Translation from German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
It is now almost two years since a natural event, in which the lives of several people were at stake, attracted a great deal of public attention. Many readers will remember the “Lugloch Cave Affair”, about which all newspapers at home and abroad carried daily reports. A number of people had entered a cave, the so-called “Lugloch Cave”, near Semriach,[2] to explore it. While they were busy there, the stream flowing into the cave swelled as a result of a cloudburst in the mountains and blocked the exit. For eight days, all means were put into motion to free the prisoners, who had only scant provisions, from their terrible situation. They tried to divert the stream and dam it, and after much valuable time had been lost through all sorts of attempts, the failure of which could have been foreseen, they began to search for a way into the cave by drilling and blasting, which was all the more difficult as they did not know the direction to which they were to advance. Eventually they managed to find this direction, and those trapped in the cave were freed without any of them suffering any particular disadvantage as a result of their long imprisonment.
Few people know, however, that the success of this liberation was due to a dream which prompted Miss Leopoldine Luksch in Vienna to indicate the exact direction in which the tunnel was to be dug. Miss Luksch has already described the details of this event in a small book,[3] and the author of these lines has come to the conclusion that the information given by Miss Luksch actually served to indicate the direction in which one had to proceed in order to reach the trapped people, and that without her information or without following it, the prisoners in the Lugloch cave would most likely have starved to death. But it is almost self-evident that Miss Luksch’s lucid dreams received no official recognition, and that others even claimed credit for having found the direction; for who would have the courage these days to acknowledge that there can be a spark of truth in a dream?
As for the rest of Miss Luksch’s book, it would have been better if it had remained unpublished, for it is confusing and incomprehensible; the author, despite her high intelligence and noble character, is not a skillful writer. For the latter reason, I was pleased to comply with her invitation and make a few remarks about Miss Luksch and her dreams, as well as about dreams in general.
It is true that Miss Luksch often has future events foreshadowed in her dreams, but with the exception of the case in the Lugloch cave, these have so far been of no use to anyone, but have always been disastrous for her. She foresaw that a misfortune would befall Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and tried to warn him; her warnings were of course ignored. She foresaw that an accident would befall President Carnot of the French Republic and travelled to France to warn him, but could not arrive. She foresaw the death of Archduke Albrecht and other high-ranking persons and tried to save them by writing letters to certain high-ranking persons living at court or by seeking audiences. The result, which any person of sound judgment could have predicted, was that she was repeatedly arrested by the police for harassing high-ranking persons and twice put in an insane asylum, but has now been exonerated from the same, since no trace of insanity can be found in her other than her belief in her vivid dreams.
In my opinion, which is based on my experiences during my personal acquaintance with Miss Luksch, the reason for the error lies not in the belief in her dreams, but in the ignorance of the causes from which these dreams arise and in the false conclusions which she draws from them. If one wanted to put all people in a madhouse who draw false conclusions from given facts because they do not know the laws on which these mental processes are based, where would most of our scholars end up? Perhaps we can shed some light on the causes of dreams and dream life. In order to simplify the matter, we will not go into details, but only outline our view and leave it too much of a burden for those who are interested to investigate the more detailed circumstances.
According to the usual classification, which, although very incomplete, must suffice for our present purpose, we distinguish three things in man, namely body, soul and spirit.
The body is bound to a place in space, and its ability to perceive does not extend beyond the realm of its senses; the mind of man is everywhere, but what the mind can perceive does not come to bodily consciousness unless, for example, the mind is intimately united with the body during sleep. The soul is the link between mind and body. It can transmit sensations or perceptions which the mind receives directly to the thinking faculty of the brain in the body, provided that the brain of the receiver is sensitive enough to receive the impressions received. Then the mind comes and judges them according to its knowledge from previous experience; where the impression on the brain activity is a clear one and the mind has knowledge, the meaning of an impression reflected by a dream will easily be clear; But if the impression is unclear, the imagination begins its own game, and without one being aware of it, a series of connected images arises from the feelings and ideas stored in the “unconscious”, which one takes to be the truth because of their connection and because one does not know the causes of them; although the spark of truth in them is only the spiritual perception that has not come to personal recognition. From such unconscious fantasy ideas arise the “visions” of a Katherina Emmerich, mediumistic messages, which are also for the most part just a kind of unconscious daydreaming, etc.
To illustrate this with an example, let us take an anecdote from the life of H. P. Blavatsky. When she was still a young girl, she dreamed of an aunt who had disappeared years ago and, it was claimed, had long since died. Soon the “spirit” of this aunt appeared to her and wrote to her through her in German, which she (H. P. Blavatsky) did not understand. The aunt stated where she had died, who had given the funeral oration, what was said in it, etc. Then the spirit of this aunt’s son came, who stated that he had committed suicide, was suffering in purgatory for it, and asked for requiem masses. All the evidence that a critical spiritualist could have demanded was available in sufficient quantity to prove the identity of these spirits. Unfortunately, it later turned out that mother and son were still alive and in good health, and that the whole thing was based on a play of the imagination, on an unconscious train of ideas, the explanation of which would take us too far here [to explain].
It is the same with dreams. Not all dreams arise from mental impressions; physical impressions also produce such impressions. For example, when we are asleep, we feel cold on our feet. This sensation conjures up a dream for us: we are on a voyage of discovery at the North Pole, suffer shipwreck, have to fight with polar bears, etc. We wake up and nothing is true except the impression of cold.
