of the muscles of the eyes; the balance is lost; only the everwakeful source of our life—the medulla oblongata—remains unaffected by this retirement. Like the heart—the primum movens and ultimo moriens—it still maintains the play of the vital muscles of the body, and the vital processes themselves. If these limits are passed, there ensues powerlessness and death."¹

To the four bodily forms of life, then, to which in sleep life retreats, correspond also the spirit-like psychical: for the dream is a characteristic psychic phenomenon, in which the spirit, with the activities proper to it, transferred into a position of repose, as it were, represents the spectator; and which it annuls as soon as its will, appearing out of inactivity, or out of a reaction as yet only feeble, begins to interfere either by way of restraint or stimulus.² If the sleep be profound, the sleeper does not dream at all: the soul has retreated absolutely into the unconsciousness of the first form of life, which consists in direct yet dim self-apprehension; it lives, and is moreover active, but without being manifest to itself in the lowest hidden ground of its nature. If the retreat of the forms of life pause at the fourth, or if it raise itself from the deeper submergence back again to this, the dream begins, D^n, ivwrviov (oveipos only in the book of Wisdom; ovap only in Matt.).³ The unconscious will proceeds out of itself as an impulse, which, according to the man's disposition, expresses itself in this or that way, but always with less restraint and more strongly than in waking life; and the impulse seeks for itself within the world of forms, that has been stored up during the waking

¹ E. Huschke, I.e. p. 161; compare the able treatise on sleeping, waking, and kindred states, by Purkinje in R. Wagner's H.W. iii. 2, 431. Also Erdmann, Psychol, p. 19, apprehends sleep as "a,return into the embryonic life."

³ Hence we perceive a meaning, when Erdmann (Das Traumen, ein Vortrag, 1861, 12) calls sleep the feminine, and waking the masculine, Bide of human life.

³ Gbschel, Der Mensch diesseits und jenseits, p. 43: "As sleep may be represented as sinking (kataqopa), the dream may be represented as the rising (ii»«<popi*)." Comp. the luminous representation of the course of events in Kohler, Zachariah (1861), p. 42.

life, an object corresponding to its own determination, in the representation of which, or its fantastic new formation, idea and volition are concerned,—a kind of birth-labour, which comes to breaking forth in the fourth form of life; a>? wSivovarjs fyavrd&rai KapSi'a, i.e. as the heart deviseth to itself forms in travail¹ (Ecclus. xxxi. (xxxiv.) 5). For the proper laboratory of the dream, according to Scripture, is the heart. Thus the Scripture names the seat of the imagination (Sec. VII.), where that, which in the first forms germinates, and expands, and struggles forth, comes into daylight prepared; and the seat of the capacity of presentiment, which does not bring forth images, but receives images into itself — that is, receives immediate impressions of the future, and generally impressions full of mystery. The head indeed is so little unconcerned in dreaming, that in the book of Daniel dreams are even called " visions of the head," and forms of the brain therefore; but depending on the daily activity of the brain, this relation is rather secondary and passive. The activity of the region of the heart, on the other hand, is increased; and thence—where, moreover, lie the roots of thought—spring forth (without piercing to the clearness of the spiritual, daylight consciousness of the free, fully conscious thought) dreams formed and coloured by sense, and, as it were, painted on the cloud-gloom of the *vegetative life. ^u I slept," says the Shulamite, beginning to relate a dream (Cant. v. 2), "and my heart was waking."² Dream-forms which obtrude themselves falsely upon man as divine revelation, are called deceit of the heart nwn, Jer. xxiii. 26).³

There are none of the manifestations of life belonging to the three highest forms of life which are not carried on in the dreamer; but although not in unconsciousness, still only in phantasy, not in outer reality. For the real activity—which is

¹ Grimm remarks that the mention of women with child was rather to be expected. Not only, however, in the case of pregnant women, but also in those who are actually bearing (and even those who are shortly about to bear), various nervous disturbances may be considered as degrees between the morbid impulses and high degrees of psychical alienation (e.g. mania)—degrees which not seldom express themselves in hallucination.

⁸ See my Canticles, p. 123.

