“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Often the seeming meaninglessness of dreams is the result of your own ignorance of dream symbolism and organization. For example: You may also misinterpret “revelatory” material because you try to structure it in reference to your ordinary conscious organizations. Many valuable and quite practical insights that could be utilized go astray, therefore. I am going to suggest, then, some simple exercises that will allow you to directly experience the “feel of your being” in a different way.

(9:20.) First of all, these other organizations do not deal primarily with time at all, but with the emotions and associative processes. When you understand how your own associations work, then you will be in a much better position to interpret your own dreams, for example, and finally to make an art of them.

Thoughts of your own next birthday, for instance, may instantly lead you to think of past ones, or a series of birthday pictures may come to mind of your own twelfth birthday, your third, your seventh, in an order uniquely your own. That order will be determined by emotional associations — the same kind followed by the dreaming self.

(9:54.) Now: Consciously construct a dream. Tell yourself you are going to do so, and begin with the first thought or image that comes to mind. When you are finished with your daydream, then use free association to interpret it to yourself.

You might feel as if you are crossing your wires, so to speak, or stretching vaguely sensed psychic muscles. The purpose is not so much the perfect execution of such exercises as it is to involve you in a different mode of experience and of awareness that comes into being as you perform in the ways suggested. You have been taught not to mix, say, waking and dreaming conditions, not to daydream. You have been taught to focus all of your attention clearly, ambitiously, energetically in a particular way — so daydreaming, or mixing and matching modes of consciousness, appears passive in a derogatory fashion, or nonactive, or idle. (Louder:) “The devil finds work for idle hands” — an old Christian dictum.

You will not remember, or want to remember, your own dreams for the same reason. Many people, therefore, tell themselves that they are very impatient to discover the nature and extent of the psyche, and cannot understand why they meet with so little success. At the same time, such beliefs convince them that the self is evil. These beliefs must be weeded out. If you cannot honestly encounter the dimensions of your creaturehood, you surely cannot explore the greater dimensions of the psyche. This blocking of associations, however, is a very important element that impedes many people. The psyche’s organizations are broader, and in their way more rational than most of your conscious beliefs about the self.

Many of you believe that it is safe to make a nuclear bomb, but that it is insane to use your dreams as another method of manipulating daily life; or that it is all right to be consciously aware of your viruses, wars, and disasters, but that it is not all right to be consciously aware of other portions of the self that could solve such problems.

I said that there were different kinds of knowledge; so will these exercises bring you in contact with knowledge in another way. Done over a period of time, they will open up alternate modes of perception, so that you can view your experience from more than one standpoint. This means that your experience will itself change in quality. Sometimes when you are awake, and it is convenient, imagine that your present experience of the moment is a dream, and is highly symbolic. Then try to interpret it as such.

Who are the people? What do they represent? If that experience were a dream, what would it mean? And into what kind of waking life would you rise in the morning?

The qualities of consciousness cannot be elucidated. These exercises will bring you in contact with other kinds of knowing, and acquaint you with different feelings of consciousness that are not familiar. Your consciousness itself will then have a different feel as the exercises are done. Certain questions that you may have asked may be answered in such a state, but not in ways that you can anticipate, nor can you necessarily translate the answers into known terms. The different modes of consciousness with which I hope to acquaint you are not alien, however. They are quite native, again, in dream states, and are always present as alternatives beneath usual awareness.

(11:17.) While your future can on occasion be correctly perceived ahead of time by a gifted psychic, the future is too plastic for any kind of systematized framework. Free will is always involved. Yet many people are frightened of remembering dreams because they fear that a dream of disaster will necessarily be followed by such an event. The mobility of consciousness provides far greater freedom. In fact, such a dream can instead be used to circumnavigate such a probability.

Only if you understand your own freedom in such areas will you allow yourselves to explore alternate states of consciousness, or the environment of dreams. Such exercises are not to be used to supersede the world you know, but to supplement it, to complete it, and to allow you to perceive its true dimensions.

There is no need to divorce the waking and dreaming states in the particular fashion that currently operates — for they are complementary states, not opposite ones. A good deal of life’s normal dimensions are dependent upon your dream experience. Your entire familiarity with the world of symbols arises directly from the dreaming self.

In certain terms, language itself has its roots in the dreaming condition — and man dreamed [that] he spoke long before language was born (intently).

He dreamed of flying, and that impetus led to the physical inventions that made mechanical flight possible. I am not speaking symbolically here, but quite literally. From the beginning, I said that the self was not confined to the body. This means that the consciousness has other methods of perceiving information, that even in physical life experience is not confined to what is sensed in usual terms. This remains fine theory, however, unless you allow yourself enough freedom to experiment with other modes of perception.