“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.

Raindrop patterns in a puddle follow certain laws having to do with the contours of the land, the weather, the nature of the rain, of the clouds, the height from which the raindrops fall, and the conditions operating in the nearby and far portions of the world. If you could properly understand all of that, then by looking into a single puddle you could tell the past and present weather conditions for the entire planet, and follow the probabilities in terms of storms, or volcanic eruptions. You cannot do this, of course, yet it is possible.

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.

(Long pause.) You know that the natural world changes its form constantly. Objects, however, follow certain laws of a physical nature as you experience them, just as violets on the ground do not suddenly change into rocks.

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.

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.

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.