The same applies to spiritual impressions. The free spirit is everywhere, just as the light of the sun is everywhere, even if the sun’s body is in a particular place in the universe. It exists outside of space and time and can sense everything through the soul; but it requires an extremely finely organized brain to perceive these sensations and a philosophical understanding to recognize them correctly. Let us assume that the spirit comes into contact through the soul with a person who is close to death. The impression of this is transferred to the brain. Then the play of the imagination begins. In our “unconscious” we find familiar memories of stories of people who are apparently dead. The idea of the dying person takes shape in our dreams; he “appears” to us and tells us that he will be buried alive, that he will wake up in the grave and try to pull the nails out of the coffin with his mangled fingers, etc. Or, as a result of the coordination of ideas, the image presents itself as the apparition of a deceased relative who calls on us to do this or that, and yet everything is nothing but a spectacle of the imagination seen objectively in the dream.
In finely organized persons, such as Miss Leopoldine Luksch, the mental impressions can sometimes be received from the brain with more or less clarity, and then it depends on the ability to understand whether the dream is correctly interpreted or not. It goes without saying that the receptivity of the brain is not always the same, but depends on many different circumstances. In the case of the Lugloch cave, the impression seems to have been a clear one.
The transmission of spiritual impressions to the brain takes place not only during sleep, but also during waking. It can be more complete during sleep, since then the receptivity of the brain is not disturbed by ones own thinking. But he who is receptive to the impressions which his own mind receives and does not lie to himself by denying them, does not need to sleep and dream first; he feels and sees through the mind, even while the body is fully conscious, and this is called “intuition.”
There are warning dreams and presentiments by which one can recognize impending dangers and avoid them or avert them. But if one really foresees an event that is certain to happen, one cannot avert it; for if one could prevent it, it would not happen, and one can no more foresee the occurrence of something that will not happen than one can remember something that has not happened.
It is therefore erroneous to deny the possibility of dreams being true; but it is equally erroneous to consider everything as a dream which may be based only on a play of the imagination; rather, as in all things, so here too we should learn to distinguish the true from the false by investigating the law on which all this rests. A dream can only be judged of its real value in advance if we know all the causes from which it arose.
It is therefore as difficult to judge which dreams are reliable and which are not, as it is difficult to judge which of our thoughts are correct and which are not, as long as we do not know their source. Our thoughts, like our dreams, can arise from the most varied sensations, which can only be judged correctly when we know their source. Innumerable examples are known which prove that a dream foresaw a danger, and it happens even more often that a dream lies to us. The same is the case with ordinary thinking. If all our thoughts arose from the knowledge of the truth, there would be no error; and as it would be foolish to take everything that occurs to us as truth, it would be just as foolish to take all dreams at face value. There is no criterion by which one can judge the truth of a thing other than clear reason, and reason itself rests on the knowledge of the truth.
Dreams can arise from real facts as well as from error; but if a person has had frequent dreams which have come true, it is not illogical to assume that his dreams can come true in the future. Recently Miss Luksch has again dreamed of important events which relate to the deaths of prominent people in Germany, but it is to be expected that, wisely dictated by her previous experience, she will not divulge anything about them, for an old German proverb says: “He who wishes to carry the truth to the table of great gentlemen must make a lot of sweet broth for it,” and “he who plays the truth will have the fiddle bowed over his head.”
What is most interesting to the metaphysician about Miss Luksch’s dreams is the fact that she is visited by the “spirits” of living persons who demand favors from her which these “spirits”, if they had reason, would know to be impossible. This is one of the many proofs that the astral body of the ordinary human being (the “Evestrum”, as Paracelsus calls it) has no reason. In these Evestra are contained only unreasonable desires, instincts, instincts for survival, fixed ideas, passions, etc.; the intelligent part of man, reason, is not active in it. Let us take, for example, if the Evestrum of a high-ranking person senses the approach of death and asks Miss Luksch for help, then this Evestrum, if it had reason and intelligence, would know that the high-ranking person to whom it belongs would not accept the help of Miss Luksch at all, indeed would not even listen to the person in question and would simply entrust her letters to the wastepaper basket. But there are other things known which these unreasonable “Evestra” carry out without the people to whom they belong knowing anything about it. A closer look at this would lead us deep into the area of spiritualism, vampirism, etc.
Likewise, the “spirits” of the dead who soon advise her to do such impracticable things cannot in any way be the rational spirits of her relatives, but, insofar as such images and ideas do not arise from the seer’s own feelings, they could also only be their “Evestra”, i.e. their “astral corpses” that remained on earth, in which dormant and awakenable earthly instincts, desires, etc. may still be present, but in which neither reason nor intelligence nor judgment are present. But this consideration would also lead us back to that controversial area of spiritualism, in which it is impossible to find one’s way without a precise knowledge of the psychological constitution of man.
Dr. Franz Hartmann.
Note:
[1] A Dreamer. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Sphinx 22, no. 122 (April 1896), 214-219 [Eine Träumerin] Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025. The original text was set using the German fraktur or blackletter.
[2] [R.H.—Graz-Umgebung District, State of Styria, Central Austria.]
[3] “Wonderful Dream Fulfillments” by Leopoldine Luksch. (Leipzig, Oswald Mutze. (Mk 50 Pf.) [R.H.—Wunderbare Traumerfüllungen als Inhalt des wirklichen Lebens! Verlag. Oswald Mutze, Leipzig, 1894; viii, 96 pages 20 cm.] Our readers would undoubtedly be very grateful to the author of the above work if he wrote an essay on the symbols of dreams for the “Sphinx” and showed the way to the correct evaluation of dreams through his critical hints. H. G. [R.H.—birth, unknown; death Jan. 15, 1936?]