“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.

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.

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.