“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Symbols can be called psychic codes that are interpreted in infinite fashion according to the circumstances in which consciousness finds itself. Dream events “come together” in the same way that the universe does. Events, therefore, cannot be precisely defined. You can explore your own experience of an event, and that exploration itself alters the nature of the seemingly separate event that you began to investigate. You share, then, a mass dream experience as you share a mass waking world. Your daily experience is private and uniquely yours, yet it happens within the context of a shared environment. The same applies to the dream state.

Your dreams are also uniquely yours, yet they happen within a shared context, an environment in which the dreams of the world occur. In that context your own existence is “forever” assured. You are the physical event of yourself put into a given space and time, and because of the conditions of that framework, within it you automatically exclude other experience of your own selfhood. The greater event of yourself exists in a context that is beyond your usual perception of events. That greater portion of yourself, however, forms the self that you know.

Physical play is pleasant, and accompanied by high imaginative activity. Muscles and mind are both exercised. The same kind of activity occurs in the child’s dream state as it learns to handle events before they are physically encountered. Intense dream activity is involved. Some dream events are more real to the child than some waking events are — not because the child does not understand the nature of experience, but because he or she is still so close to the emotional basis behind events. Some of the exercises I will suggest will put you in touch with the way events are formed.

When you ask: “How are events formed?” you more or less expect an answer couched in those terms. The answer is not that simple. The origin of events lies in that creative, subjective realm of being with which you are usually least concerned. This state of dreaming provides an inner network of communication, that in its way far surpasses your technological communications. The inner network deals with another kind of perceptual organization entirely. A rose is a rose is a rose. In the dream state, however, a rose can be an orange, a song, a grave, or a child as well, and be each equally.

I have told you that dream reality is more cohesive than you may have supposed. Such characteristics as shared dreams go a long way to stabilize dream reality. When you dream of others they know it. When they dream of you, you know this. [...]

The dream solutions are held as the ideals, however. Without for example mass dreams, your United Nations would never exist. This type of mass dream is one of several varieties. It is true indeed that all dreams to some extent are shared, for the privacy that you imagine exists within them is, as Ruburt correctly supposed, an illusion.

In certain areas of mass shared dreams, collective mankind deals with the problems of his political and social objective structure. The solutions which he makes within his dream reality are often, however, not the same solutions that he accepts within physical reality.

[...] Shared dreams present their own historic organization, for the shared memory of your race does not only include physical events, but reaches much further than this.

Now, your physical universe is obviously composed of shared perceptions, and mass dreams would of course be of the same nature. Mass dreams are indeed a reality. [...]

[...] For now we will be concerned with mass dreams that have an almost universal nature. That is, dreams that are shared at one time or another by the majority of living persons on your planet.

[...] We have not touched upon it often, if at all, and it has to do with something Ruburt wondered about: Mass, or shared, dreams.

We will then discuss briefly, very briefly, mass or shared dreams.

Now the dreams that you would have, and had, in shared experience, are root dreams. Such root dreams serve as a method of maintaining inner identity, and of communication. There may be flashes of realization in such dreams. Projections may occur also from root dreams. [...]

Now you will have some experiences that are shared in the dream state. [...]

There are also some root dreams shared by the race as a whole.

Flying dreams you see are not symbolic of anything. They are valid and actual experiences, though often intermixed with other dream elements. Falling dreams are experience. [...]

[...] Dreams often present you with what seems to be an ambiguity, an opaqueness, since they lack the immediate impact of psychological activity with space and time. From your viewpoint it seems often that dreams are not events, or that they happen but do not happen. The lack of normal time and space intersections means that you cannot share your dreams with others in the way that you can share waking events. Nor can you remember dream events — or so it seems — as you do your normal conscious experience. In actual fact you remember consciously only certain highlighted events of your lives, and ordinary details of your days vanish as dreams seem to.

You have a dream memory, of course, though you are not aware of it as a rule. [...] You perform this craft well when dreaming. Event-making begins before your birth, and the dreams of unborn children and their mothers often merge. The dreams of those about to die often involve dream structures that already prepare them for future existence. In fact, towards death a great dream acceleration is involved as new probabilities are considered — a dream acceleration that provides psychic impetus for new birth.

