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_ CHAPTER XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS
This is going rather far, for a book--nay, a booklet--on the child
consciousness. But it can't be helped. Child-consciousness it is. And
we have to roll away the stone of a scientific cosmos from the
tomb-mouth of that imprisoned consciousness.
Now, dear reader, let us see where we are. First of all, we are
ourselves--which is the refrain of all my chants. We are ourselves. We
are living individuals. And as living individuals we are the one, pure
clue to our own cosmos. To which cosmos living individuals _have
always_ been the clue, since time began, and _will always_ be the
clue, while time lasts.
I know it is not so fireworky as the sudden evolving of life,
somewhere, somewhen and somehow, out of force and matter with a pop.
But that pop never popped, dear reader. The boot was on the other leg.
And I wish I could mix a few more metaphors, like pops and legs and
boots, just to annoy you.
Life never evolved, or evoluted, out of force and matter, dear reader.
There is no such thing as evolution, anyhow. There is only
development. Man was man in the very first plasm-speck which was his
own individual origin, and is still his own individual origin. As for
the origin, I don't know much about it. I only know there is but one
origin, and that is the individual soul. The individual soul
originated everything, and has itself no origin. So that time is a
matter of living experience, nothing else, and eternity is just a
mental trick. Of course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has its
own individual soul.
And we sit on our own globe, dear reader, here individually located.
Our own individual being is our own single reality. But the single
reality of the individual being is dynamically and directly polarized
to the earth's center, which is the aggregate negative center of all
terrestrial existence. In short, the center which in life we thrust
away from, and towards which we fall, in death. For, our individual
existence being positive, we must have a negative pole to thrust away
from. And when our positive individual existence breaks, and we fall
into death, our wonderful individual gravitation-center succumbs to
the earth's gravitation-center.
So there we are, individuals, single, life-born, life-living, yet all
the while poised and polarized to the aggregate center of our
substantial death, our earth's quick, powerful center-clue.
There may be other individuals, alive, and having other worlds under
their feet, polarized to their own globe's center. But the very
sacredness of my own individuality prevents my pronouncing about them,
lest I, in attributing qualities to them, transgress against the pure
individuality which is theirs, beyond me.
If, however, there be truly other people, with their own world under
their feet, then I think it is fair to say that we all have our
infinite identity in the sun. That in the rush and swirl of death we
pass through fiery ways to the same sun. And from the sun, can the
spores of souls pass to the various worlds? And to the worlds of the
cosmos seed across space, through the wild beams of the sun? Is there
seed of Mars in my veins? And is astrology not altogether nonsense?
But if the sun is the center of our infinite oneing in death with all
the other after-death souls of the cosmos: and in that great central
station of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and change trains for
the stars: then ought we to assume that the moon is likewise a
meeting-place of dead souls? The moon surely is a meeting-place of
cold, dead, angry souls. But from our own globe only.
The moon is the center of our terrestrial individuality in the cosmos.
She is the declaration of our existence in separateness. Save for the
intense white recoil of the moon, the earth would stagger towards the
sun. The moon holds us to our own cosmic individuality, as a world
individual in space. She is the fierce center of retraction, of
frictional withdrawal into separateness. She it is who sullenly stands
with her back to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. She it is who
burns white with the intense friction of her withdrawal into
separation, that cold, proud white fire of furious, almost malignant
apartness, the struggle into fierce, frictional separation. Her white
fire is the frictional fire of the last strange, intense watery
matter, as this matter fights its way out of combination and out of
combustion with the sun-stuff. To the pure polarity of the moon fly
the essential waters of our universe. Which essential waters, at the
moon's clue, are only an intense invisible energy, a polarity of the
moon.
There are only three great energies in the universal life, which is
always individual and which yet sways all the physical forces as well
as the vital energy; and then the two great dynamisms of the sun and
the moon. To the dynamism of the sun belong heat, expansion-force, and
all that range. To the dynamism of the moon the _essential_ watery
forces: not just gravitation, but electricity, magnetism,
radium-energy, and so on.
