“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Children practice using all of their senses in play-dreams, which then stimulate the senses themselves, and actually help ensure their coordination. In your terms, events are still plastic to young children, in that they have not as yet learned to apply your stringent structure. There is an interesting point connected with the necessity to coordinate the workings of the senses, in that before this process occurs there is no rigid placement of events. That placement is acquired. The uncoordinated child’s senses, for example, may actually hear words that will be spoken tomorrow, while seeing the person who will speak them today.

Focusing the senses in time and space is to some extent an acquired art, then — one that is of course necessary for precise physical manipulation. But before that focusing occurs, children, particularly in the dream state, enjoy an overall version of events that gradually becomes sharper and narrower in scope.

A certain amount of leeway in space and time lingers, for even biologically the child is innately equipped with a “forevision” that allows it some “unconscious” view of immediate future events that forewarn it, say, of danger. From this more plastic, looser experience, the child in dreams begins to choose more specific elements, and in so doing trains the senses themselves toward a more narrow sensitivity.

You have inner senses that roughly correlate with your physical ones. These, however, do not have to be trained to a particular space-time orientation.

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.

This means that to some extent the imagination must operate outside of the senses’ precise orientation. For that reason, it is most freely used in the dream state. Basically speaking, imagination cannot be tied to practicalities, for when it is man has only physical feedback. If that were all, then there would be no inventions. There is always additional information available other than that in the physical environment.

These additional data come as a result of the brain’s high play as it experiments with the formation of events, using the inner senses that are not structured in time or space.

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.

Playfully done, these exercises will set into action other creative events. These will involve the utilization of some of the inner senses, for which you have no objective sense-correlations. You will understand situations better in daily life, because you will have activated inner abilities that allow you to subjectively perceive the reality of other people in a way that children do.