The Intermittent Monad: Carl du Prél’s Concept of Dream-Consciousness as Ontological Interstice
In the vast and often mist-enshrouded borderlands between Kantian transcendental idealism and speculative metaphysics, few figures loom more mysteriously than the Bavarian philosopher and physician Carl du Prél (1839–1899). A disciple in method of Schopenhauer and in aspiration a metaphysical psychologist of the deepest hue, du Prél remains a marginal figure, straddling science, mysticism, and philosophy with equal discomfort. Yet it is precisely within this interstitial tension that one uncovers a peculiar conceptual gem: the notion of the intermittent monad, a principle rarely acknowledged explicitly in his corpus, but one which, upon closer examination, subtends his theories of dream-consciousness and individuation.
This essay seeks to excavate and trace the outlines of this neglected yet potent concept. We shall argue that du Prél implicitly posits the self not as a unified, continuous perception (pace the Cartesian cogito), nor as a mere epiphenomenon of neural activity (pace the naturalist positivists), but as an oscillating monadic force intermittently manifesting in the planes of waking and dreaming. In this regard, his work represents not merely a curious footnote to German idealism, but a significant deviation from it—evoking a metaphysical realism of an oneiric order.
Du Prél’s magnum opus, “Philosophie der Mystik” (Philosophy of Mysticism, 1885), offers the clearest articulation of his dream-centric philosophy of the self. Dreams, he asserts, are not illusory phantasms reducible to mere psychological excreta, but rather unveilings of a latent, more essential self—or, his frequently used term, the “unconscious self.” Unlike Freud’s later sexualized and mechanistic unconscious, du Prél’s unconscious is fundamentally metaphysical: a spiritual substratum, glimpsed most clearly in altered states, particularly dreams. He writes, “Dreams are the aperture through which the transcendental ego peers into this corporeal world, and through which the corporeal ego, in sleep, momentarily recedes.”¹
What is most critical in this passage is the dual movement—the ingress of the transcendental and the egress of the corporeal. This vacillation, we contend, constitutes the rhythm of du Prél’s intermittent monad. Although he never names it thus, the components are unmistakably present: an individualized metaphysical principle (i.e., the monad), a periodicity of manifestation (i.e., intermittence), and an ontological flexibility between worlds (i.e., dream and waking consciousness). The self is not permanently quarantined within the temporal ego; it is, rather, a trans-dimensional agent whose visible manifestation is but one phase among many.
Compare this to Leibniz’s monadology, and the deviation is pronounced. For Leibniz, the monad is windowless, pre-programmed from creation, complete within its own coordinates, its changes reflective of a divine calculus. Du Prél’s monad, by contrast, is porous—its border oscillates. It is not merely non-local in the spatial sense but temporally vibratile, entering and exiting ontological planes. The dream represents not a failure of reason but a dilation in the monad’s indivisibility—a moment in which its essential unity becomes, paradoxically, multiple.
One might pose the objection that dreams are incoherent, ephemeral, irrational—and thus a shaky foundation for ontology. Du Prél anticipates this critique, yet inverts it: “Incoherence,” he argues, “is not a reflection of the unconscious, but a distortion caused by the re-imposition of waking logic upon the alien grammar of the dream-state.”² The dream, in other words, is not irrational but differently-rational, governed not by Aristotelian logic but perhaps by a deeper, archetypal syntax—one that science, in its materialist myopia, has long mistaken for illusion.
Herein lies a subtle but pivotal shift. Whereas mainstream idealism seeks to unify phenomena under a singular Reason, du Prél’s intermittence privileges the plural, the discontinuous, the shadowy. His synthesis fuses German romantic metaphysics with a faint élan vitalism avant la lettre: an unconscious monadic force that flirts with the contours of individuation but never fully commits. Not unlike the obscure emanations of Neoplatonism, the self in his schema “descends” into the body but retains a home in the transcendent.
Du Prél’s apparent dualism thus disguises a more radical metaphysics: not two substances, nor merely two modes, but an undulating self-monad shifting across ontological strata. Waking life is a thickened node of manifestation; dream—its aperture. He observes, with startling prescience, that “in hypnosis and somnambulism the stratification of the soul becomes visible,” a notion that anticipates later quantum debates about the partitioning of states.³
The subtlety that remains under-analyzed is the implication that the dream is not a by-product of consciousness, but its prototype. Inverting the hierarchy, du Prél implies that the waking self is a compression, a narrowed beam of a wider consciousness accessible in sleep. The dream, then, does not merely reflect hidden desires or random neural discharge; it reveals the monad leaning out of its temporal chamber, trailing messages from a region anterior to logic and physics.
Contemporary readers might be tempted to ascribe such theories to a spiritualist sentimentality foreign to rigorous philosophy. Yet it bears remembering that du Prél’s inquiries were deeply engaged with the psychophysical sciences of his time, including studies of somnambulism, automatisms, and telepathic phenomena. He was not, therefore, a mystic cloaked in scholastic vestments, but a philosopher of thresholds—bridging the empirical and the ideal by way of what he deemed the “transcendental psychology.”
The intermittence of the monad raises irrefutable ontological questions. If the dream-accessed self is truer than the waking self, then the coordinates of reality itself are inverted. The “real,” far from being the inflexible category of natural science, becomes the flickering veil upon a more fundamental plane of activity—one experienced not through sensory continuity but ontological intermittence. Identity, in this scheme, is a pulsation, a pattern of emergence and concealment.
This reconceptualization of the self as an intermittent monad not only re-contextualizes du Prél in the history of metaphysics but also proposes a richer topographical map of human consciousness. Rather than a Cartesian pivot or a Hegelian dialectical sequence, the self is fractal and recursive—oneiric in essence, plural in appearance, but singular in monadic essence.
Much remains to be excavated from Carl du Prél’s unorthodox oeuvre. Yet it is in the evanescent borders—in the flickers between sleep and wakefulness, between multiplicity and unity—that his philosophy resounds with an eerie prescience. The intermittent monad speaks with the voice of forgotten systems and future ontologies, awaiting a philosophy supple enough to decode its cadence.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, oneirology, mysticism, footnotes, dream-consciousness
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¹ Carl du Prél, *Philosophie der Mystik* (Munich: Wilhelm Friedrich, 1885), p. 112.
² Ibid., p. 135.
³ Carl du Prél, *Die monistische Seelenlehre* (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1892), p. 78.