“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When people profess an interest in the nature of dreams, they usually have certain set questions in mind, such as: “How real are dream events?” “What do dreams mean?” “How do they affect daily life?” Each person is aware of the astonishingly intimate nature of dreams. Despite this, certain symbols seem to be fairly universal in your experience.

Such issues, however, while obviously of concern, do not touch upon the greater events behind dream activity, or begin to touch upon the mysterious psychological actions that are behind the perception of any event. Dreams are primarily events, of course. Their importance to you lies precisely in the similarities and differences that characterize them in contrast to waking events.

The psyche’s basic experience, then, deals with a kind of activity that you cannot directly perceive, yet that existence is responsible for the events that you do perceive, and therefore acts as the medium in which your dreaming and waking events occur.

In that respect you cannot rip apart your events to find the reality behind them, for that reality is not so much a glue that holds events together, but is invisibly entwined within your own psychological being. There are obvious differences between what you think of as waking and dream events. You differentiate definitely between the two, making great efforts to see that they are neatly divided. In your world, conventional and practical sanity and physical manipulation are dependent upon your ability to discriminate, accepting as real only those events with which others more or less agree.

(Pause at 10:23.) All of the elements of physical experience at any given time are present in the dream state. Practically speaking, however, the species accepts certain portions of dream reality as its so-called real events at any particular time, and about those specialized events it forms its “current” civilizations. Historically speaking, early men dreamed of airplanes and rocket ships. For that matter, their natural television operated better in some ways than your technological version, for their mental images allowed them to perceive events in neighboring areas or in other portions of the world. They could not simply press a button to bring this about, however. The psychic and biological mechanisms were there, permitting the species to know, particularly in time of stress or danger, what normally unperceived events might threaten survival. But in the dream state, then as now, all such issues were contemporary, acting as models from which the species then chose the practical events that formed its physical experience.

To that extent a study of the dream state gives you some important insights as to the nature of the psyche. In certain terms you are “prepackaged.” You always recognize one package of psychological reality as “you.” In basic terms you are always arriving by a kind of instantaneous mail into that package, however. You are unknowingly immersed in and a part of pure energy, being newly created in each moment, so that the energy of your atoms and molecules and of your physical universal system is being replenished at every conceivable moment.

Your psyche is being drawn back into itself, into All That Is, and “out of itself” into your individuation, in psychological pulses of activity that have a correlation with the behavior of electrons in your world. In the dream or sleep state, when you do not meet as directly with physical activity, there is the opportunity to learn more about the psyche by a study of dreams — those events that are so like and so dissimilar to your waking experience.

Now: All of the probable events of your life exist at once, at certain levels that are connected to the dream state. Since your activities physically must be fitted into a space-time framework, only a minimum of those probable events will physically occur.

Those that do are chosen with great discrimination, dreams serving as one of the methods by which you ascertain the desirability of any given probable act. There is basically no difference at these other levels of existence between waking and dream events. Creatively, then, you organize your experience in such a fashion, with the conscious mind as you think of it also carrying its own responsibility. Those events that you do not accept as physical ones, however, also exist and join their own organizations. They do not simply fall away from your experience, but serve as focus points for events that do not concern you directly, while indirectly they form a definite psychological background. To a certain extent they become the invisible medium of experience from which your own specialized activities emerge, so that their nature is implied in your own life — and so that your life is implied in those other frameworks.

To that extent the dream also serves as a drama of interweaving probabilities, a springboard from which events emerge in all directions. Each aspect of a dream, while having personal meaning, is also your version of a symbol that stands for a corresponding kind of event, but in a different level of reality entirely.

(Long pause.) If you numbered each aspect of a dream, then each number would represent itself in a different numerical system entirely. The surface numbers, or the familiar ones, would still serve to explain the dream in the context of your own world. As you live in an obvious physical universe, sharing in its reality, so each of you exists in a far vaster psychological or psychic universe — surrounded by, supported by, and part of psychic or psychological entities (long pause) infinite in their variety. Your smallest action affects their reality, as theirs does yours. To some extent in the dream state you can perceive such entities more clearly, as at night the stars become more apparent, physically speaking. Psychological realities cannot be compared in terms of size, or bigger or smaller, for the validity and brilliance of each existence carries a personalized intensity so unique that it overshadows any such considerations.

(11:35.) The life of a star, the life of a flower, are entirely different in your terms of duration, size, and characteristics; yet each exists in a validity of experience that ultimately makes such comparisons meaningless. In the same way, it does not help to compare your own consciousness to one of starlike psychological or psychic properties. The psychological mobility of consciousness, however, allows for an inner kind of communication impossible to verbalize, an interlocking spiritual and biological language by which experience is directly transmuted. Many of your dreams therefore are translations of events occurring in other levels of the greater psyche.

There, events are not dependent upon time. You, on the other hand, must work with the time version of events. Dreams provide an elegant framework that allows you to break down timeless events, placing them properly in the context of your own world. This proper placement is quite dependent upon an inner knowledge of probable future events, and your present time would be an impossible achievement were it not for this unconscious knowledge of the “future.”

The dreams are often a synthesis of past, present, and future, where one main event is used as a focus point around which “present” events will be collected.