“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In dreams you know the beginning and end of events in the same fashion. Any one action in your life is taken in context with all of the other events from your birth to your death. Now it seems to you that because you speak one sentence at any given time, rather than ten other possible versions of it, the sentence as spoken is the “correct” one. Its probable variations in grammar or tense or inflection escape you entirely. Yet unconsciously you may have tried out and discarded all of those, even though you have no memory of such experiences. So even in forming sentences you deal with probabilities, and to some extent or another your body mimics, say, the various muscular responses that might be involved with each unspoken sentence.

So, while each action of your life is taken in context with all other actions of your life until your death, this does not mean that your death is predestined to occur at any given time. As you might change your sentence in the middle from one version to another without even being consciously aware of it, so as you live your life you also work with probabilities. You are the self who speaks the sentence, and you are the self who lives the life. You are larger than the sentence that you speak, and larger than the life you live.

In dreams the preparations for experienced events take place, not only in the most minute details but in the larger context of the world scene. Events fit together, forming a cohesive whole that gives you a global scale of activities. The “future” history of the world, for example, is worked out now, as in the dream state each individual works with the probable events of private life. That private life exists, however, in a context — social, political, and economic — which is unconsciously apprehended. When a person constructs various probable realities in the dream state, he or she does so also in this larger context, in which the probable status of the world is known.

Much information does not even reach the brain (the mind is aware of such data, however). In man, the psychic-physical structure has at every moment a complete up-to-date picture of pertinent information about all events that will in any way affect the organism. All actions are taken with this information available. In the dream state such data becomes transformed, again, into pseudophysical pictures — reflections of events that might occur, previews of probable sequences. These are flashed before a consciousness that momentarily focuses upon the inner rather than the outer arena of reality.

Now these previews are played out not only for the mind but for the body as well. In sleep, again, each cell calculates the effect of various probable events upon its own reality. Computations are made so that the body’s entire response can be ascertained ahead of time, and the advantages and disadvantages weighed. The body participates in dreaming at the most minute levels.