Wahrlich, waren die Menschen sinniger, die feinen Winken der Natur zu beobachten und zu deuten, dieses Traumleben musste sie aufmerksam machen. Sie mussten finden, dass von dem grossen Ratsel, nach dessen Losung sie dursten, die Natur uns hier schon die erste Sible eingeflustert hat.

[Truly, if men were more sensitive to observe and interpret nature's delicate hints, they would be roused by their dreamt life. They would find that here nature has already disclosed the first hint of the great riddle which man is so thirsty to solve.]

Kiirnburger

The art of dream interpretation is a most ancient one. Some of the oldest documents relate to dream interpretations. The dream was considered an intermediary between the higher forces of nature and mankind. Usually it was the voice of divinity that was speaking through the medium of dreams. But demons and evil powers, too, were capable of coming into contact with man through the dream life. That was a period which we, belonging to a sophisticated age, can hardly visualize. "The lights and shadows and the coloring, at any rate, have changed," says Nietzsche. "We no longer understand precisely how ancient mankind felt about the most ordinary and common facts of life - about daylight and about waking up; for instance: because the ancients believed m dreams, their waking life had another coloring"

Contrary to the learned men, the simple folk have never looked upon dreams as "foam." Within their soul there persisted a belief in the reality of this psychic experience. But the belief rested stubbornly on what might be termed the "historic" background: the people wanted to interpret the future through the dream. The dream was looked upon as the infallible prophet. Whoever could interpret dreams possessed the gift to solve the riddle of the future. A derivation of this belief is the application of the dream to mercenary ends. The transposition of the dream pictures into figures is diligently practiced to this day and plays a great role among the people.1 The "cultured" classes regard it as their duty superiority to smile at such practices. They look upon the dream as a meaningless play of the phantasy uncontrolled by consciousness. Even so, ordinary reflection should have suggested the thought that here was raw material of great psychic value, though in a distorted form. We ought to see what we can make out of it. Here and there an investigator occasionally tried to penetrate the riddle of dreams. But these promising beginnings only led to far-fetched theories. 2

1 I want to take this opportunity to state that I have not disdained to look over the various Egyptian and Persian dream books. I wanted to find out whether our knowledge derived through the modern analysis of dreams is in any way corroborated in the old writings. That is but rarely the case. The dream books, so-called, which circulate among the people, impress me as being deliberate artefacts. The transposition of dream pictures into numbers is clearly traceable to the lottery game which is only a few centuries old.

2 The extensive literature on dreams has been adequately considered by Freud to whose work the interested reader is referred.

Anatole France is justified when he states: "I am firmly convinced that the power of dreams is greater than that of reality." The dream is the bridge between the real and the supersensory world. The ancient peoples knew this better than we. They believed in dreams and through the dream they felt themselves nearer their divinity.

Divinity is the projection of our ideal into infinity. What we demand of our ideal self appears to us as God's command. All appearances of self are continually referred to an ideal that stands supreme. Hence the first conception about the origins of dreams, - that the dream is a gift sent down by the gods. The divine voice commands and warns, it annunciates and praises through the dream. The dream interpreter of former ages claimed the gift of understanding that secret language and to be able thereby to foretell the future.

But not only is the ideal self projected into infinity. The evil self is also refracted outwardly and it reflects back as temptation or as the influence of demonic powers. The naive conception of the middle ages was that the dream represents a struggle between heaven and hell, a contest between God and Satan. That combat has always fascinated man's fancy. From Job and Jesus down to Faust and Parsifal, - what a wealth of poetic creations!

It is the eternal warfare between instinct and repression, between man, in his primordial character, and himself, under the tinsel of culture, which breaks forth in this wonderful symbolic picture. Our culture requires the continual repression of our cravings. The higher man ascends upon the cultural scale the stricter are the laws which impose the ethical strictures of the society in which he finds himself. Culture means smooth-working inhibition. The greater the social freedom, i.e., the stronger the social rights of the individual, the smaller becomes the span of his individual freedom; the stricter also the limitations which the individual must impose upon himself for the benefit of all. Social progress is based on the annihilation of individualism.

The dream represents an indulgence in fancies without the intervention of consciousness or under a limited control by the latter. The dream is a hallucination. Consciousness is the bearer of inhibitions. The ethical self first assumes control of consciousness and then it attempts to penetrate into the depths of the unconscious. Hence the cleft which arises between the pictures of the waking self and the hallucinations of the dream. Conscience is the sum of all inhibitions of a religious and ethical character. The term conscience in itself shows that it pertains to a knowledge of good and evil. The primitive man has so such knowledge. He is familiar only with the promptings of his cravings; with unpleasure, which arises out of the non-fulfillment of wishes and with the pleasure which accompanies and follows their gratification. The primordial man in us lives again in the dream.