“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There are alterations taken into your calculations, so astronauts know ahead of time that they can expect to encounter weightlessness, for example. Your ideas and experiences with space and matter, however, are determined by your own sense apparatus. What is matter to you might be “empty space” for beings equipped in an entirely different fashion. Your conscious mind as you understand it is the “psychological structure” that deals with conditions on a physical basis. Sense data are served up, so to speak, more or less already packaged. The greater inner reality of the psyche, however, is as extensive as outer space seems to be.

When information “falls” into your conscious mind from those vaster areas, then it also is changed as it travels through various levels of psychological atmosphere, until it finally lands or explodes in a series of images or thoughts. Period.

You are bombarded with such “alien intrusions” constantly. The focus of your consciousness blots these out while you are in the normal waking state. There are falling stars everywhere tumbling through the heavens, for example, though you only see some of these in the night sky. It is important during the day that a screening process be used, so that the precision of your actions can be maintained. Again, however, that fine precision rests upon an endless amount of information that impinges onto other levels of your psychological reality. Those data then become the raw material, so to speak, from which your physical events are formed.

In the dream state, with your body more or less safe and at rest, and without the necessity for precise action, these psychological intrusions become more apparent. Many of your dreams are like the tail end of a comet: Their real life is over, and you see the flash of their disappearance as they strike your own mental atmosphere and explode in a spark of dream images. They are transformed, therefore, as they travel through your own psychological atmosphere. You could not perceive them in your own state — nor can they maintain their native state as they plunge through the far reaches of the psyche. They fall in patterns, forming themselves naturally into the dream contents that fit the contours of your own mind. The resulting structure of the dream suits your reality and no other: As this intrusive matter falls, plummets, or shifts through the levels of your own psychological atmosphere, it is transformed by the conditions it meets.

(9:44.) Dreams patter down into psychological puddles. They follow the contours of your psychological reality. They make ever-moving psychic patterns in your mind, rippling outward. The rain that hits your backyard as warm drops, soft and clear, may be hail in areas far above your rooftop, but it changes its form as it falls — again, according to the conditions that it encounters. So these “alien intrusions” do the same, and the dreams are like the raindrops, for at other “higher” levels they may have quite a different form indeed.

There are gullies, hills, mountains, valleys, large continents, small islands upon the earth, and the falling rain fits itself to those contours. Your own thoughts, dreams, intents, emotions, beliefs — these are the natural features of your mind, so that information, impinging upon your mental world, also follows those contours.

These conditions, however, only exist at the conscious level of your perception. The larger psyche deals with the greater dimension of events, and the dream state itself is like a laboratory in which your waking reality is constructed. The physical earth is bombarded by cosmic rays, and by other phenomena that you do not perceive, yet they are highly important to your survival. The psyche is bombarded in the same way by phenomena important to your survival. In the laboratory of dreams this information is processed, collected, and finally formed into the dreams that you may or may not remember; dreams that are already translations of other events, shaped into forms that you recognize.

Each dream you remember is quite legitimate in the form in which you recall it, for the information has broken down, so to speak, fitting the contours of your own intents and purposes. But such a dream is also a symbol for another unrecalled event, a consciously unrecorded “falling star,” and a clue as to how any environment is formed.

The physical manipulation of events is indeed a psychological knack of considerable merit, in which consciousness and attention are exuberantly and wholeheartedly focused, bringing vitality and meaning to one relatively small range of activity.

Again, I do not mean to deny the validity of that experience, but to point out its specialized nature. By its nature, however, that precise specialization and tuning of consciousness in to space and time largely precludes other less-specialized encounters with realities. Dreams often present you with what seems to be an ambiguity, an opaqueness, since they lack the immediate impact of psychological activity with space and time. From your viewpoint it seems often that dreams are not events, or that they happen but do not happen. The lack of normal time and space intersections means that you cannot share your dreams with others in the way that you can share waking events. Nor can you remember dream events — or so it seems — as you do your normal conscious experience. In actual fact you remember consciously only certain highlighted events of your lives, and ordinary details of your days vanish as dreams seem to.

Each event of your life is contained within each other event. In the same way, each lifetime is contained in each other lifetime. The feeling of reality is “truer” then in the dream state. You can become consciously aware of your dreams to some extent — that is, consciously aware of your own dreaming. You can also allow your “dream self” greater expression in the waking state. This can be done through techniques that are largely connected with creativity.

Creativity connects waking and dreaming reality, and is in itself a threshold in which the waking and dreaming selves merge to form constructs that belong equally to each reality. You cannot begin to understand how you form the physical events of your lives unless you understand the connections between creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking hours. In one respect dreams are a kind of structured unconscious play. Your mind dreams in joyful pleasure at using itself, freed from the concerns of practical living. Dreams are the mind’s free play. The spontaneous activity, however, is at the same time training in the art of forming practical events.

Probabilities can be juggled, tried out without physical consequences. The mind follows its natural bents. It has far more energy than you allow it to use, and it releases this in great “fantasies” — fantasies from which you will choose facts that you will experience. At the same time dreaming is an art of the highest nature, in which all are proficient. There are structured dreams as there are structured games in waking life. There are mass dreams “attended by many.” There are themes, both mass and private, that serve as a basis or framework. Yet overall, the mind’s spontaneous activity continues because it enjoys its own activities.