“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the dream state the actors become aware to some extent of the parts they play, and sense the true personal identity that is behind the artist’s craft. I have spoken of this before, but it is important to remember that you impose a certain kind of “artificial” sense of exaggerated continuity even to the self you know. Your experience changes constantly, and so does the intimate context of your life — but you concentrate upon points of order, in your terms, that actually serve to scale down the context of your experience to make it more comprehensible. There are no such limits naturally set about your consciousness.

The last sentence is important, for in your lifetimes your experience must be physically felt and interpreted. Despite this, however, events spring from a nonphysical source. As mentioned earlier, your recalled dreams are already interpretations of other nonphysical events.

In dreams this relationship often is revealed. The truth behind such relationships is inherent in all God-Man, God-Woman, Animal-Man, or Animal-Woman legends and mythology. There are connections, then, between man and the animals and the so-called gods (in small letters), that hint at psychological and natural realities.

Any section of the land has an identity, so to speak, and I am not talking symbolically. Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm. Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousnesses as there are particles, and these are combined in infinite fashions. (Long pause.) In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama (A one-minute pause.) Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess. It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity — stamped, as it were, with your identity.

In the dream state, animals, men, and plants merge their realities to some extent so that information belonging to one species is transferred to others in an inner communication and perception otherwise unknown in your world.

I am simply explaining the characteristics, aptitudes, abilities, and tendencies of Nature, with a capital N. There are so many different levels in what you call the dream state that they are impossible to list, except in stereotyped ways. This is particularly because some dream sequences involve biological comprehensions that are not literally translatable.

(11:23.) On the one hand, dreaming on the part of animals — and men in particular — involves not only information processing, but information gathering. Dreaming prevents life from becoming closed-ended by opening sources of information not practically available in the waking state, and by providing feedback from other than the conventional world. Data gained through waking learning endeavor and experience are checked in dreaming, not only against physical experience, but are also processed according to those “biological” and “spiritual” data, colon: Again, that information is acquired as the sleeping consciousness disperses itself, in a manner of speaking, and merges with other consciousnesses of its own and other species while still retaining its overall identity. These [other consciousnesses] are dispersed in like manner.

In such ways each individual maintains a picture of the everchanging physical and psychological mass environment. Physical events as you understand them could not exist otherwise. (Long pause.) Basically, information is experience. In dreams you attain the necessary information to form your lives. That state of sleep, therefore, is not simply the other side of your consciousness, but makes your waking life and culture possible.

Death operates in the same fashion. The animals in particular realize this because they organize time differently from you. Dreaming provides all the conditions of life and death, therefore — a fact that often frightens the waking self. But here is a creative mixture: the perceptive organizations from which prosaically tuned conscious life emerges. Here are the raw materials for all the daily events you recognize privately and on a world scale.

In nature nothing is wasted, so the luxurious growth of man’s dream landscapes are also utilized. Whether or not these are physically actualized, they have their own reality. Your own personalities are to some extent the result of your waking experience. But they are also formed equally by your dreaming experience, by the learning and knowledge and encounters that occur when many would tell you that you are beyond legitimate perception. Dreams, then, are deeply involved with the learning processes. Dreams of walking and running occur in infants long before they crawl, and serve as impetuses.

In rudimentary form children’s dreams also involve mathematical concepts, so that formal mathematical training falls on already fertile ground. The arts, sciences, agriculture — all of these reflect natural contours and tendencies inherent in man’s mind, as general rather than specific attributes emerging first in the dream state, and then sparking specialized intellectual tendencies in the waking state.

Cities, therefore, existed in dreams before the time of tribes. The dream state provides the impetus for growth, and opens up to the earth-tuned consciousness avenues of information for its physical survival.

(11:59.) Because that state is also connected with waking life, you also take into it many of the elements of your daily existence, so that your recalled dreams are often cast in fairly conventionalized terms. As a rule you remember the dream’s outer veneer, or what it turns into as you approach your usual level of consciousness. In a dream you are basically aware of so many facets of an event that many of them must necessarily escape your waking memory. Yet any real education must take into consideration the learning processes within dreams, and no one can hope to glimpse the nature of the psyche without encouraging dream experience, recall, and the creative use of dream education in waking life.