“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.

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.

Space itself accelerates in ways that you do not understand. You are not tuned into those frequencies. Any point in space is also a point in what you think of as time, a doorway that you have not learned to open.¹

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.

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.

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.