³ Corresponding to this biblical representation, the spirit of Clytemnestra, in JSschylus' Eumen., says, v. 104, to the sleeping chorus of furies, 6f/oi Si "x'hirtya; rotooi xap<tia otilt».

instrumentally carried on by the body—of those powers that act externally, has ceased; they have, as being reduced to potentialities, entered into the fourth form of life, and there— often in such a lively manner, that the dreamer, without knowing it, becomes the speaking echo of the impressions inwardly received¹—carry on their play in the picture-world of the heart. The dream is only a phantom of the waking life, a shadow which fleeth when one awaketh (Job xx. 8). Therefore the melting of the dream at awakening is in Scripture a favourite image for destruction without trace left (Ps. lxxiii. 20; Isa. xxix. 7). And emphatic warning is given against trusting in dreams. "Where many dreams are," saith the Preacher (Eccles. v. 7), " there are many vanities and words." The son of Sirach carries on this, when in ch. xxxi. 1 he says: "The hopes of a man void of understanding are vain and false, and dreams lift up fools. As he that catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind, so is he that regardeth dreams. The vision of dreams is a resemblance (tovto Kara Tovtov), even as the likeness of a face to face (irpoaunrov o/nowu/ia)."

But this prevailing illusory character of dreams has, moreover, its reverse side. The dream is a domain of experience, to which is appropriated an intellectual, ethical, and spiritual significance far transcending the unimportance of appearance or seeming. As spirit and soul are associated as essence and manifestation, and as the peculiarity of man as such subsists in the reciprocal modification of his spirit-life and bodily life by the soul, which is the link that associates the two, it is certainly impossible, that when the soul and its corporeal self-manifestation retire to the sources whence they originated, there should not at the same time follow a retirement of the spirit. It may be said without hesitation, that when the man sleeps, his spirit also sleeps, so far as it does not make itself manifest outwardly, as in waking life; just as the Scripture says of God, that He, as it were, sleeps (Ps. xliv. 24, lxxviii. 65), when He does not interfere in what is happening externally, as might be expected from His righteousness and truth. But, on the other hand, what the Scripture says of God, Ps. cxxi. 4, is also true of the

¹ This sleep-talking is called in Scripture nm, Isa. lvi. 10; comp. Cant. vii. 10.

spirit, that He neither slumbers nor sleeps. As the activity of the soul and of the body only changes its character, and does not cease, still less does that of the spirit. "Quiescit a munere suo externo," says Hamann in his Latin Exercitium,¹ "uti conditor ab opificio suo quievit; attamen pergit operari, aeque ac vivere in •somno haud cessamus, quamvis per quietem vitam non sentiamus." The distinction is only, that in God there is no difference of the consciousness of day and night; but to the self-conscious creature its own nature is never so transparent as that of God is to Him. And especially we, the men who live in an earthly body, have, as the background of our being, a dim region, out of which our thinking labours forth to the daylight, and in which much goes forward, especially in the condition of sleep, of which we can only come to a knowledge by looking back afterwards. Experience confirms to us the assertion of Scripture (Ps. cxxvii. 2), that God giveth to His beloved in sleep. Not only many poetical and musical inventions, but, moreover, many scientific solutions and spiritual perceptions, have been conceived and born from the life of genius awakened in sleep; and as Lavater confesses in his Pontius Pilatus:¹ "If we take together all the dream-visions in the Bible, and consider them with a calculating glance; if, of the numerous histories of ancient and modern days, of all which Plutarch, Valerius Maximus, Pliny, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, and so many wise and honourable men of antiquity relate, we grant nothing, and are willing to explain all, without exception, as deliberate falsehoods or childish superstitions,—a course which seems to me to involve no praise of our reasonableness and wisdom, of our love of truth and perception of truth; if we, moreover, bound by the spirit of our free-thinking age, declare the whole to be falsehood and folly, and merely hesitate at the review of all the biblical dreams,—can we, as reverencing the Bible—we who pardonably believe in the Bible histories—can we help

¹ Comp. Kahnis, Dogmatik, i. 186: "At the source of the actual consciousness, i.e. that which is definitely imprinted on the individual powers, directed to a definite purpose, and associated with the nervous functions, lies the potential self-consciousness, the innermost core of the spirit, which is affected by no change of the nervous functions,—an image of God, who neither slumbers nor sleeps."

