“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt wondered later if I dreamed. My own usual state of consciousness is far different from yours. I do not alternate between waking and sleeping as you do. Still, I have states of consciousness that could be compared to your dream state, in that I am myself not as involved in them as I am in others. If I said to you, “I control my dream state,” you might have an idea of what I mean. Yet I do not control my dreams — I fulfill them. What you could call my dreaming state is involved with the levels I spoke of that exist beneath your remembered dreams.

Trance states, daydreaming, hypnotism — these give you some hint of the various differences that can occur from the standpoint of waking consciousness. In each, reality appears in another fashion, and for that matter, different rules apply. In the dream state far greater variations occur. The key to the dream state, however, lies in the waking one as far as you are concerned. You must change your ideas about dreaming, alter your concepts about it, before you can begin to explore it. Otherwise your own waking prejudice will close the door.

My remark has nothing to do with your accepted concepts of the unconscious portions of the self. Your ideas of the unconscious are so linked to your limited ideas of personhood as to be meaningless in this discussion. It is as if you used only one finger of one hand, and then said: “This is the proper expression of my personhood.” It is not just that there are other functions of the mind, unused, but that in those terms you have other minds. You have one brain, it is true, but you allow it to use only one station, or to identify itself with only one mind of many.