“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

New paragraph: While your beliefs do structure much of your dream activity, other issues are also involved simply because the focus of your awareness is not acutely directed toward physical reality, but is only opaquely concerned with it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I said probabilities were realized (in the 653rd session in Chapter Fourteen) … and she is suddenly open to her (imagined) events as actualities. Because you are space-time oriented, her realizations, accepted momentarily as physical reality, cause gaps in what you think of as normal experience.