From falling asleep to waking, Steiner taught, every soul leaves its own folk soul and lives in the round dance of all the others, its own excepted.
Sleeping in Foreign Folk Souls in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that a human being lives inside his own folk soul only from waking to falling asleep, because the folk soul works in the etheric body, which the ego and astral body leave each night. From falling asleep to waking, the sleeper stands outside his own nation entirely and lives within the concerted interplay, the round dance, of all the other folk souls of the age, his own excepted. Steiner presented the teaching in Berlin on 28 November 1914, in the wartime lecture cycle published as The Destiny of Individuals and of Nations (GA 157). He drew one hard corollary: sincere hatred of a nation acts as a spell that binds the hater's sleep life to the very folk soul he hates. The teaching gives modern prejudice research an unexpected esoteric mirror.
Sleeping in Foreign Folk Souls names one of Steiner's starkest wartime teachings. By day the folk soul of your nation lives in your etheric body; by night, when ego and astral body withdraw, you are outside it, moving through the interplay of every other folk soul of the age. Delivered in Berlin in November 1914, while the nations of Europe were at war, the teaching turns nightly sleep into an unchosen education in the foreign.
In Steiner's Own Words
I have said that between going to sleep and waking man usually lives in the interplay of folk souls other than the one which is his own folk soul at the time. That is the usual way. There is a way, however, of living one-sidedly, as it were, in just one particular folk soul. There is a way in which one is forced, in this state between going to sleep and waking, to live not within the whole interplay of those other folk souls, within their dance as it were. Instead one is more or less under a spell to live together with one or several folk souls that are taken out of the total concord of all folk souls. There is such a way. It consists in our feeling a particular hatred for one or several folk souls or nations.
What it Means Today
In 1954 the Harvard psychologist Gordon W. Allport published The Nature of Prejudice, the book that founded intergroup contact theory: the finding that prejudice weakens when members of hostile groups meet under conditions of equal status and common purpose. Half a century later, Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp's 2006 meta-analysis of 515 studies confirmed the effect across nations, ethnicities, and decades. Contact with the group you distrust, reliably and measurably, softens the distrust. Allport framed such contact as something societies must deliberately arrange: mixed housing, integrated units, shared work.
Steiner's Berlin lecture of 28 November 1914 makes a stranger claim in the same direction: contact with foreign folk souls is already arranged, nightly, for every sleeper, and the one force that narrows it is hatred, which chains the sleeper to the single folk soul he hates most. Where Allport prescribes contact as remedy, Steiner describes it as constitution. Thalira synthesis: the contact hypothesis reads as the daylight half of a law whose night half Steiner stated first, that no soul can wall itself inside its own nation, and that hatred, far from keeping the foreigner out, is the strongest binding to him. A practitioner takes this concretely: review before sleep what national antipathies the day's news has planted, because on Steiner's account those feelings decide the company your soul keeps until morning.
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