“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

If there is a gully in your backyard, it will always collect the rain that falls. Your beliefs are like receptive areas — open basins — that you use to collect information. Intrusive data will often fall into such basins, taking on their contours, of course. Beliefs are ways of structuring reality. If you overstructure reality, however, then you will end up with a formal mental garden — whose precise display may be so rigidly structured that the natural aspect of the plants and the flowers is completely obscured. Even your dream information, then, will flow into structured patterns.

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.

In a manner of speaking, dream reality is closer to the true nature of events than your experience with physical events leads you to suppose.

Dreams often seem chaotic because your point of reference is too small to contain the added dimensions of actuality. Again, in a manner of speaking, events are far more circular in nature. In dreams you can experience the past or future. Physical events are actually formed now, in your terms, because of the interactions between past and future, which are not separate in actuality, but only in your perception.

A dream is like the snap of a rubber band, but it is not the rubber band. You read newspapers and keep in constant physical communication with others of your kind. The news affects “future” events. Individuals and governments take such communications into consideration when they make their decisions. The newspapers are not the events they discuss, though they are their own kind of events. The written news story is actually composed of a group of symbols. Through reading you learn how to interpret these. If you watch news on television you have a larger view of a given news event. When you are viewing a war in a newscast, however, you are still not watching people die. You are watching symbols translated into images that are then visually perceived. The images stand for the people, but they are not the people. The symbols carry the message, but they are not the event they depict.

Some of your dreams are like newspaper stories, informing you of events that have happened in other portions of the psyche. Others are like the televised news picture, carrying perhaps more information about the event but still not containing it.

Psychologically and physically, however, you send out dream bulletins all the while in a constant inner communication. On this level individual dreams help form mass reality, yet also to some extent arise from it in the same way that local weather conditions contribute to world weather conditions, while they are formed by them at the same time.

Events as you understand them are only intrusions of multidimensional activities into space and time. Events are reflections of your dreams even as your dreams reflect the events you know; those you experienced, and those you anticipate in one way or another. In a manner of speaking, then, and without denying the great validity of your experience, events as you know them are but fragments of other happenings in which you are also intimately involved. The inner multidimensional shape of events occurs in a framework that you cannot structure, however, because as a rule you are not focused in that direction. You prefer to deal with activities that can be physically manipulated.

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.

You have a dream memory, of course, though you are not aware of it as a rule. There is a craft involved in the formation of events. You perform this craft well when dreaming. Event-making begins before your birth, and the dreams of unborn children and their mothers often merge. The dreams of those about to die often involve dream structures that already prepare them for future existence. In fact, towards death a great dream acceleration is involved as new probabilities are considered — a dream acceleration that provides psychic impetus for new birth.

This is true of a life. It is true of a dream. The information is not practical in your terms, because it denies your direct experience. Upon request, however, and with some practice, you can suggest in the middle of a dream that it expand to its larger proportions. You would then experience one dream wrapped in another, or several occurring at one time — all involving aspects of a particular theme or probability, with each connected to the others, although to you the connections might not be apparent.

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.