“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.