Steiner taught that beneath ordinary waking consciousness the head dreams without pause, and the content of that continuous dream is the last earth-life, the former incarnation.
The Dream of the Former Incarnation in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a continuous, unnoticed dream-consciousness that runs beneath ordinary waking life, carried by the head, whose content is the previous earth-life. Steiner presented the teaching in Berlin on 25 June 1918, in the lecture States of Consciousness (GA 181, Earthly Death and Cosmic Life). The head, formed by forces carried over from before birth, holds a latent picture-record of the deeds and feelings of the last incarnation; while we perceive and think, it quietly dreams that record. Its counterpart is the limb-man, which dreams the next earth-life beneath sleep. Steiner's approach to noticing it is a state of pure waking: consciousness held awake yet emptied of perceptions, memories, and thoughts, until dim picture-like feelings surface. Interpreting them is the hard part. In practice the term grounds karma study in direct observation rather than doctrine.
Steiner's anthropology divides the human form into head, breast, and limbs, each with its own state of consciousness. The Dream of the Former Incarnation is what the head-consciousness does all day beneath our noticing: it dreams the last earth-life in dim pictures, while the limb-man dreams the next one beneath sleep. Two biographies, past and future, run under every ordinary day.
In Steiner's Own Words
The source of these perceptions is the weaving of the “underlying” consciousness which I have mentioned, and this is itself a kind of dream. But what is the dream about? It is actually about the former incarnation, the last earth-life. The interpretation is the difficulty. Latent in the consciousness of the head lies this dream of a former life on earth. In this subjective fashion it is possible to arrive at such a dream, although it may be hard to interpret. We shall return to this question. Hence you will see that what I have described as the human head is, in terms of soul-life, somewhat complex, inasmuch as two forms of consciousness belong to it, closely interwoven: the ordinary waking day-consciousness and the underlying dream-consciousness, which is a kind of reflection of the former incarnation.
What it Means Today
In 2001 the neurologist Marcus Raichle and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis published “A default mode of brain function” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, naming a set of brain regions that grows more active when a person stops performing tasks and simply rests awake. Two decades of research have tied this default mode network to autobiographical memory and to mental time travel: Harvard's Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis showed in 2007 that the network which reassembles the personal past also simulates the personal future. The finding echoes Steiner's structure with odd precision: a self-referential undercurrent beneath task-focused attention, occupied with where the biography has been and where it is going. Steiner extends the biography past the boundaries of birth and death. Where Raichle's network rehearses this life's past and future, the head's hidden dream, in Steiner's account, rehearses the former earth-life, and the limb-man's night dream rehearses the next one.
The practice parallel is close as well. Raichle's subjects revealed the network by resting without a task; Steiner's exercise asks for pure waking, consciousness held alert while perceptions, memories, and thoughts are set aside, so the undercurrent can surface as dim, picture-like feelings. Thalira synthesis: the Dream of the Former Incarnation reads the default mode not as idling but as testimony, a biographical undercurrent whose reach is longer than one lifetime.
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