* Lavater's Ausgewahlte Schriften, von J. K. Orelli (1841), Part i. p. 155.

confessing that there is in human nature a sensorium for invisible, absent, remote, future, contingent things, for real images and sensuous symbols of such things; which sensorium, under certain contacts of higher natures, under certain influences, which in natural ways are hidden from us, may be set in motion and appointed to the perception of such things as can be perceived by no other sensorium?"

Certainly the deep of man's internal nature, into which in sleep he sinks back, conceals far more than is manifest to himself. It has been a fundamental error of most psychologists hitherto, to make the soul only extend so far as its consciousness extends: it embraces, as is now always acknowledged, a far greater abundance of powers and relations than can commonly appear in its consciousness. To this abundance pertains, moreover, the faculty of foreboding, that leads and warns a man without conscious motive, and anticipates the future,—a faculty which, in the state of sleep, wherein the outer senses are fettered, is frequently unbound, and looms in the remoteness of the future; as, among the ancients, especially ^schylus beautifully and appropriately says :¹

EvOovox yip <Ppri» ofifixain 'koifi-zpiiatrm,
it r,i,.hx o» fioip' dvpoaxavo; <fpt»uf.

For in sleep the spirit is clear-sighted;

By day the spirit's vision of the future is limited.

With respect to this natural gift of divination, the Talmud names the dream the sixtieth part of prophecy ;² and Tertullian, with respect to it, suggests, in his psychological section de somno, the question, Quis tarn extraneus humanitatis, ut non aliquam aliqwmdo visionem fidelem senserit? The dreams of Joseph in his father's house (Gen. xxxvii. 5-11), which, as became plain

¹ Eumen. v. 106.

² The ingenious talmudic passage Berachoth, 576, runs: "Five are a sixtieth. Fire, honey, and Sabbath, Bleep and dreaming. Fire is a sixtieth of hell; honey is a sixtieth of manna; Sabbath is a sixtieth of the future world; sleep is a sixtieth of death; dreaming is a sixtieth of prophecy." Similar to this is another passage, Genesis Rabba, c. xvii.: "Three things are fallings off (as foliage from the tree): sleep is a falling off from death; dreaming is a'falling off from prophecy; the Sabbath is a falling off from the future world." R. Abin adds to these two more: "The sun is a falling off from the light of heaven; the Thora is a falling off from the wisdom of heaven."

to him subsequently (xlii. 9), figuratively predicted to him his future eminence over the house of Jacob; the dreams of the chief butler and the chief baker of Pharaoh (Gen. xl.), which, as Joseph interprets them, signify beforehand the forthcoming several issue of their destiny; the dream of the warrior in the Midianitish camp in the time of Gideon (Judg. vii. 13),—are illustrations of such dreams of presentiment (^avraaiai ovelpov irpofirjvvovaai, Wisd. viii. 17-19). In all these cases the dreams are not designated as divinely produced; and there is no need of any other source of origination than that natural gift of insight¹ innate in the soul, and variously allotted to individuals and peoples, which slumbers when the man wakes, and often wakes up when he slumbers. Its representation of the future is often concealed behind enigmatical symbols; and with reference to this, Scripture recognises a science of dreaminterpretation (P^na or "¹?!?'), but as a capacity bestowed from above (Dan. i. 17; comp. Gen. xl. 8, xli. 16).

Another significant aspect of dreaming is the ethical. It is not alone the external world, with its after effects echoing and growing dim in the distance, which is represented in the dream (wherefore the Preacher says, v. 3: "The dream cometh from the multitude of trouble"); but, moreover, our entire innate and acquired subjectivity is manifested there in a natural truthfulness, that breaks through the pressure of external relations and the simulation of the waking life. In the dream the man has himself before himself as in a mirror (KarevavTi -rrpoadiirov ofioiwfixi irpoadyrrov, Ecclus. xxxi. 3). And not merely the constitution and contents of the soul, including the state of the body, but mediately also the constitution and contents of the spirit, come to manifestation in the dream as in a hieroglyph. Is the man of a carnal tendency? It may be said of him, in some measure, when he is unconsciously sleeping, what is said of a dead man in Rom. vi. 7 (6 airodavwv SeSiKalarrcu airb Tjj< ; afiapria<;), so far as the actual sinning ceases, although in sub

