In Steiner's teaching, dreams are not only memory: what the ego and astral body meet at night often belongs to the next incarnation, clothed in images of this life.
The Prophetic Nature of Dreams in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that dreams point forward as much as backward: during sleep the ego and astral body leave the physical and ether bodies and undergo real experiences, some of which belong to the next incarnation, including meetings with individuals one has not yet encountered on earth. On waking, the returning astral body presses these experiences against the ether body, which holds only the imprints of the present life, and the ether body clothes the future content in familiar images. The dream we remember is therefore a present-life costume draped over next-life substance. Steiner set this out in a Berlin lecture of 22 June 1915, published in The Destiny of Individuals and of Nations (GA 157), tracing the dreaming faculty back to Old Moon consciousness. Practically, he asks dreamers to study the manner of a dream rather than its imagery.
Most accounts of dreaming treat the dream as a replay of the day. Steiner reverses the direction. The prophetic nature of dreams names his claim that sleep carries the ego and astral body into experiences still waiting in a future life, and that the ether body, meeting them at waking, can only translate them into pictures borrowed from the life already lived.
In Steiner's Own Words
We must be aware that in the principles which depart from our physical and ether bodies, in the astral body and the ego, we have that which tends towards our next incarnation, which is preparing in us for our next incarnation. As we gradually learn to separate our dreams from the images deriving from our present life, we come to know the prophetic nature of dreams. The prophetic nature of dreams can indeed be revealed to us; we merely have to learn to strip our dreams of the images in which they are clothed. We need to consider the nature of the experiences in our dreams rather than the actual experience.
What it Means Today
Twelve years after this Berlin lecture, the British aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne published An Experiment with Time (1927), still the most discussed secular argument that dreams point forward. Dunne recounts dreaming, in the spring of 1902, of an island volcano about to destroy its inhabitants, shortly before news reached him that Mont Pelée had levelled Saint-Pierre on Martinique. His response was procedural: keep a notebook at the bedside, record every dream on waking, then read the record against the following days as carefully as against the preceding ones. He concluded that dream content blends past and future in roughly equal measure, and he built a theory of layered time, Serialism, to hold the observation. J. B. Priestley turned Dunne's scheme into the time plays of the 1930s, including Time and the Conways (1937).
Dunne could describe the anomaly; he could not say what in the human being does the travelling. Steiner's lecture supplies the anatomy Dunne lacked: the ego and astral body undergo real future-directed experience outside the body, and the ether body, holding only this life's imprints, dresses the report in old scenery. Thalira synthesis: Dunne's notebook and Steiner's discipline converge on one instruction, trust the manner of the dream and distrust its costume, because the costume is always cut from yesterday's cloth. A practitioner who records dreams in Dunne's fashion while asking Steiner's question, what quality of encounter is here rather than what picture, is working both methods at once.
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