“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The “off-center” quality sensed in dream activity, comma, the different viewpoints, the perspective alterations, all can add to a chaotic picture when the dream state is viewed from the waking one.

(9:32.) Your waking life is the result of the most precise kind of organization, held competently and with amazing clarity. While each person views that reality from a slightly different focus, still it occurs within certain ranges or frequencies. You bring it into clear focus in almost the same way that you adjust your television picture, only in this case not only sound and images are synchronized, but phenomena of far greater complexity. Following this analogy, everyone sees a slightly different picture of reality, and follows his or her own program — yet all of the “sets” are the same.

Ruburt and Joseph often watch old Star Trek reruns (humorously) as they eat their evening meal. They sit quite comfortably on their living room couch, with dinner on the coffee table, surrounded by all of the dear, homey paraphernalia that is familiar to your society.

Now: Your normal waking reality can be compared to a kind of television drama in which you participate directly in all of the dramas presented. You create them to begin with. You form your private and joint adventures, and bring them into experience by using your physical apparatus — your body — in a particular way, tuned in to a large programming area in which, however, there are many different stations. In your terms, these stations come alive. You are the drama that you experience, and all of your activities seem to revolve about you. You are also the perceiver.

Some of my friends may not watch such programs at all, but instead look at wholesome sagas, or religious dramas. A preacher may stand golden-faced, earnest-eyed, extolling the merits of goodness and damning the legions of the devil — and to some of my readers that devil, unseen, never appearing, may nevertheless seem quite real.

Sometimes you are deliciously frightened by a horror program, for example. You may feel compelled to see how it comes out, and find yourself unable to go to bed until the horrendous situation is resolved. All the time you know that salvation is nearby: You can always switch off the program. If someone watching a gory midnight special suddenly screams or shouts or leaps up from the chair, how comical this seems, because the action is appropriate not to the “real” situation, but geared instead to a pseudodrama. The yelling and screaming will have absolutely no effect upon the program’s actors, and will alter the drama not one whit. The appropriate action would be to turn the station off.