“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Long pause.) At the time of this awakening man did experience, then, some sense of separation from his dream body, and from his own inner reality—the world of his dreams—but he was still far more aware of that subjective existence than you are now.

The practical nature of his own dreams was also more apparent, for again, his dreams sent him precise visions as to where food might be located, for example, and for some centuries there were human migrations of a kind that now you see the geese make. All of those journeys followed literal paths that were given as information in the dream state. [But] more and more man began to identify himself with his exterior environment. He began to think of his inner ego almost as if it were a stranger to himself. It became his version of the soul, and there seemed to be a duality—a self who acted in the physical universe, and a separate spiritlike soul that acted in an immaterial world.

The inner and outer egos do not have a cementlike relationship, but can interrelate with each other in almost infinite fashions, still preserving the reality of physical experience, but varying the accents put upon it by the inner areas of subjective life. Even the bare-seeming facts of history are experienced far differently according to the symbolic content within which they are inevitably immersed. A war, in your terms, can be practically experienced as a murderous disaster, a triumph of savagery—or as a sublime victory of the human spirit over evil.

(Long pause.) You all have physical parents. Some of you have physical children as well—but you will all “one day” also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about them for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. All worlds have an inner beginning. All of your dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. That which is in harmony with the universe, with All That Is, has a natural inborn impetus that will dissolve all impediments. It is easier, therefore, for nature to flourish than not.

Sleepwalking was once, in that beginning, a very common experience—far more so than now—in which the inner self actually taught the physical body to walk, and hence presented the newly emerged physically oriented intellect from getting in its own way, asking too many questions that might otherwise impede the body’s smooth spontaneous motion.

Last week I received from our current optometrist (whom I’ll call John Smith) his standard notice that two years have passed since my glasses were changed. I told myself to ignore it, yet began to feel a sense of strain whether or not I wore the glasses. I thought the power of suggestion was operating. Because of a cancellation I got a quick appointment to see John this afternoon—and received a very pleasant surprise, for his examination revealed that my vision has improved since the last prescription. The glasses I now have are getting to be too strong. Out of habit, I’d thought the opposite was the case. John too was surprised; he double-checked his figures to make sure he was right before ordering the weaker lenses. Once John had assembled his pheropter, or lens unit, the test lenses making up the new prescription, my vision checked out at 20/15—better than the so-called normal 20/20. That score is a considerable improvement over anything I’d ever achieved before, with or without glasses.