“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A man or woman might [be] while dreaming suddenly in strange territory, looking at the sky from a different viewpoint, with, say, a familiar river nowhere in sight, and with a mountain where ordinarily a plain might be. This was in a way as startling an experience as it would be to you to find yourselves on some distant planet. (You do, for that matter, explore space in the same fashion, and on at least some occasions your own “visitors from outer space” are dream travelers from other dimensions of reality. Period.)

(Long pause.) In such a fashion man learned the location of the oceans upon the earth—or at least was given the assurance that such large bodies of water existed, along with clues as to their locations, and the placement of the stars overhead.

Also in the same manner dreams were an aid in navigation, so that they served to let sailors know when land was near before it could be physically perceived—and there is no human activity to which dreams and group dreams have not contributed.

They were of great aid, of course, in human politics, so that through dreams the intents of tribal leaders, say, were known to the others. Some people within the tribe specialized in such dreams, and again, dream content was and is directed by the individual intents, purposes and interests of the dreamer. In a certain manner dreaming, then, helped sharpen such individual tendencies while still directing them toward the public value fulfillment. The person interested most in herbs and plant life would also find that nightly dreams mirrored that daytime preoccupation, so that nightly dream excursions might find the dreamer examining strange herbs in another location than the native one. Or he might be given knowledge as to how the herbs could best be used for healing purposes. People are natural mimics, as are some animals and birds, so when tribal members related their dreams, they did not just tell them but acted them out with great mobility, carefully mimicking whatever animals or people or elements of land they may have encountered.

(8:47.) The origins of drama began in just that fashion. Tribal leaders were usually chosen only after long “dream investigations,” in which the new leader’s name cropped up, say, time and time again in the people’s dreams. They expected to receive counsel from their dreams. Such information was then aired and shared, studied and examined along with all physical considerations that applied before important decisions were made (all intently).

As far as group dreaming is concerned, however, there are still some people who have always served as watchdogs in that regard, while others even in the dream state operate as healers or teachers or explorers or whatever. There is no craft that was not first conceived of by an individual dreamer, who later transferred it to the social world of activity.

In the dreaming state, then, the needs and desires of families, communities and countries are well known. The dream state serves as a rich source for the world’s knowledge, and is also therefore responsible for the outgrowth of its technology. This is a highly important point, for “the technological world out there” was at one time the world of dreams. The discoveries and inventions that made the industrial world possible were always latent in man’s mind, and represented an inner glittering landscape of probability that he brought into actualization through the use of dreams—the intuitive and the conscious manipulation of material that was at one time latent.