Creativity connects waking and dreaming reality, and is in itself a threshold in which the waking and dreaming selves merge to form constructs that belong equally to each reality. You cannot begin to understand how you form the physical events of your lives unless you understand the connections between creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking hours. In one respect dreams are a kind of structured unconscious play. Your mind dreams in joyful pleasure at using itself, freed from the concerns of practical living. Dreams are the mind’s free play. [...]

In the dream state, with your body more or less safe and at rest, and without the necessity for precise action, these psychological intrusions become more apparent. Many of your dreams are like the tail end of a comet: Their real life is over, and you see the flash of their disappearance as they strike your own mental atmosphere and explode in a spark of dream images. [...] They fall in patterns, forming themselves naturally into the dream contents that fit the contours of your own mind. The resulting structure of the dream suits your reality and no other: As this intrusive matter falls, plummets, or shifts through the levels of your own psychological atmosphere, it is transformed by the conditions it meets.

It cannot be too strongly stressed that these dream locations are actualities. [...] However mass dreams do occur (underlined). There are dreams that you share with others. There are dream environments that you share, as you share your physical environment. [...]

For Ruburt then: When the physical body lies in bed, that physical body is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell. [...] For the dream location exists simultaneously with the room in which the body dwells.

[...] If you have little memory of your dream locations while you are in the waking state, then remember you have as little memory of waking locations when you are in the dream state. [...]

When, in the dream state, you are focused in a different dimension, then you see you form from these same atoms and molecules the environment in which you will operate. Yet while you dream you cannot find the bed nor chest nor chair, and when you wake you cannot find the room or city or location which was there moments before.

[...] There are also root dreams shared by the race as a whole. [...] For that matter, as you know, flying dreams need not be symbolic of anything. They can be valid experiences, though often intermixed with other dream elements. Falling dreams are also simple experience in many instances, representing downward motion, or a loss of form-control during projection.

The dreams you will have and have had in shared experience are root dreams. [...]

Now you will have some experiences that are shared in the dream state. [...]

We mentioned that the dreaming self has its own memories. It has memory of all dream experience. [...] To the dreaming self, however, past, present and future do not exist. [...]

Now in dreams you also form your environment. The dream locations that you visit you form in precisely the same manner as atoms and molecules, but they are of briefer duration, for you do not focus your energy upon them for the same amount of physical time. These locations and these dreams appear private to you. You feel that you do not share them with any other. The fact is that you do to a certain extent share them and telepathically, dreams can be dreamed by more than one person. [...]

[...] In dreams you communicate with your own past lives. In dreams you often know who you have been. In dreams you often realize what you have learned. In dreams you restate your challenges and problems. [...]

[...] Dreams help form your personality, but they do not take up physical space. [...]

[...] You form your own dreams and you form your own physical reality. [...]

There are many kinds of mass or shared dreams. For now, we will be concerned with mass dreams that have an almost universal nature; that is, dreams that are shared at one time or another by the majority of living persons on your planet.

[...] In 1967, I finished the dream book manuscript, and did much more on the Seth Material. [...] It wasn’t until February 1, 1968 that I sent the dream manuscript out to a publisher. On February 17, I dreamed that it was returned and that the person to whom I had addressed it no longer worked there. [...] The letter was dated the day before my dream and written by a different editor than the one to whom I’d written.

In the end, I combined portions of the dream book manuscript into a new book called The Seth Material, which was published by Prentice-Hall in September, 1970. [...] Seth’s interpretation of that first dream, some three years ago, had been correct. In a series of dreams, I also knew that the unused portions of the original dream manuscript would appear in another book — and they are — in this book you are now reading.

I’m making good progress with the suggestions for dream recall. Now I can remember at least one dream every two days. [Previously, he’d recalled dreams very seldomly.] It’s unfortunate that I can’t keep a notebook in the service, but I do make a quick note of dreams when I can.

(10:39.) Simply as an analogy, look at it this way: Your present universe is a mass-shared dream, quite valid — a dream that presents reality in a certain light; a dream that is above all meaningful, creative, based not upon chaos (with a knowing look), but upon spontaneous order. To understand it, however, you must go to another level of consciousness — one where, perhaps, the dream momentarily does not seem so real. There, from another viewpoint, you can see it even more clearly, holding it like a photograph in your hands; at the same time you can see from that broader perspective that you do indeed also stand outside of the dream context, but in a “within” that cannot show in the snapshot because of its limitations.

