“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.

In the most cosmic and most minute ways, physical experience springs from inner reality. Events are initiated from within and then appear without. In your terms I have no physical existence. These books, however, initiate quite physical events as readers learn to take better control of their lives, expand their consciousnesses, and become aware of their own greater abilities.

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.

Your own greater reality hovers about you in each instant. If you knew in precise terminology how you grew physically from a fetus to an adult, if you could consciously follow that process, you would not necessarily be better off, but possibly hindered in your growth; for you would begin to question: “Am I doing this right?” The perfection of the process would make you ill at ease.

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.

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.