The moon likewise is the pole of our night activities, as the sun is
the pole of our day activities. Remember that the sun and moon are but
great self-abandons which individual life has thrown out, to the right
hand and to the left. When individual life dies, it flings itself on
the right hand to the sun, on the left hand to the moon, in the dual
polarity, and sinks to earth. When any man dies, his soul divides in
death; as in life, in the first germ, it was united from two germs. It
divides into two dark germs, flung asunder: the sun-germ and the
moon-germ. Then the material body sinks to earth. And so we have the
cosmic universe such as we know it.
What is the exact relationship between us and the death-realm of the
afterwards we shall never know. But this relation is none the less
active every moment of our lives. There is a pure polarity between
life and death, between the living and the dead, between each living
individual and the outer cosmos. Between each living individual and
the earth's center passes a never-ceasing circuit of magnetism. It is
a circuit which in man travels up the right side, and down the left
side of the body, to the earth's center. It never ceases. But while we
are awake it is entirely under the control and spell of the total
consciousness, the individual consciousness, the soul, or self. When
we sleep, however, then this individual consciousness of the soul is
suspended for the time, and we lie completely within the circuit of
the earth's magnetism, or gravitation, or both: the circuit of the
earth's centrality. It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue
removing or arranging the dead body of our past day. For each time we
lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with
the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed or laid in
line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active
death-circuit, while we sleep.
As we sleep the current sweeps its own way through us, as the streets
of a city are swept and flushed at night. It sweeps through our nerves
and our blood, sweeping away the ash of our day's spent consciousness
towards one form or other of excretion. This earth-current actively
sweeping through us is really the death-activity busy in the service
of life. It behooves us to know nothing of it. And as it sweeps it
stimulates in the primary centers of consciousness vibrations which
flash images upon the mind. Usually, in deep sleep, these images pass
unrecorded; but as we pass towards the twilight of dawn and
wakefulness, we begin to retain some impression, some record of the
dream-images. Usually also the images that are accidentally swept into
the mind in sleep are as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces
of paper which the street cleaners sweep into a bin from the city
gutters at night. We should not think of taking all these papers,
piecing them together, and making a marvelous book of them, prophetic
of the future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so,
although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would have
some connection with the past day's event. But its significance, the
significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we
relegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. There
is no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper--only an
accidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actual
event: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, a
newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, torn
envelope, tract, paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, and they
have no individual sequence, they belong more to the mechanical
arrangements than to the vital consequence of our existence. And the
same with most dreams. They are the heterogeneous odds and ends of
images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current,
and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them.
It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the
individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident
and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only
those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in
its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as
gamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting
of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols
and fetishes.
Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak
and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only
occasionally they matter. And this is only when something _threatens_
us from the outer mechanical, or accidental _death_-world. When
anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may become
so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so
intense that it arouses the soul--then we must attend to it.
But we may have the most appalling nightmare because we eat pancakes
for supper. Here again, we are threatened with an arrest of the
mechanical flow of the system. This arrest becomes so serious that it
affects the great organs of the heart and lungs, and these organs
affect the primary conscious-centers.
Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse of real living
consciousness. In living consciousness the primary affective centers
control the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place.
The great organs, being obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at last
with violence arouse the active conscious-centers. And these flash images
to the brain.
These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as of
falling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such
images are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying,
of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having to
creep through terribly small passages, these are direct transcripts
from the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. It is the
directly transcribed image of the heart which, impeded in its action
by the gases of indigestion, is switched out of its established
circuit of earth-polarity, and is as if suspended over a void, or
plunging into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, maybe,
according to the strangulation of the heart beats. The same paralytic
inability to lift the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comes
directly from the same impeded action of the heart, which is thrown
off its balance by some material obstruction. Now the heart swings
left and right in the pure circuit of the earth's polarity. Hinder
this swing, force the heart over to the left, by inflation of gas from
the stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and nerves from any
obstruction, and you get the sensation of being unable to lift the
feet from earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart to
over-balance towards the right, and you get the sensation of flying or
of falling. The heart telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakes
us. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal with the obstruction,
which was too much for the mechanical night-circuits. The same holds
good of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrow
passages. They are direct transfers from the squeezing of the blood
through constricted arteries or heart chambers.
Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and the
nerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For the
blood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper,
elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In the
blood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almost
material consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousness
transfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer in
wakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort--as when we
have indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in sleep the
transfer is made through the dream-images which are mechanical
phenomena like mirages.
Nightmares which have purely mechanical images may terrify us, give us
a great shock, but the shock does not enter our souls. We are
surprised, in the morning, to find that the bristling horror of the
night seems now just nothing--dwindled to nothing. And this is because
what was a purely material obstruction in the physical flow, temporary
only, is indeed a nothingness to the living, integral soul. We are
subject to such accidents--if we will eat pancakes for supper. And
that is the end of it.
But there are other dreams which linger and haunt the soul. These are
true soul-dreams. As we know, life consists of reactions and
interrelations from the great centers of primary consciousness. I may
start a chain of connection from one center, which inevitably
stimulates into activity the corresponding center. For example, I may
develop a profound and passional love for my mother, in my days of
adolescence. This starts, willy-nilly, the whole activity of adult
love at the lower centers. But admission is made only of the upper,
spiritual love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper centers.
Nevertheless, whether the admission is made or not, once establish the
circuit in the upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you will
get a corresponding activity in the lower, passional centers of adult
love.
The activity at the lower center, however, is denied in the daytime.
There is a repression. Then the friction of the night-flow liberates
the repressed psychic activity explosively. And then the image of the
mother figures in passionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams.
The Freudians point to this as evidence of a repressed incest desire.
The Freudians are too simple. It is _always_ wrong to accept a
dream-meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time when we are given
over to the automatic processes of the inanimate universe. Let us not
forget this. Dreams are automatic in their nature. The psyche
possesses remarkably few dynamic images. In the case of the boy who
dreams of his mother, we have the aroused but unattached sex plunging
in sleep, causing a sort of obstruction. We have the image of the
mother, the dynamic emotional image. And the automatism of the
dream-process immediately unites the sex-sensation to the great stock
image, and produces an incest dream. But does this prove a repressed
incest desire? On the contrary.
The truth is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his
dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the
persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul,
it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And
yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams
of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or
sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing
dream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream is
the wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-process
will persist in substituting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifies
a man.
Why does the dream-process act so? For two reasons. First, the reason
of simple automatic continuance. The mother-image was the first great
emotional image to be introduced in the psyche. The dream-process
mechanically reproduces its stock image the moment the intense
sympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the mother-image refers only to
the upper plane. But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic.
Because the mother-image refers to the great dynamic stress of the
upper plane, therefore it refers to the great dynamic stress of the
lower. This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The living soul is
_not_ automatic, and automatic logic does not apply to it.
But for our second reason for the image. In becoming the object of
great emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an object
of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him from
finding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost
always the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, upon
the psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is
livingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the persons
who, in some way, _oppose_ his life-flow and his soul's freedom, and
so become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance. Once a
man is dynamically caught on the upper plane by mother or sister, then
the dream-image of mother or sister will persist until the dynamic
_rapport_ between himself and his mother or sister is finally broken.
And the dream-image from the upper plane will be automatically applied
to the disturbance of the lower plane.
Because--and this is very important--the dream-process _loves_ its own
automatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logical
conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakeful psyche is so
flexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism. While the soul
really lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism.
For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process.
The living soul has its great fear. The living soul _fears_ the
automatically logical conclusion of incest. Hence the sleep-process
invariably draws this conclusion. The dream-process, fiendishly, plays
a triumph of automatism over us. But the dream-conclusion is almost
invariably just the _reverse_ of the soul's desire, in any
distress-dream. Popular dream-telling understood this, and pronounced
that you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it means
a funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you will
dream of his funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear that the
desire shall not be fulfilled. It is _fear_ which forms an
arrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automatically
produces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wished
your enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would present
you with his wedding.
Of course this rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in all
cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies
most often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic nature.
So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the living
psyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automatic
conclusion: the soul's just dread of automatism. And though this may
sound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of the
dream-trick.--That which is lovely to the automatic process is hateful
to the spontaneous soul. The wakeful living soul fears automatism as
it fears death: death being automatic.
