“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dreams, you have been taught, are imaginary events.

In larger terms it is futile to question whether or not dreams are true, for they simply are. You do consider a dream true, however, if its events later occur in fact.

In the life of the psyche a dream is no more or less “true,” whether or not it is duplicated in waking life. Dream events happen in a different context — one, you might say, of the imagination. Here you experience a valid reality that exists on its own, so to speak; one in which the psyche’s own language is given greater freedom.

Some of you may try to remember your dreams, but none of you have to relate to dream reality as you must to physical life.

To some extent, however, you form physical events while you are dreaming. Then, freed from waking limitations, you process your experience, weigh it according to your own intents and purposes, correlate it with information so vast you could not be consciously aware of it. In most dreams you do not simply think of a situation. You imaginatively become part of it. It is real in every fashion except that of physical fact.

When you meet with any fact, you encounter the tail end of a certain kind of creativity. The psyche, however, is responsible for bringing facts into existence. In that reality a so-called fact is equally true or equally false. The dream that you remember is already a translation of a deeper experience.

It is cast for you so that it bridges the perception of the psyche and the perception of the dreaming self. Dreams serve as dramas, transferring experience from one level of the psyche to another. In certain portions of sleep, your experience reaches into areas of being so vast that the dream is used to translate it for you.

The power to dream springs from that source. Dreaming is not a passive activity. It demands a peculiar and distinctive mixture of various kinds of consciousness, and the transformation of “nonphysical perception” into symbols and codes that will be sensually understood, though not directly experienced as in waking experience.

You take dreaming for granted, yet it is the result of a characteristic ability that is responsible for the very subjective feeling that you call conscious life. Without it your normal consciousness would not be possible.

A spoken language is, again, dependent upon all other languages that could possibly be spoken, and thus its sounds rise into prominence and order because of the silences and pauses between them; so your waking consciousness is dependent upon what you think of as sleeping or dreaming consciousness. It rises into prominence in somewhat the same fashion, riding upon other possible versions of itself; alert only because — in your terms — of hidden pauses within its alertness.

(11:33.) The ability to dream presupposes the existence of experience that is not defined as physical fact. It presupposes a far greater freedom in which perception is not dependent upon space or time, a reality in which objects appear or are dismissed with equal ease, a subjective framework in which the individual freely expresses what he or she will in the most direct of fashions, yet without physical contact in usual terms.

That reality represents your origin, and is the natural environment in which the psyche resides. Your beliefs, cultural background, and to some extent your languages, set up barriers so that this dream dimension seems unreal to you. Even when you catch yourselves in the most vivid of dream adventures, or find yourselves traveling outside of your bodies while dreaming, you still do not give such experiences equal validity with waking ones.

Subjectively speaking, you are everywhere surrounded by your own greater reality, but you do not look in the right places. You have been taught not to trust your feelings, your dreams, or your imagination precisely because these do not often fit the accepted reality of facts.

Biologically, you are quite capable of dealing with dreaming and waking reality both, and of forming a far more effective synthesis in that regard. All of your creative impulses arise from that hidden dimension — the very impulses that formed your greatest cities, your technology, and the physical cement that binds your culturally organized world.

The creative impulses are behind your languages, yet often you use the languages to silence rather than free inner communication. There have always been rhythms in consciousness that are not historically obvious. At certain times some behavior has been primarily expressed in the waking state, and sometimes in the dream state. The emphasis is never static, but ever-changing In some periods, then, the normal behavior was “more dreamlike,” while more specific developments occurred in the dream state, which was then the more clear or specified of the two. Men went to sleep to do their work, in other words, and the realm of dreams was considered more real than waking reality. Now the opposite is true.

End of session. My heartiest regards. I wish you exciting experiences in the dreams you will have tonight, now that I’m telling you all about how to do it (amused).