“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.

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.

(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.

The orientation is that of sense data lived most vividly, and yet, again, at an opaque angle. In other words, in most dreams data is still being received and interpreted in the light of corporeal life. These are the dreams most remembered also.

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.

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.

In waking life you perceive only certain portions of events that fall within your space-time continuum. In dreams you may have a greater glimpse. You may for example see in the past, present and future, objects that in your time will take up any given space. Often such a dream will be considered meaningless because at your “fact level,” past, present and future objects cannot appear at once in the same space.

Physical focus provides you with a magnificent reality, intent and specialized. Were it not for dream activity however you would be, relatively speaking, enclosed within it, afraid to try out new concepts and intuitive realizations in the face of what seems to be such rockbed reality.

(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.

Your dreams are private, as your waking life is, and yet there is a mass waking experience and a mass dreaming experience in which each individual finds his or her own place, and accepts or rejects events. In your terms, the race at any given “time” simultaneously works out problems in the dream state, and those solutions are then physically materialized. Because there is more freedom from time and space in the dream state, there is greater overall perspective; many solutions that may appear poor in the short range — as they are physically activated — will in the longer range be seen as highly creative.

Both privately and en masse, then, mankind utilizes the dream world as a preliminary working ground. From these “fantasized” realities and probable dream events come all the physically accepted “facts” in your world of true and false.

Probable events, experienced dream-wise, and quite valid in other areas of reality, become, say, false in your world, while the same kind of event, physically actualized, becomes true.

New paragraph: Your wars are fought, lost or won in the dream world first of all, and your physical rendition of history follows the thin line of only one series of probabilities. To you a given war was either lost or won by a particular side. In your skimpy (whispering humorously) comprehension of events there can be only one definite outcome of a battle, for instance. There will be certain hard facts; a fight with so many people involved, occurring on a particular day at a given place, culminating in a definite victory. Historically there will be treaties signed, yet in far greater terms you are perceiving but one small dimension, or one corner, of a much larger happening that quite transcends your ideas of the times or places involved.

(10:35.) The initial battle, so to speak, took place on a dream level, then privately and en masse the race decided which portions of the event to actualize in physical terms. Even in those recognized terms, however, it is quite apparent that the victor is often the loser.

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.

You have not understood the great give-and-take that exists between waking and dream experience. You have been taught to believe in the existence of an artificial barrier between the two that does not in fact exist. By suggesting before sleep that solutions to problems be given you, you automatically begin to utilize your dream knowledge to a greater extent, and to open the doors to your own greater creativity.