“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.