“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Generally speaking, if you do not believe that you can become conscious in the dream state, then that feat will be relatively impossible. It will go against your idea of reality, thereby preventing the opening and acceptance that is necessary.

In the dream state you allow yourself greater freedom, trying out certain ideas and beliefs in this more plastic framework. You may therefore accept new beliefs initially in the dream state, and the intellectual or emotional realization may only come “later.” In dreaming, the conscious mind itself is far more lenient and playful. It can afford this greater permissiveness because it well knows that it need not immediately test out theory in the daily context. It very willingly looks inward toward those areas of the inner self’s experience to see what it can find for its own use, quite like an explorer searching for resources in virgin territory.

(9:15.) The earth-tuned consciousness must deal within the space-time context, for only inside this framework can it clearly perceive events. In the dream state consciousness ignores space-time relationships to a large degree, and yet it is still firmly based upon the body’s corporeal mechanism. Dreams then are physically experienced. You perceive yourself running, talking, eating, in quite physical activities — except that they are not performed by the body that lies on the bed.

Beyond this there are experiences but seldom recalled, in which the usual identification of your consciousness with physical-life orientation is gone. (Pause.) Images as you think of them are based upon your own neurological structure, and your interpretations of these. When you consider survival after death, for instance, you imagine all the senses fully operating, though perhaps in a nonphysical body. Perception without images seems impossible in that context. Yet in some dream situations you enter a state of awareness quite divorced from that kind of sense data. Images as such are not involved, though later they may be manufactured unconsciously for the sake of translation. In those conditions you come close to an understanding of what your consciousness is when it is not physically oriented at all.

(9:27.) In your daily life you may suddenly know something without knowing how you know, without being aware of any particular image or sense impression. The knowledge is simply “there.” This kind of activity approaches the sort of knowing of your own consciousness when it is uninvolved with any kind of ordinary sense stimuli. It simply knows. In those certain dream states, then, you know in the same fashion. You experience your being unallied with flesh.

That kind of dream awareness can literally regenerate your life, though the original impact will be forgotten, and the entire event will usually be translated into images before awakening. Such dream events may be called experiences of basic being. During them, the self or consciousness literally travels to the source of its own energy. On another level atoms possess this same kind of knowing.

In periods of stress, the physically attuned consciousness will often momentarily forsake its usual orientation and let itself fall back, as it were, into the source of its own being, where it knows it will be regenerated and indeed reborn.

While you are physically connected you must interpret experience in sense terms, even that in dreams. At times your consciousness can range into other areas, but then the events must be physically translated in some way.

New paragraph: In somewhat the same manner, your physical brain is a doorway that triggers activity in your mind. Your beliefs then are largely responsible for the areas of the brain that you activate, and for the resulting nonphysical action of the mind.

(10:10.) The dream state provides you with a preliminary stage in which working hypotheses can be creatively formed and tried out in a context of playfulness. Still, the dreams that you have and recall, and the resulting solution of many problems, represent only the surface layer of dream activity. To follow yourself into your own dreams is a fascinating endeavor, and there in the dream context you can become aware of the working of your own consciousness. To do so you must believe in the integrity of your own being. If you do not trust your waking self you will not trust your dreaming self, and the landscape of your dreams will appear threatening. Your belief that dreams are unpleasant can make them so, or at best you will only remember frightening dream events.

(Long pause at 10:20.) If you believe that you do not dream, however, you will inhibit memory of them — but you will still dream. Those rich experiences will not form a part of your conscious life because of your belief.

Again, in your dreams you work with probabilities and decide which ones will become your physical “true facts.” Here you have great freedom both individually and as a race. Here each man works out his own destiny, and with the use of this dream information quite consciously chooses which episodes he will physically materialize and experience.

You will accept from your dreams that information that largely agrees with your waking conscious beliefs. There is interaction, as mentioned previously, in which new beliefs are tried out, so to speak. In that regard, you are not at the mercy of your dreams in any meaning of the word.

(Briskly:) Now that is the end of that. I hope that your mind is set somewhat at rest. You may end the session or take a break as you prefer.