342. If people's dreams are realistic experiences in another world, how can it be that terrestrial mankind takes this condition so little into account? Why is it that the "psychic world" has not become more widely favoured than it is and has not been mapped out long ago?
      If the dream-state has not been able to leave behind it more tangible and convincing impressions of the existence of this other world or form of life, this must be due to the fact that the dream-state is in itself an abnormal way of experiencing. This type of experience is actually based entirely upon the memory-faculty. Indeed, in reality the dream-state consists only of a transference of memories from the psychic experience met with during sleep to the physical day-consciousness when awake.
      But as memory is a faculty which will not culminate or fundamentally support consciousness until the sixth kingdom of the spiral, and terrestrial man is still only in the second kingdom of this spiral, it becomes clear that, at present, this faculty does not have much supporting capacity for terrestrial people. Its domain is actually no greater than just enough for daily needs in the struggle for existence itself. So, for this individual there is no such thing as being able to remember past lives. He cannot even remember much of his present physical existence; generally, the first years of life have been completely blotted out from present memory. So the ability to remember, both in animals and terrestrial people, is one of the mental faculties least in use. And, as we shall see later on in "Livets Bog", it is not the object of the memory to transfer memories from the "awake state" in night-consciousness to the "awake state" in day-consciousness. Therefore it is generally the case that terrestrial people remember absolutely nothing from their "awake state" in night-consciousness, so it follows that that state is quite unknown to the individual during his awake day-consciousness. The only impression he has of his night-consciousness is that it constitutes just a deep sleep. He believes he is unconscious when asleep. But this is a great delusion and an irrational belief. As I have already begun to point out here, night-consciousness represents an "awake state" just as much as day-consciousness. But as the memory-faculty is not able to take the memories from this "awake state" over to the individual's day-consciousness, then obviously this awake state will become a domain of which he has not the smallest recollection. And so this domain becomes just as unknown to that individual as all the other things and experiences of which he has lost all memory. As a result the terrestrial individual has no prior condition in his awake day-consciousness for acquiring any impression of life's experiences other than the fact that they are formed in alternating states of being "awake" or "asleep". So he cannot realize in a normal way that this "sleeping" state is really also an "awake existence" and that "sleeping" only concerns the physical organism itself. A direct transference of memories from the "awake state" in night-consciousness could therefore never be an actual fact for a terrestrial person, were it not that such a transference may sometimes come about in an abnormal way. It is this abnormal memory-transference which we call the "dream-state", just as memories transferred in this way are what we call "dreams".
      As the dream-state is an abnormal or inconsistent transference of memories from an "awake" state in night-consciousness to an "awake" state in day-consciousness then the identity of dreams as memories will be correspondingly abnormal and incomplete. These "memories" also appear to be illogical and unreliable to a high degree – indeed, sometimes they are in direct contrast to truth and reality. Moreover, the above-mentioned cases, when they show actual clairvoyance in time and space – whereby an individual is able to "see" situations or events which are really taking place hundreds of miles away at the "dream-moment", or will take place on the physical plane at a more or less distant moment in the future, or again, which have already taken place in the past – these cases amount to a very small percentage of all dream-states. In the face of this prevailing condition which prevents dreams from being perfect memories of the realistic things the individual has actually experienced in a non-physical way, the few cases in which dreams have been an irrefutable proof that an individual's experiences in his "awake state" in night-consciousness are memories of true facts, are so insignificant and have so little importance that up to now they have not been able to form any basis for scientific recognition from ordinary researchers who lack the supplementary knowledge in other spiritual and mental fields. And thus the concept "dream state" has come to be tinged with unreality. One does not really take dreams into account and cannot, of course, place much reliance on them because of the imperfect form in which they are carried over to day-consciousness. But nevertheless, one thing is certain, that in themselves they are experiences from a different "awake state" than the one known in day-consciousness, that is to say, an "awake state" not supported by the physical senses. And the few cases of dream-experiences which are identical with experiences of actual fact only demonstrate the saying that "little strokes fell great oaks". To the advanced researcher they constitute irrefutable additional proof of the existence of an "awake state" even though the physical senses are out of action and the physical body is asleep.