It seems to me these are the first two dream-principles, and the two
most important: the principle of automatism and the principle of
inversion. They will not resolve everything for us, but they will help
a great deal. We have to be _very_ wary of giving way to dreams. It is
really a sin against ourselves to prostitute the living spontaneous
soul to the tyranny of dreams, or of chance, or fortune or luck, or
any of the processes of the automatic sphere.
Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, the dream-image generally.
Any _significant_ dream-image is usually an image or a symbol of some
arrest or scotch in the living spontaneous psyche. There is another
principle. But if the image is a symbol, then the only safe way to
explain the symbol is to proceed from the quality of emotion
connected with the symbol.
For example, a man has a persistent passionate fear-dream about
horses. He suddenly finds himself among great, physical horses, which
may suddenly go wild. Their great bodies surge madly round him, they
rear above him, threatening to destroy him. At any minute he may be
trampled down.
Now a psychoanalyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is a
father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex
catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary.
Examining the emotional reference we find that the feeling is sensual,
there is a great impression of the powerful, almost beautiful physical
bodies of the horses, the nearness, the rounded haunches, the rearing.
Is the dynamic passion in a horse the danger-passion? It is a great
sensual reaction at the sacral ganglion, a reaction of intense,
sensual, dominant volition. The horse which rears and kicks and neighs
madly acts from the intensely powerful sacral ganglion. But this
intense activity from the sacral ganglion is male: the sacral ganglion
is at its highest intensity in the male. So that the horse-dream
refers to some arrest in the deepest sensual activity in the male.
The horse is presented as an object of terror, which means that to the
man's automatic dream-soul, which loves automatism, the great sensual
male activity is the greatest menace. The automatic pseudo-soul, which
has got the sensual nature repressed, would like to keep it repressed.
Whereas the greatest desire of the living spontaneous soul is that
this very male sensual nature, represented as a menace, shall be
actually accomplished in life. The spontaneous self is secretly
yearning for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest and most
powerful sensual nature. There may be an element of father-complex.
The horse may also refer to the powerful sensual being in the father.
The dream may mean a love of the dreamer for the sensual male who is
his father. But it has nothing to do with _incest_. The love is
probably a just love.
The bull-dream is a curious reversal. In the bull the centers of power
are in the breast and shoulders. The horns of the head are symbols of
this vast power in the upper self. The woman's fear of the bull is a
great terror of the dynamic _upper_ centers in man. The bull's horns,
instead of being phallic, represent the enormous potency of the upper
centers. A woman whose most positive dynamism is in the breast and
shoulders is fascinated by the bull. Her dream-fear of the bull and
his horns which may run into her may be reversed to a significance of
desire for connection, not from the centers of the lower, sensual
self, but from the intense physical centers of the upper body: the
phallus polarized from the upper centers, and directed towards the
great breast center of the woman. Her wakeful fear is terror of the
great breast-and-shoulder, _upper_ rage and power of man, which may
pierce her defenseless lower self. The terror and the desire are near
together--and go with an admiration of the slender, abstracted bull
loins.
Other dream-fears, or strong dream-impressions, may be almost
imageless. They may be a great terror, for example, of a purely
geometric figure--a figure from pure geometry, or an example of pure
mathematics. Or they may have no image, but only a sensation of smell,
or of color, or of sound.
These are the dream-fears of the soul which is falling out of human
integrity into the purely mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselves
sufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last work only, or almost
only, in the mechanical mode. They have no dynamic relation with
another being. They cannot have. Their whole power of dynamic
relationship is quenched. They act now in reference purely to the
mechanical world, of force and matter, sensation and law. So that in
dream-activity sensation or abstraction, abstract law or calculation
occurs as the predominant or exclusive image. In the dream there may
be a sensation of admiration or delight. The waking sensation is fear.
Because the soul fears above all things its fall from individual
integrity into the mechanic activity of the outer world, which is the
automatic death-world.
And this is our danger to-day. We tend, through deliberate idealism or
deliberate material purpose, to destroy the soul in its first nature
of spontaneous, integral being, and to substitute the second nature,
the automatic nature of the mechanical universe. For this purpose we
stay up late at night, and we rise late in the morning.
