Klages defined the dream mood through passivity, felt distance, and fleetingness
Evidence
Klages emphasized three aspects of the dream mood: first, perceptual passivityan abandonment to impressions only made possible by shedding, or bursting out of, customary forms of perception. Secondly, a sense of being far away, which can be connected even to things close at hand, since what is decisive is not remoteness itself, but the impression of distance. And, thirdly, the feeling of fleetingnessthe fleetingness, for example, of landscape images rushing past the train window, or of a car going past at night which has hardly approached us before it has already passed by, or the fleetingness of one’s own life seen in the wilting leaf, in billowing smoke, in dissolving foam, in shooting stars, or in the face of images of changeless continuation such as trees hundreds of years old, pyramids thousands of years old, or primeval mountain ranges. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 815
Categorization
- DEFINE: A precise three-part formal definition of the dream mood that Benjamin borrowed from Klages — reference-quality.
- XREF: The fleetingness of train-window and car-at-night imagery feeds directly into Benjamin’s later writing on speed, shock, and passanten (the flâneur, ‘One-Way Street’). — connects to: Klages coined ‘aura’ for the distant archetypal quality of the world soul — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 818; The Dialectic of Enlightenment rests on two uncredited themes from Weber and Klages — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1368; A scene’s emotional tone, not its image, determines dream meaning — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 434
- STORYSTEM: The third point could seed a story narrated from inside a dream mood: everything experienced as simultaneously rushing past and changeless.
Broader Connections
- Klages coined ‘aura’ for the distant archetypal quality of the world soul
#complicates(0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 818 - The Dialectic of Enlightenment rests on two uncredited themes from Weber and Klages
#responds-to(0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1368