¹ Vid. J. P. Lange, art. "Ahnung" in Herzog's R.E., and E. von I.asaulx, Die prophelische Kraft der Menschlichen Seele in Dichtern und Denkern, 1858, 4. "As," says the Spanish physician Huarte, "there are men who excel others in remembering past events, or in the perception of the present, so there are also men who have, more than others, the natural capacity of representing to themselves the future."

stance it is only dammed up at its fountain. But as soon as ever dreaming is combined with the sleep, the spirit suffers, from the side of the dark and fiery life of the soul withdrawn from its light—driven round by the flesh and self—a degradation towards the soul; and from the selfishness of the soul, its selfish impulses, its restlessness stimulated by selfishness, are formed in the heart all kinds of sinful images, of which the man is ashamed when he awakens, and on account of which remorse sometimes disturbs even the dreamer, especially those dreaming forms that proceed from the sexual impulse and its allurements, which will be all the more dominant and unchaste the less the man in his waking state strives, and is accustomed, to keep himself in strict discipline on this side of his natural disposition. The modern doctrine of the soul, indeed, regards these dreams as free from guilt;¹ but Scripture decides otherwise, and even looks upon the involuntary emission of seed, as a loathsome contamination, which makes him who suffers it unclean for the current day (Lev. xv. 16), and even banishes the warrior from the camp (Dent, xxiii. 10); for it is a disgrace of the spirit that it has lost its royalty, and should allow itself to be involuntarily driven round by the wheel of nature. Our own conscience confirms the judgment from which the institutions of the Thora proceed; and the whole of antiquity, from India to Egypt, is unanimous on this fuahteiv Tt\v adpxa of the dreamer (Jude ver. 5). These licentious dreams show just this, that the spirit has let go the reins; it attains to the perception of it in the veiling of the spirit that follows them. For so far as man in God has once more attained power over himself, the spirit of the sleeper sinks not into the flesh,² but into God, from whom it originated: it communes with God, and finds

¹ Thus, for example, Schemer, Das Leben des Traums (1861), p. 192: "Collectively, the sexual impulses, and their dream-images that occur in sleep, are morally wholly indifferent."

² The Semitic Di^n (Syr. chelmo, Arab, hulm) specially designate such sexual, lustful dreams; see the true development of the meaning of the verbal stem in Ges. Thes. But the word has become then the conception of a species of the dream: "so nevertheless, that, at least in Arabic, this denomination of the dream, on account of the sexual-sensual meaning attached to it, is avoided when prophetic, spiritual, pure, and true dream-visions are spoken of, and manum or ruja is used. It would be a kind of contradictio in adjecto to say Juim fsadik, a true dream; all the world says manam

itself with its senses in God, as in falling asleep, so also still in awakening (Isa. xxvi. 9; Ps. cxxxix. 18, comp. iii. 6, iv. 9).

A third significant aspect of dreams is the spiritual: they may become the department and means of a direct and special intercourse of God with man, for specific purposes, individual, or general. We divide dreams, in this view, into dreams of conscience and dreams of revelation.¹ The witness of conscience—which, besides, in man's conscience, instinctively and judicially attends all his doings—may make itself objective, and expand within the dream-life, and the night-life generally, into inwardly perceptible transactions between God and the man. Thus God appeared threatening and warning Abimelech (Gen. xx.) and Laban (Gen. xxxi. 24) by night, in dreams; and the wife of Pilate warned her husband against being concerned in the death of the Just One, in consequence of the terror that she had experienced in a dream (Matt. xxvii. 19). Such a phenomenon, with the purpose of establishing the conviction of the sinfulness and nothingness of man, is the vision of the night with the spirit's voice, which Eliphaz relates in Job iv. 12-21. And Elihu describes (with reference to Job's utterance, vii. 13) such experiences of the sleeping man as may kindle repentance (xxxiii. 15): "In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; then He uncovereth the ear of men, and sealeth warnings to them, to release man from crime, and to withdraw arrogance from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from falling on io the sword." Dreams, or even dream-like visions, that overtake man within the nightly perception, bring him to self-acquaintance, selfconsideration, and draw him back from the brink of the abyss.

fsadik or ruja fsddekeh. On the other hand, hulm, plur. dhlam, is entirely in its place, when disordered, nonsensical, confused, and phantastical, vain, and lying dreams are spoken of; as the Koran (xii. 44, xxi. 5) says confusion of dreams, ahlamin = confused chimeras" (Fleischer).