To stay up late into the night is always bad. Let us be as ideal as we
may, when the sun goes down the natural mode of life changes in us.
The mind changes its activity. As the soul gradually goes passive,
before yielding up its sway, the mind falls into its second phase of
activity. It collects the results of the spent day into consciousness,
lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of the
gathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past.
Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance--all of
which are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over,
that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, or
bitterly. Evening is the time for this.
But evening is the time also for revelry, for drink, for passion.
Alcohol enters the blood and acts as the sun's rays act. It inflames
into life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. But by a
process of combustion. That life of the day which we have not lived,
by means of sun-born alcohol we can now flare into sensation,
consciousness, energy and passion, and live it out. It is a liberation
from the laws of idealism, a release from the restriction of control
and fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. But naturally
the course of the liberated consciousness may be in either direction:
sharper mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emotion, or deeper
sensuality. Nowadays the last is becoming much more unusual.
The active mind-consciousness of the night is a form of
retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct
from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical
consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most
elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of
_dynamic_ upper consciousness. But our deepest lower consciousness is
blood-consciousness.
And the dynamic lower centers are swayed from the blood. When the
blood rouses into its night intensity, it naturally kindles first the
lowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice and its fire to the
great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral
ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep
swaying of the blood in sex passion. Sex is our deepest form of
consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure
blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the
nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the
consciousness of the night, when the soul is _almost_ asleep.
The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living
soul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking with
its first hoarse half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operate
purely until the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and forms
of upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, it
draws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into the
blood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself
livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out its
great call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an
answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual
polarity between the sexes. As the night falls and the consciousness
sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenly
the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their
spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established
between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves
and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of
pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in
me ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is the
profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal.
And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosy
breasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. These
trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have
anything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the blood
in the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutation
passes through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They
fall apart and sleep in their transmutation.
But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul is
still individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is still
integral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream of
mankind was one and homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one,
more near to homogeneity than anything else within us. The
blood-stream of mankind is almost homogeneous.
But it isn't homogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfect
dark dynamic polarity, the sexual polarity. No getting away from the
fact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition,
or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact in
sex connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashing
circuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of our
under-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then in
the second place, the blood of an individual is his _own_ blood. That
is, it is individual. And though we have a potential dynamic sexual
connection, we men, with almost every woman, yet the great outstanding
fact of the individuality even of the blood makes us need a
corresponding individuality in the woman we are to embrace. The more
individual the man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is a
non-individual connection: promiscuity. The more individual, the more
does our blood cry out for its own specific answer, an individual
woman, blood-polarized with us.
We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the
woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. And we
force it to be so. To our disaster. The woman who thinks and talks as
we do is almost sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. The
dynamic blood-polarity would make her different from me, and not like
me in her thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much deeper than
thought-mode, that it may result in very different expression,
verbally.
We have made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the
day-self into the night, and spreading the night-self over into the
day. We have made love and sex a matter of seeing and hearing and of
day-conscious manipulation. We have made men and women come together
on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty--their
mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the
blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration.
We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day. It
is an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal
consciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upper
consciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act. By
provoking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the sex-reaction,
from the upper, outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousness
of conscious purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in our bodies.
We prevent it from having its own dynamic sway. We prevent it from
coming to its own dynamic crisis and connection, from finding its own
fundamental being. No matter how we work our sex, from the upper or
outer consciousness, we don't achieve anything but the falsification
and impoverishment of our own blood-life. We have no choice. Either we
must withdraw from interference, or slowly deteriorate.
We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day.
Once the sun rises our constitution changes. Once the sun is well up
our sleep--supposing our life fairly normal--is no longer truly sleep.
When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper
consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even
its chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We do
ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The
half-hour's sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long
hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active
centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic
flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the
morning's blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing
force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we
persist from bad to worse.
With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are
half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious,
because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to
be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of
the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a
feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good,
glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our
day-consciousness on into the night, when we _do_ at last begin to
come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the
morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to
prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman
should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly
the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn
the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will
soon be nervously diseased. _
Read next: Chapter 15. The Lower Self
Read previous: Chapter 13. Cosmological
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