“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I am what I am, interpreted through your reality. I have personality characteristics by which those who have come to sessions can identify me. I have a peculiarity of voice and accent that is, if I may say so myself, unique and individualistic. Yet I come to your reality by a strange route — one that does not involve roads or highways but psychological dramas that wind backward like paths into the “psychological history” of your species. To some extent, I am like a particularly vivid, persistent, recurring dream image, visiting the mass psyche, only with a reality that is not confined to dreams — a dream image that attains a psychological fullness that can seem to make ordinary consciousness a weak apparition by contrast, psychologically speaking.

We have been speaking of dream events and waking reality, the nature of creativity and the formation of events. We have also touched upon psychological entities of vast proportions, in your terms, that form psychological structures from which your own reality emerges. In that connection, the nature of my reality becomes pertinent.

I am not speaking here of gods, but of psychological structures different from the ones you know. They cannot directly perceive or experience your reality in their “present” form of organization. In a manner of speaking they are in the background, from which the foreground of your experience emerges. They appear in your dreams in various ways. They are like the cloth from which you are cut. They are forces which have no need of names except for your convenience.

(9:50.) Those psychological structures are also great energy activators, and as such are important initiators of events. They are seldom if ever physically materialized. Yet they are very responsive to the psychic needs of the people, and so they “appear” at various times in history with certain messages, in the same way that certain dreams might reoccur in a private mind.

You may say if you wish that I am a dream image lacking even an image — but if so, then each individual whose life is changed by my words must question: “What is a dream?” In the same way that my personality exists without physical manifestation, so does your own. Your dreaming and waking experience has a direct effect upon the entire universe. The difference is that you are not consciously aware of what you are doing, but I am. I change a world to some extent, though in your terms I will not actually sit in a chair or walk the streets, or shake your hand, or see the twilight come, or the sunrise.

To me your world is a dream universe which I visit by invitation, a probable reality that I find unique and very dear — but one in which I can no longer have direct experience. Because I am not as immersed in it as you, I can tell you much about it, since your precise orientation necessitates a more narrow, concentrated view.

Now in your dreams you often visit other such realities, but you have not learned to organize your perception, or direct it. If entities like myself form the background of your own existence, so do entities like yourselves act as the background psychological structures in which other such organizations exist. There is always a give-and-take in all such relationships.

It is not easy to explain the workings of the inner psyche, or the activity behind dreams, for such experience exists beyond the framework of verbalization or images, and deals basically with the nature and behavior of psychological and psychic energy.

I am a personified energy source — but so are you. I have had many lives, in your terms, yet in other terms I have not lived physically, but rather lent or loaned my energy to lives that rose from my reality but were not me. In the same way you give birth to dream images of your own — hardly aware that you have done so, unconscious of the fact that you have provided impetus for a kind of psychological reality that quite escapes your notice. The dream stories you begin continue on their own. No dream is stillborn. Each chapter of this book is written in such a way that the ideas presented will activate your own intuitions, and open pathways between your dreaming and waking states.

In the same way, a step-by-step illustration of the nature of the dream state might well make you too self-conscious. (Humorously:) You would begin to question: “Am I dreaming right?”

(10:32.) Many people are in awe of their dreams. They are afraid of anything they do not consciously control. Yet if you think of your dreams as extensions of your own experience in another context, then you can indeed learn to gain ease with them. You will recall them more easily, and as you do you will be able to maintain a sense of continuity between the waking and dream states.

If in your waking hours you playfully make up a dream for yourself, and then playfully interpret it without worrying about implications, but for itself only, you will unwittingly touch upon the nature of your own nightly dreaming. Your regular dreams and your “manufactured” ones will have much in common, and the process of manufacturing dreams will acquaint you with the alterations of consciousness that to a greater degree happen nightly. This is an excellent exercise. It is particularly beneficial for those who have a too-rigid mental framework.

The playfulness and creativity of dreams are vastly underrated in most dream studies. Children often frighten themselves on purpose through games, knowing the game’s framework all the time. The bogeyman in the garden vanishes at the sound of the supper bell. The child returns to the safe universe of tea and biscuits. Dreams often serve the same purpose. Fears are encountered, but the dawn breaks. The dreamer awakes for breakfast. The fears, after all, are seen as groundless. This is not an explanation for all unpleasant dreams by any means, yet it is a reminder that not all such events are neurotic or indicative of future physical problems.

Ruburt and Joseph have a kitten. In its great exuberant physical energy it chases its own tail, scales the furniture, tires itself out — and man’s mind exuberantly plays with itself in somewhat the same fashion. In dreams it uses all those splendid energetic abilities freely, without the necessity for physical feedback, caution, or questioning. It seeks realities, giving birth to psychological patterns. It uses itself fully in mental activity in the same way that the kitten does in physical play.

When you try to explore the psyche in deadly seriousness, it will always escape you. Your dreams can be interpreted as dramas, perhaps, but never as diagrams.

Do not try to bring “dream interpretation” — and kindly, now — down to your level, but instead try to playfully enter that reality imaginatively, and allow your own waking consciousness to rise into a freer kind of interpretation of events, in which energy is not bounded by space, time, or limitations.