344. In cases where sleep is disturbed for some reason and the individual is frequently "woken up", it means that day-consciousness is transferred from one body to another in a very unnatural way. The transference happens much too quickly and abruptly. Neither the physical body nor the feeling-body really come to rest. Consequently, in such circumstances, the individual's "awake state" becomes a kind of cross between his awake day-consciousness and his "awake state" in night-consciousness. As a result of this, aberrations of memory come about so that recollections of experiences met with in the "awake state" in night-consciousness become intermingled with recollections from experiences in the individual's awake state in day-consciousness. And the total impression from a night such as this, is a chaotic mixture of memories from these two forms of the "awake state". This impression can be neither purely physical nor purely mental, nor can the individual in question differentiate between what are the physical and what are the mental recollections. It is this mixed state of consciousness which underlies all that which is described as "dreams". And it is obvious, moreover, that dreams, when contrasted with a normal wide-awake form of experience in day-consciousness, could hardly appear otherwise than as something unreal and intangible, something in which there is not a trace of purpose or meaning. And experiences which prove to be without purpose or meaning could never constitute a fundamental basis for a human being's creation of cultural values. So this is why dreams have no kind of meaning in the creative output of terrestrial man. But everything has a meaning for the more advanced researcher and so we cannot avoid dwelling here for a moment on the nature of dreaming. Besides, amid the immense collection of mental nonsense relating to dreams, we have found some grains of gold in the shape of "clairvoyance in space and time" which constitutes irrefutable proof of a spiritual form of existence and experience, and have also seen that night-consciousness for the I is an expression of something quite different from, and much more than, mere physical sleep. In analysing dreams we found, too, that there is an "awake existence" with sense-experiences independent of the physical body and the senses connected to it. Dreams are therefore "flashes" from another world which have found their way into the day-conscious life of terrestrial people. It is as if some kind of "leak" had appeared in the partition between physical and mental zones. In a very few places the "leakage" is considerable and the flashes become radiantly clear and irrefutably visible as emanating from the glow of another world. For instance this may be the case where rays of light appear in the form of realistic "clairvoyance in space and time", revealing present, past and future. In other places the "leaks" appear in numerous narrow "rifts" and "holes", through which the light is seen only weak and flickering. In this case the terrestrial radiance is dominating and pervades the mental light so strongly that the latter appears quite unreal. The light emanating from these two worlds cancels each other out. What remains from this unfavourable combination is mental "ash", the dross of consciousness. And it is the accumulation of this "dross" which is generally known or viewed as the "dream-world". It is only the serious researcher who reaches the individual large "cracks" and sees the mental light in its pure form. For the large majority of people physical light is so dominating and has such an effect on these stray, feeble beams of light that the latter completely lose all colour and power and become as "ashes". No wonder, then, that these "ashes" cannot give an ordinary terrestrial person any reassuring concept that dreams are the consequences of a realistic "awake existence" beyond physical sleep; that they are the defective recollections from a higher world which is parallel with its terrestrial counterpart and that they are indeed defective material from the consciousness showing the immortality of the I and its immaculate divinity, that is, its identity as the master of every form of unconsciousness.
      Terrestrial people in general drift amongst defective evidence of their own immortal existence and so they remain in a mental darkness. "The wages of sin is death". Here the divine prophecy from the Garden of Eden is fulfilled. The shining light of materialism obscures even the light of life itself. Death broods over the Earth. The living being remains a mystery. Ignorance reaches its peak. Earthly light is life's darkness.