“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When your eyes are on the road of time, therefore, you forget the circular motion of your being. When you dream or sleep, however, the world of cause and effect either vanishes or appears confused and chaotic. Normal daytime images are mixed and matched, so that combinations are formed quite different from those seen in the daylight. The known rules that govern the behavior of creatures and objects in dreams seem no longer to apply. Past, present, and future merge in a seemingly bizarre alliance in which, were you waking, you would lose all mental footing. The circular nature of the psyche to some extent makes itself known. When you think of dreams you usually consider those aspects of it only, commenting perhaps upon the strange activities, the odd juxtapositions and the strange character of dream life itself. Few are struck by the fact of their dreams’ own order, or impressed by the ultimate restraint that allows such sometimes-spectacular events to occur in such a relatively restricted physical framework.

For example, in a dream of 20 minutes, events that would ordinarily take years can be experienced. The body ages its 20 minutes of time, and that is all. In dreams, experience is peripheral, in that it dips into your time and touches it, leaving ripples; but the dream events themselves exist largely out of time. Dream experience is ordered in a circular fashion. Sometimes it never touches the hub of your present moment at all, as you think of it, as far as your memory is concerned; yet the dream is, and it is registered at all other levels of your existence, including the cellular.

(Long pause.) You always translate experience into terms you can understand. Of course the translation is real. The dream as you recall it is already a translation, then, but an experienced one. As a language that you know is, again, dependent upon other languages, and implied pauses and silences, so the dream that you experience and recall is also one statement of the psyche, coming into prominence; but it is also dependent upon other events that you do not recall, and that your consciousness, as it now operates, must automatically translate into its own terms.

Generally speaking, the psyche has the same kind of instant overall comprehension of psychological events and environments as your body has of physical ones. It is then aware of your overall psychological climate locally, as it involves you personally, and in world terms.

New paragraph. When you grow from a baby to an adult you do not just grow tall: You grow all about yourself, adding weight and thickness as well. To some extent events “grow” in the same fashion, and from the inside out, as you do. In a dream you are closer to those stages in which events are born. In your terms they emerge from the future and form the past, and are given vitality because of creative tension that exists between what you think of as your birth and your death.

You make sentences out of the alphabet of your language. You speak these or write them, and use them to communicate. Events can be considered in the same fashion, as psychological sentences put together from the alphabet of the senses — experienced sentences that are lived instead of written, formed into perceived history instead of just being penned, for example, into a book about history.

I said that your language to some extent programs your experience. There is a language of the senses, however, that gives you biological perception, experience, and communication. It forms the nature of the events that you can perceive. It puts experience together so that it is physically felt. All of your written or verbal languages have to be based upon this biological “alphabet.” There is far greater leeway here than there is in any of your spoken or written languages.

Dreams are a language of the psyche, in which man’s nature merges in time and out of it. He has sense experiences. He runs, though he lies in bed. He shouts, though no word is spoken. He still has the language of the flesh, and yet that language is only opaquely connected with the body’s mechanisms. He deals with events, yet they do not happen in his bedroom, or necessarily in any place that he can find upon awakening.