“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Children’s dreams are more intense than those of adults because the brain is practicing its event-forming activities. These must be developed before certain physical faculties can be activated. Infants play in their dreams, performing physical actions beyond their present physical capacities. While external stimuli are highly important, the inner stimuli of dream play are even more so.

When children dream, they utilize these inner senses as adults do, and then through dreaming they learn to translate such material into the precise framework of the exterior senses. Children’s games are always “in the present” — that is, they are immediately experienced, though the play events may involve the future or the past. The phrase “once upon a time” is strongly evocative and moving, even to adults, because children play with time in a way that adults have forgotten. If you want to sense the motion of your psyche, it is perhaps easiest to imagine a situation either in the past or the future, for this automatically moves your mental sense-perceptions in a new way.

Man’s creative alertness, his precise sensual focus in space and time, and his ability to react quickly to events, are of course all highly important characteristics. His imagination allowed him to develop the use of tools, and gave birth to his inventiveness. That imagination allows him to plan in the present for what might occur in the future.

For another exercise, imagine that you are in another part of the world entirely, but in present time, and ask yourself the same questions. For variety, in your mind’s eye follow your own activities of the previous day. Place yourself a week ahead in time. Conduct your own variations of these exercises. What they will teach you cannot be explained, for they will provide a dimension of experience, a feeling about yourself that may make sense only to you.

There is an inner knack, allowing for greater sensitivity to the feelings of others than you presently acknowledge. That knack will be activated. Again, the powers of the brain come from the mind, so while you learn to center your consciousness in your body — and necessarily so — nevertheless your inner perceptions roam a far greater range. Before sleep, then, imagine your consciousness traveling down a road, or across the world — whatever you want. Forget your body. Do not try to leave it for this exercise. Tell yourself that you are imaginatively traveling.