¹ According to Synesius (tie insomniis), these correspond to those respectively which we call dreams of foreboding, of conscience, and of revelation —the Greek expressions Sisipo;, xpqftarwfio;, cpafca, contrasted with which the dream as a reflex of experience is called esuwv/ov, and as the picture of the creating imagination, Qarraafca. Compare, for the rest, also Philo's two books on dreams. Of the original five books, only the second and third remain to us.

They print the call to repentance deeply and past forgetting, on his heart, and seal the work of grace that brings him round by chastisement from destruction. These are the dreams which we call dreams of conscience.

There are, moreover, dreams, by means of which God's special will is made known to man by the voice of God, or of an angel, in a way that it could not be known to him from God's written word, and the points of view and motives presented by conscience; and dreams, by means of which future occurrences are made present to man,—events, the foresight of which, on account of their speciality, and their relation to God's counsel, and its fulfilment in redemption, lies far beyond the limits of the faculty of presentiment, and is essentially distinct from the mode of expression of presentiment. The prevailing psychological tendency does not acknowledge the truth of such occurrences thus apprehended: it says that in them the man becomes his own genius, and the substance of his own religious inward nature is there portraying itself. But the Holy Scripture, which has for the beginning, middle, and end of its contents and purpose, a personal intercourse of man with the personal God, although, on the other hand, warning expressly enough against dreams on account of their predominantly illusory subjective nature, yet claims a recognition of such dreams of revelation as those in which God and man stand in presence of one another as I and thou, and divinely produced forms enter into the dream-life of the sleeper; while the Spirit of God applies ideas and conceptions which man has attained in a natural way during waking life, to give him by their means a forcible experience of the future and of eternity. The means of representation even here are human; but that which is represented itself, and its efficient cause, are divine. Dreams which, like everything divine, bear in themselves the evidence of their divine original, are an essential link in the chain of the temporal working out of redemption. Scripture relates a great multitude of them. Illustrations of such, by which God's mind and will are revealed to the individual, are found in the dreams of Jacob in Bethel (Gen. xxviii. 12) and in Haran (Gen. xxxi. 10-13); the dream of Solomon in Gibeon (1 Kings iii. 5); the dreams of Joseph the husband of Mary (Matt. i. 2); the nightly visions of Paul (Acts xvi. 9, xviii. 9, xxiii. 11, xxvii. 23), if (which is not expressly said) they were experienced by the apostle in a sleeping condition. In such dreams as relate to the way of life of the individual, God is answering sometimes probably to sincere inquirers (1 Sam. xxviii. 6). And examples of dreams concerning the history of the future, having a more general horizon, are the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel; perhaps also, considering their introduction into the history of God's people, the dreams of Pharaoh (Gen. xli.), although these moreover—except, on the contrary, xli. 25—may be regarded as God-ordained dreams of presentiment. If he who has such dreams of revelation be an appointed agent of divine revelation, they are prophetic dreams in the special sense. Waking visions probably are to be distinguished from these prophetic dreamvisions, as the seer—whether by day (Ezek. viii. 1; Dan. x. 7; Acts vii. 55, x. 9—16), or, as for example Zechariah (comp. Acts xvi. 9, xviii. 9), by night—receives them in a waking state. In both cases the external senses are in repose; and in both cases the freedom of action is limited to the range of that which is beheld, and otherwise is in bondage. But in the former the restraint is the natural manifestation of sleep; in the latter, the extraordinary result of an operation of God. Every deep sleep, indeed, so far as the soul is withdrawn from its relation to the outer world into its relation to itself and the spirit, and through the spirit to God, is an eiiorewt? (LXX. for HDTin);¹ but there is also in the waking state an internal withdrawing like to sleeping and dreaming, which may arise to such a point, that the man is taken out beyond the limits of the region of his temporal life, and comes into contact with a remote world withdrawn from his usual perception (comp. t^H?> Dan. viii. 18, x. 9). This is ecstasy (from iKarrjvai, opposed to aaxf>poveiv, i.e. daylight, calm, discursive thinking, 2 Cor. v. 13, and to yeveadai iv kavrw, i.e. being in one's self, Acts xii. 11), the condition of prophetic visionary intuition (Acts x. 10, xi. 5, xxii. 17), or of special charisma (1 Cor. xiv. 2), or, moreover, of individual extraordinary events (Acts

