“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Instead events are built up, so to speak, from significances. But let us forget that term for a moment and consider association, with which you are already familiar, since your stream of consciousness operates in that fashion. By its very nature each consciousness is a particular, peculiar, and unique focus of awareness which will experience any possible realities through its own characteristics.

Put more simply from another viewpoint, each of you as you know yourselves has certain abilities and characteristics of your own. You experience reality through the cast of those abilities and characteristics, but you also stamp the universe with that particular imprint of individuality that is your own, and you attract those events that are suited to your nature and no other.

(9:49.) At the same time Aunt Sarah, unbeknown to you, might pick up a blue vase, one that you had just seen in your mind as belonging on a shelf in her living room. Touching the vase, your Aunt Sarah might think of the person who gave it to her, now on the other side of the continent. That person, perhaps thinking of buying a present for someone, might settle upon a vase in a flash of inspiration, or suddenly begin humming a song with the name “Sarah” in the title, or possibly even think of your aunt. If on the other hand any opposing associations existed anywhere along the line, the “chain” of association could be broken. The last lady might consider a vase, for example, but reject the idea. Because of the time element, it seems to you that the first episode caused the others, and that your first association concerning your aunt brought about the “following” events.

These are kept separate in various systems of actuality, while still combining in an overall fashion. You understand the cause-and-effect kind of order, but this is built upon the noncausal aspect of significances. In a way the dreams that you recall are like numbered paintings, tailored to fit your own intents and purposes, fitting the contours of your mind so perfectly that you forget the larger experiences from which they were drawn.

To some extent, however, dream events are like physical ones a good deal of the time. Your dream perceptions seem physical — you walk, run, eat, and perform other physical functions. There are actually many other conditions of existence, but for now we will speak of a predream state, which is actually composed of several conditions of actuality. Here the physical aspects of events largely vanish, comparatively speaking, the farther away you go from the dream state into inner reality. It would seem to you that experience becomes broader but less specific, but such is not the case. Experience does become broader, but it changes in quality so that, for example, one moment in your terms of such experience would provide the working material for five years of dreams.

This is simply an analogy because you are steeped in that other reality constantly; but its illuminations and nature are transmitted to the self that you know through the formation of dreams, and in your terms, “it takes time to dream.” This larger experience, from which your dreams are finally formed, involves you in a kind of journey. Period. Using another analogy, it is as if you joyfully leave the normal paraphernalia of usual life behind, and ride aboard your own greater psyche into vaster seas of experience.