In Steiner's account, the dreams of European villagers put questions to them, set them tasks, and gave them something to overcome.
What is the Riddle in Folk Dream Life?
The Riddle in Folk Dream Life in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the questioning character of the half waking, half sleeping picture life that European villagers carried from the fourth century to roughly the twelfth. Steiner described it in Lecture II of European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century (GA 325), given at Dornach on 16 May 1921. His claim is narrow and testable against the folk record: these were not passive visions. The spiritual world put questions to the sleeper, imposed tasks, required skill, and gave something to overcome. Steiner located the organ of this experience in the rhythmic system, the breathing and circulating middle of the threefold human being, rather than in the nerve system, which faces outward toward the senses. Because the rhythmic system was drawn forth out of the organism, the resulting pictures were shared aloud from neighbour to neighbour and hardened into local saga. Folklorists later catalogued the riddles; Steiner asked who was asking.
The Riddle in Folk Dream Life is the mark Steiner gave to European folk consciousness before the towns took over. Villagers reported premonitions and dreams tied to a grove, a spring, a mountain. What they reported was rarely a message. It was a demand: a question to answer, a task to finish, an obstacle to get past.
In Steiner's Own Words
But something very remarkable permeated this remains of an ancient prophetic and clairvoyant dream-life, which continued to flourish in the village communities whilst Catholic doctrine passed over their heads, and one can see that everywhere in Europe the organization of the human being was involved in this characteristic spiritual life. Something was at work which indicated a quite special disposition of soul in two respects. When people told of their weightiest premonitions, their most significant dreams (these were always associated with places), when they describe their half-waking, half-sleeping experiences, these dreams are always connected either with events, with questions which were asked them from out of the spiritual world, or with tasks which were imposed upon them, with matters in which their skill played a part.
What it Means Today
Folkloristics reached this material about eighty years before Steiner lectured on it, and kept half of it. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published Deutsche Sagen in two volumes, 1816 and 1818, gathering the local legend Steiner says was still recoverable among country people in the nineteenth century: the dream fastened to a mill, a lake, a crossroads. What the Grimms preserved as narrative, Antti Aarne began to number in his Verzeichnis der Märchentypen of 1910, a catalogue Stith Thompson revised in 1928 and 1961 and Hans-Jörg Uther expanded in 2004 as The Types of International Folktales, issued at Helsinki by the Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Open that index at the riddle and task types and Steiner's description is sitting there in tabulated form. ATU 500 turns on guessing a name nobody has given you. ATU 875 turns on a farm girl answering a question set as a trap. ATU 313 turns on impossible tasks assigned by an otherworldly figure. The index records how often each motif appears and where it travelled, not why the folk imagination is so insistently interrogative, why the dream so rarely tells and so often demands.
Thalira synthesis: the tale-type index preserves the riddle and loses the questioner, the exact transposition Steiner is pointing at, an exchange between the sleeping villager and the spiritual world flattened into a plot device once town thinking put the nerve system where the rhythmic system used to be.
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