“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.

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.

(9:51.) Events, then, are organized in a different fashion. Not only can you experience dramas in which you are intimately involved, as in waking life, but your range of activities is multiplied so that you can view events “from outside” your own usual context. You can look down at a drama on the one hand, for example, and participate in it as well.

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.

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.