The dream mood comprises perceptual passivity, an impression of 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, 218

Categorization

• DEFINE: Enumerates the three constitutive features of Klages’ dream mood, the concept later metabolized into Benjamin’s theory of perception.
• XREF: Connects directly to prior notes on Klages coining ‘aura’ as the distant archetypal quality of looked-at things. — connects to: Klages defined the dream mood through passivity, felt distance, and fleetingness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 815; The mind is constitutively active and reaches outward even while dreaming — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 153; Adventures are remembered as dreamlike and as happening to someone else — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 465
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Klages defined the dream mood through passivity, felt distance, and fleetingness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 815; The mind is constitutively active and reaches outward even while dreaming — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 153; Adventures are remembered as dreamlike and as happening to someone else — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 465

Broader Connections

• Klages defined the dream mood through passivity, felt distance, and fleetingness #corroborates (0.98) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 815