Steiner's finding that human beings are fully awake only in thinking, dream their feelings, and sleep through their will.
What is Dreaming Feeling and Sleeping Will?
Dreaming Feeling and Sleeping Will in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's finding that ordinary waking consciousness covers only part of the soul. Stated in the Bern lecture of 30 November 1917, printed in Freedom, Immortality and Social Life (GA 72), the doctrine holds that full wakefulness extends over sense perception and the life of mental pictures alone. Feeling carries the same intensity of consciousness as a dream, and will is passed through as blankly as dreamless sleep. The bearer is the whole human being in daytime life, not a separate member: thinking, feeling, and willing occupy three different degrees of the same consciousness. Steiner's consequence is social rather than private. Because moral impulses, historical acts, and community life flow out of feeling and will, humanity dreams and sleeps precisely where its destiny is made. The modern application is a discipline of attention that raises feeling and will toward the clarity thinking already has.
Dreaming Feeling and Sleeping Will names the uneven brightness of everyday awareness. A thought stands in clear light. A feeling arrives already formed, like a dream image whose making was never watched. A deed leaves the will and returns only as a finished fact. Steiner treated this unevenness not as a defect to regret but as the actual condition under which history gets made.
In Steiner's Own Words
Everything that lives in our feelings, we dream while awake. What lives in our will is no more conscious to us in our waking daily life than the dull, barely perceptible consciousness during sleep. This is precisely why people in the field of philosophy have always argued about whether the will can be free or not, because even if they are enlightened philosophers, with their ordinary consciousness they cannot look into the workings of the soul when it expresses itself in the will, just as little as they can see into what the soul experiences during the deepest dreamless sleep. For the life of the will in its actual mystery is not only dreamt away, it is slept away in ordinary consciousness.
What it Means Today
Jonathan Haidt arrived at the same border from the other side. In The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail, published in Psychological Review in 2001, Haidt argued that moral judgment is made first by intuition and only afterward dressed in reasons. His experiments left subjects morally dumbfounded: certain of a verdict, unable to say why. In The Righteous Mind (Pantheon, 2012) he gave the model its lasting image, the rider on the elephant, where the rider is conscious reasoning and the elephant is the vast automatic system that actually chooses direction. The rider mostly serves as press secretary.
Steiner had described the same terrain in Bern eighty-four years earlier, and drew a different conclusion from it. Haidt's elephant is Steiner's dreamed feeling and slept will. Both men agree that the deciding happens outside the lit room. Where they part is on what follows. Haidt reads the finding as a permanent structure of human nature, to be worked with politically. Steiner read it as a developmental stage, and pointed, in the same lecture cycle, to the exercises by which feeling and will can be brought up into the same daylight thinking already enjoys.
Thalira synthesis: the elephant and the slept will are the same animal, but Haidt is describing a rider who has given up the reins, while Steiner is describing a rider who has not yet learned to hold them. The practical difference shows in what each recommends: better institutions in one case, self-schooling in the other.
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