[...] Then he² becomes sensitive to the different subjective alterations that occur when dreams begin, happen, and end. He familiarizes himself with the symbolism of his own dreams, and sees how these do or do not correlate with the exterior symbols that appear in the waking life that he shares with others. I will have more to say about these shared symbols later, for they can become agreed upon signposts.

[...] “Ruburt,” Seth commented, “is just beginning his own dream endeavors, which could not seriously start until he learned to have faith in his own being.” [Appendix 11 contains excerpts from The Wonderworks, the paper Jane wrote almost two weeks ago on Seth, dreams, and the creation of our reality. In my notes for The Wonderworks I described her own recent dream series — which still continues, by the way.] And: “In our case,” Seth said a bit later, “Ruburt almost ‘becomes’ the material he receives from me. If certain other beneficial alterations occur, and further understanding on Ruburt’s part, we may be able to meet at other levels of consciousness — in the dream state, when he is not cooperating in the production of our book material.” For Jane has never met Seth, face to face, you might say, in a dream. The closest she’s come to this situation is in giving a session for him in the dream state, as she does in waking life.

[...] There are some individuals embarked upon a study of dreams, working in the “dream laboratories”; but here again there is prejudiced perception, with scientists on the outside studying the dreams of others, or emphasizing the physical changes that occur in the dream state. [...]

[...] As the many hours of our calls quickly accumulated, Laurel and I came to understand through dreams that we had shared reincarnational relationships. [...] She helped me proofread Seth, Dreams, and Projection of Consciousness for Stillpoint Publishing. [...] She’s worked as a researcher of Jane’s material for The Magical Approach — the book she has “most dreamed of working on.” [...]

[...] I painted portraits of her as I met her in my dreams. [...]

[...] I know that my wife lives within me now, as I do within her “where she is now” — just as we shared ourselves with each other throughout the nearly twenty-nine years of our marriage. [...]

In those early times all species shared their dreams in a way that is now quite unconscious for your kind, so that in dreams man inquired of the animals also—long before he learned to follow the animal tracks, for example. [...] Man explored the planet because his dreams told him that the land was there.

(Long pause.) In your terms of time, however, we will speak of a beginning, and in that beginning it was early man’s dreams that allowed him to cope with physical reality. The dream world was his original learning ground. In times of drought he would dream of the location of water. In times of famine he would dream of the location of food. That is, his dreaming allowed him to clairvoyantly view the body of land. [...] In dreams his consciousness operated as a wave.

[...] What you now think of as the dream state was the waking one, for it was still the recognized form of purposeful activity, creativity, and power. The dream state continues to be a connective between the two realities, and as a species you literally learned to walk by first being sleepwalkers. [...] You dreamed your languages. You spoke in your dreams and later wrote down the alphabets—and your knowledge and your intellect have always been fired, sharpened, propelled by the great inner reality from which your minds emerged.

People were not nearly as isolated as it now appears, for in their dreams early men communicated their various locations, the symbols of their cultures and understanding, the nature of their arts. All of the inventions that you often think now happened quite by chance—the discovery of anything from the first tool to the importance of fire, or the coming of the Iron Age or whatever—all of that inventiveness was the result of the inspiration and communication of the dream world. Man dreamed his world and then created it, and the units of consciousness first dreamed man and all of the other species that you know.

He says, ‘I breathe, but who breathes, since consciously I cannot tell myself to breathe or not to breathe?’ He says, ‘I dream. But who dreams? I cannot tell myself to dream or not to dream.’ He cuts himself in half and then wonders why he is not whole. [...]

The mover, the breather, the dreamer
Shares with me this fond flesh.
He is a twin so like myself
That I cannot recognize his face.
He goes his way and I go mine.
We never meet head-on, and yet
I am aware of this ghost
Behind my every word or act.
Who moves? Who breathes?
Who dreams?

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one self who acts in the physical universe and another who dreams and breathes. It is because he has buried the part of himself which breathes and dreams. [...]

