“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

Let us return to our friends, Ruburt and Joseph, watching Star Trek as each of you watch your own favorite programs.

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.

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.