“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Basically, events have nothing to do with what you think of as cause and effect. This is perhaps apparent to some degree when you study dream events, for there the kind of continuity you are used to, connecting events, largely vanishes.

Actually the three sets of events could easily occur to the three people at once, and if no normal communication happened no one would be the wiser. The inner tapestry of events deals with just this kind of association. Emotional intensities and significances compose the nature of events. In dreams you work with the kind of intensities involved, exploring multitudinous significances. These are like charged emotional patterns, formed of your own highly personal emotions and intents.

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.

Physically and psychically the dream itself is the result of the most precise kind of calculation and activity, in which complicated dramas and interactions occur, often highly charged and intense, and yet cut off from the body’s full participation. These significances, then, involve from your end certain biological cues that regulate the intersection of psychological events with physical activity in time and space. Only when all conditions match your own highly specific requirements are the necessary cues activated to give you physical experience. To that extent in dreams you are “on hold,” involved with a range of action too wide to fit the contours of practical earth experience.

These significances set up their own codes, then, so that physical events must be coded in a certain fashion, and dreams in another. There is, then, what can be called a predream state, or a state of experience from which the dream will be formed. Such experience will carry a different kind of code, further divorcing it from that acceptable intersection with bodily activity, space, and time.

Your physical events happen to you as you. In dreams you may experience an event seemingly as someone else, or you may find yourself in the past or future instead of the present. In waking life you have the family that you recognize, or group of friends, or profession, or what have you. In dreams you may find yourself married to someone else, or living an entirely different kind of life. In a way dreams are like variations of the theme of your life, though in reality your life is the theme you have chosen from those possible versions.

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.

Experiences at predream levels occur at their own intensities. The knowledge is translated into information that is broken down in the dream state into more specific data, highly symbolized, suiting individual requirements and “run through the body” in a kind of ghostly trial fashion.

It is then further processed into individual significances, drives, or intents, which convert it into the required codes that will then determine the nature of actualized waking events. Data must be of particular kinds of intensity before they register as physical matter, or are experienced as physical events. Part of this processing occurs in the dream state, and creativity plays a large part in the preliminary process.