Time to your dreaming self is much like ‘time’ to your waking inner self. The time concept in dreams may seem far different than your conception of time in the waking state when you have your eyes on the clock and are concerned with getting to some destination by, say, 12:15. [...] Then, I am sure, you will see the similarity between this alone sort of inner psychological time, experienced often in waking hours, and the sense of time experienced often in a dream. [...]

These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.

[...] For what would seem to you to be eons, according to your time scale, men were in the dreaming state far more than they were in the waking one. [...] It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imagining the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories—building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.

(8:58.) During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge [man] gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, its constant inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the CU’s translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into the physical form.

Man dreamed his languages. He dreamed how to use his tongue to form the words. In his dreams he practiced stringing the words together to form their meanings, so that finally he could consciously begin a sentence without actually knowing how it was begun, yet in the faith that he could and would complete it.

According to Seth, we do have shared dreams or mass dreams. [...] Are our dreams private? [...] In the 254th session Seth had this to say: “In certain areas of mass, shared dreams, collective mankind deals with problems of his political and social structure. The solutions he reaches within dream reality are not always the same as those he accepts in the physical world.

“The dream solutions are held as ideals, however. Without mass dreams, for example, your United Nations would not exist. [...] Shared dreams, then, are also usually well beneath awareness. [...]

“Many illnesses could largely be avoided through such dream therapy. Rather harmlessly, aggressive tendencies could be given freedom within the dream state. Suggestions would be given that the individual involved would experience, say, aggressiveness, within a dream. It would also be suggested to him that he learn to understand his aggressions by watching himself while he was dreaming [watching the dream as he would a play]. If I may indulge in a fantasy, theoretically you could imagine a massive experiment in dream therapy where wars were fought by sleeping, not waking, nations.”

“If you have little memory of dream locations when you are awake, you have little memory of ‘physical’ locations when you are in the dream state. When the physical body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell. But this distance has nothing to do with space, for the dream location can exist simultaneously with the room in which the body sleeps.

(Pause at 8:43.) Their dreams would then be shared by the tribe in the morning, or at special meetings, when each dreamer would give a rendition of the dream or dreams that seemed to be involved. [...] Some such dreams were extremely direct, others were clothed in symbolism according to the style of the dreamer, but in any case the dream was understood to have a public significance as well as a private one.

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. (Pause.) As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.

Earlier, I also spoke about the importance of dreams in man’s early background, and their importance to you as a species. Here, I want to stress the social aspects of dreams, and to point out the fact that dreams also show you some of the processes that are involved in the actual formation of physical events: You actually come into an event, therefore, long before the event physically happens, at other levels of consciousness, and a good deal of this prior activity takes place in the state of dreaming.

The same still applies, though often dreams themselves are forgotten. Instead, for example, for news or for advice you watch your morning television news, which provides you with a kind of manufactured dream that to some extent technologically serves the same purpose. [...] dream dramas. [...] Now such dreams simply act as backup systems, rising to the fore whenever they are needed. [...]

Not only does television actually serve as a mass means of communal meditation, but it also presents you with highly detailed, manufactured dreams, in which each viewer shares to some extent. [...]

[...] Soon after Tam Mossman suggested in early October that she do a book on her dream about Emir,² Jane began work on that project with her usual enthusiasm. The dream became Chapter 1 of the book, and inspired the rest of it; she’s having great fun writing the story, and is sending it to Tam chapter by chapter as it comes out of her typewriter — a procedure she’s never followed before. [...]

[...] In your dreams you visit “casting agencies.” [...] In the dream state, then, often you familiarize yourself with dramas that are of a probable nature. [...]

[...] It reflects and rereflects through millions of homes the giant dreams and fears, the hopes and terrors of events in the most private individual.

[...] Early artists drew pictures to share the images they saw in their dreams. In a fashion they practiced dreaming in their sleep, and thus learned also to think (underlined) in terms of the measurement of physical images, and to move objects around in their minds before they did so physically.

[...] Jane was much more willing to attempt the move than I was, but I think we knew all along that beneath our questions and feelings the idea of moving was more like a shared dream, or a probable reality we chose not to explore during our current physical lives. [...]