¹ Just so Philo, in Genesin, p. 17, ed. Aucher: Somnus in se proprie ecstasis est, son ea qua propior est amentias (fixniX) Bed secundum sensuum solutionem abscntiamque consilii {Koyiofiov). Tunc etiam sensua recedunt a sensibilibus, et intcllcctus abest a sensibus, non roborans nervos eorum neque prestans motum illis.

ix. 3, comp. ix. 7 with xxii. 9; 2 Cor. xii. 2-4),—in the Old Testament ptn, as distinguished from Di^n (J₀el iii. 1; Dan. i. 17),—a divinely wrought concentration of the entire human life upon the spiritual (Apoc. i. 10),—an internalization which is effected to the limit of the hodily life and of death, i.e. of the separation of the soul from the body (2 Cor. xii. 2-4). This ecstasy in waking stands above the dream of revelation. Wherefore the revelations which Daniel receives begin with dreams or visions of the night (Dan. ii. 19, vii. 1); as, on the other hand, that immediate constant vision of God of which Moses was declared worthy (Num. xii. 6-8),¹ is above them both: for neither in the dream nor in the ecstasy is the object seen altogether without the veil of symbol and enigma, which are occasioned by the remoteness of God and of the spiritworld from man. That, for the rest, even in dream and ecstasy, phantoms of the heart may assume the appearance of divine revelations, Scripture is fully conscious. It warns of them, specifies the criteria to distinguish them (Deut. xiii. 2; Gal. i. 8), and is rich in warning examples. For that is the very blinding and deception of the false prophets, in whose dreams the fleshly wishes and hopes of the people that they are beguiling are embodied (Jer. xxix. 8, comp. xxiii. 32, etc.).

This classification of dreams has already led us some steps beyond the limit of this division, in which we have to consider the natural psychological condition. The dreams of the second and third kind (those of conscience and of revelation) pertain to the sphere of grace and of miracle, which break through nature. If the spirit of man, according to its original intention and destiny, rested in God, all the sleep of man, without needing supernatural operations of God's grace and power, would be a union into God; and the fulness of the spirit like to God, and united with God, would be reflected in the soul all the more intensively, that it would be the less developed by being retracted from the last forms of life to the first. Of such a kind was the sleep of Jesus. For of Him—the sinless Son of man—we read indeed that He slept, but not that He dreamt. Our sleep, on the other hand, is associated either with total obstruction of our consciousness, or with confused dreams. For after that the soul has come into the service of the body,

¹ Tholuck, Die Propheten u. ihre Weissagungen (1860), pp. 50-52.

and the divine image of the Spirit is faded and darkened, the sleeping life of man bears the character of the Turba that the harmony of man's powers has become; and that which is in man is there manifested in confused and sinful images. Even when the innermost nature of man—the will of his spirit—is directed to the God who is his original, it has the enticements, pollutions, and disturbances that proceed from the Turba incessantly to drive away and to retreat from; and, that it may express itself more freely and purely, and become a more fitting organ of divine revelation, there is necessary a restraining and putting to death of the self-life of man's psychical body, which has incurred sin and materialism—a restraining of a more pervading and overmastering kind than that which is usual in healthy and normal sleeping and dreaming.

It will become still clearer to us how distorted and disturbed is the relation of the bodily life to the life of the soul and spirit in the present natural condition of man, when we proceed to consider psychologically, according to the hints given by the Holy Scripture, the alternate states of health and sickness between which the life of man vibrates backwards and forwards.