“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We’ve had several guests since the last session was held. I’ve been busy putting my own notes for Seth’s “Unknown” Reality in order, and have also allowed myself some painting time each day. Jane is involved in writing notes of her own — she’s had three dream visits to what certainly seemed to be probable realities, and is describing those in her own records.)

(Pause.) Your “dreaming” psyche seems to be dreaming only because you do not recognize that particular state of awareness as your own. The “dreaming” psyche is actually as awake as you are in your normal waking life. The organization of wakefulness is different, however. You come into dreaming from a different angle, so to speak.

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.

Centuries ago, in your terms, words and images had a closer relationship — now somewhat tarnished — and this older relationship appears in the dream fabric. We will use English here as an example. The great descriptive nature of names, for instance, can give you an indication of the unity of image and word as they appear in your dreams. Once, a man who tailored clothes was named “Tailor.” A man who was a robber was called “Robber.” If you were the son of a man with a certain name, then “son of” was simply added, so you had “Robberson.” Each reader can think of many such examples.

Now, names are not as descriptive. You may have a dream, however, in which you see a tailor’s shop. The tailor may be dancing or dying or getting married. Later, in waking life, you may discover that a friend of yours, a Mr. Taylor (spelled), has a party, or dies, or gets married, whatever the case may be; yet you might never connect the dream with the later event because you did not understand the way that words and images can be united in your dreams.

When you dream, however, you are to some extent experiencing reality from a different “set” entirely. Now, when you try to adjust your dreaming set in the same way that you would the waking one, you end up with static and blurred images. The set itself, however, is quite as effective as the one you use when you are awake, and it has a far greater range. It can bring in many programs. When you watch your ordinary television program, perhaps on a Saturday afternoon, you view the program as an observer. Let me give you an example.

In the dream state, it is as if you have a still-different television set that is, however, connected with your own. Using it, you can perceive events not only from your own viewpoint, but from other focuses. Using that set, you can leap from station to station, so to speak — not simply perceiving, but experiencing what is happening in other times and places.

When you are dealing with normal waking reality, you are operating at one level of the many that are native to your psyche. When you are dreaming, from your viewpoint you are entering other levels of reality quite as native to your psyche, but usually you are still experiencing those events through your current “waking station.” The dreams that you remember are colored or altered or even censored to a certain extent. There is no inherent psychological or biological necessity for this. Your ideas and beliefs, however, about the nature of reality, and sanity, have resulted in such a schism.

Ruburt and Joseph know that Star Trek is not “real.” Planets can explode on the television screen, and Ruburt will not spill one drop of coffee. The cozy living room is quite safe from the imaginary catastrophes that are occurring just a few feet from the couch. Yet in a way the program reflects certain beliefs of your society in general, and so it is like a specialized mass waking dream — real but not real. For a moment, though, let us change the program to your favorite cops-and-robbers show. A woman is shot down in the street. Now this drama becomes “more real,” more immediately probable, less comfortable. So watching such a program, you may feel slightly threatened yourself, yet still largely unconcerned.

You form certain focuses, then. You will blithely ignore certain televised dangers as sheer good adventure, while others may strike you to the heart as “too real.” So in your waking and dreaming experiences, you will make the same kind of distinctions. You will be touched or untouched by waking or dreaming events according to the significance you place upon them.

(10:15.) In the dream state, many people have learned to escape from a bad dream by waking up, or altering the focus of consciousness. Ruburt and Joseph do not feel threatened, again, by Star Trek. (Long pause.) The program does not make them feel less safe. When you are in the middle of a frightening physical experience, however, or caught in the throes of a nightmare, then you wish you knew how to “change the station.”

In this case you are yourself the programmer, and the true action is not where it appears to be — in the exterior events — but instead in the psyche, where you are writing and performing the drama. In the dream state, you are writing and performing many such dramas.