The trance state Steiner calls the polar opposite of dreaming, in which the deserted physical and etheric bodies are worked on directly by outer forces.
Somnambulism in Anthroposophy is the trance condition Rudolf Steiner treats as the exact polar opposite of dream consciousness. In the eighth lecture of True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation (GA 243, given at Torquay on 20 August 1924), Steiner describes how the medium or somnambulist has his I and astral body driven out, so that the physical and etheric bodies are left, in his phrase, as deserted territory. Into that vacated ground the terrestrial, animal and human forces work directly by suggestion, and this displacement he names the basis of every mediumistic state. Where the dreamer sinks inward into his own being, the somnambulist is flung outward and behaves like an automaton answering the world of nature. Today anthroposophic medicine reads the same withdrawal of the higher members behind hypnosis, sleepwalking and certain forms of illness.
Somnambulism, in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, is the trance or sleepwalking condition that stands as the precise antithesis of the dream. The dreamer lives wholly within his I and astral body. The somnambulist, by contrast, has these higher members thrust out, leaving the physical and etheric bodies open ground on which animal and terrestrial forces act by suggestion. Steiner calls this the basis of every mediumistic state.
In Steiner's Own Words
This no longer applies to the somnambulist. The medium or somnambulist has no control over his physical and etheric bodies; they are, so to speak, deserted territory. When a man is endowed with the constitution of soul that is normal for our time, it is the forces of the plants and minerals alone that have an influence upon his physical and etheric bodies. If the forces of the minerals, i.e. of the mineral Earth, did not influence our physical body, we should be unable to walk or move around, because we are dependent upon these forces. It is permissible to share the world of the mineral forces; that is the normal condition, but they must not enter into the etheric body.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not invent the word. The term he uses, somnambulism, carried a precise technical meaning in the medical literature he addressed at Torquay. In 1784 the Marquis de Puységur, a pupil of Franz Anton Mesmer, was treating a young peasant named Victor Race on his estate at Buzancy in northern France when Race fell into a lucid, obedient trance that Puységur called artificial or magnetic somnambulism. That observation founded a century of European research into suggestion, magnetic sleep and what was later renamed hypnosis. By the time Steiner spoke, this whole field had been taken up by the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, whose investigators he names directly in the same lecture and gently dismisses for studying the deserted vehicle from outside while ignoring the spiritual being that has left it.
What Steiner adds is an anthropology of the trance, not merely a description of it. Puységur saw obedience; Steiner asks who is obeyed, and answers that the somnambulist's I and astral body have been displaced, so that animal and terrestrial forces govern the abandoned physical and etheric bodies by suggestion. Thalira synthesis: the somnambulist is not asleep and not awake but evicted, a tenant turned out of his own house while the house keeps moving, which is why hypnotic suggestion can command a body whose owner remembers nothing. Anthroposophic physicians in the Ita Wegman lineage carry this reading into the clinic, treating certain trance, sleepwalking and dissociative conditions as a real loosening of the higher members rather than a curiosity, and working to restore the I to its rightful seat.
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