“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Early last week a friend sent me a copy of a “double dream” experienced by his lady. Then as Jane and I were discussing the episode last Friday night, I found myself saying that one explanation for double dreams — that is, the awareness of experiencing two dreams at once, or a dream within a dream — could be that each half of the brain has its own separate dream, the two dreams then try to emerge together into ordinary consciousness.

(Each dream would be characteristic of the functions of the hemisphere of the brain that experienced it, I added, as we think of those functions in the light of current knowledge. The left hemisphere, being more analytical and intellectual, would have dreams embodying those qualities; the more creative right hemisphere would have dreams involving symbols, the arts, and the emotions.

(As I talked so easily about this, without any conscious foreknowledge or preparation, I realized I’d been mulling over our friend’s letter, and that this was the way my ideas spontaneously came out. I further said that although the two hemispheres of the brain were separate, they were united at the brain stem and by the corpus callosum, and so there were all kinds of interchanges between them. In the same way, in the double dream there would be relationships between the two dreams.

It is as if the experiences of your life were captured on a film. In this case the film would be the body tissue, the brain’s tissue. The experiences themselves, however, would exist independently of the film, which in any case could not capture their entirety.

In a manner of speaking the activity of your brain adjusts the speed with which you, as a physical creature, perceive life’s events. Theoretically, those events could be slowed down or run at a quicker pace. Again in a manner of speaking, the sound, vision, dimensional solidarity and so forth are “dubbed in.” The picture runs at the same speed, more or less. The physical senses chime in together to give you a dramatic sensual chorus, each “voice” keeping perfect time with all the other sensual patterns so that as a rule there is harmony and a sense of continuity, with no embarrassing lapses.

The same applies to your thoughts, which if you bother to listen seem to come smoothly one after another, more or less following the sequence of exterior activity. The brain like the movie screen gives you a physical picture, in living stereo (humorously), of inner activities that nowhere themselves physically appear.

(9:44.) Your brain gives you a handy and quite necessary reference system with which to conduct corporal life. It puts together for you in their “proper” sequences events that could be experienced in many other ways, using other kinds of organization. The brain, of course, and other portions of the body, tune into your planet and connect you with numberless time sequences — molecular, cellular, and so forth — so that they are synchronized with the world’s events.

The brain organizes activity and translates events, but it does not initiate them. Events have an electromagnetic reality that is then projected onto the brain for physical activation. Your instruments only pick up certain levels of the brain’s activity. They do not perceive the mind’s activity at all, except as it is imprinted onto the brain.

Even dreams are so imprinted. When one portion or one half of the brain is activated, for example, the corresponding portion of the other half is also activated, but at levels scientists do not perceive. It is ridiculous to call one side or the other of the brain dominant, for the full richness of the entire earth experience requires utilization of both halves, as does dreaming.

In dreaming, however, the full sense-picture usually projected by the brain, and reinforced by bodily action, is not necessary. Those dream experiences often seem out of joint or out of focus in morning’s hindsight, or in retrospect, simply because they occur with a complexity that the brain could not handle in ordinary waking terms.

The body obviously must react in your official present; hence the brain neatly keeps its physical time sequences with spaced neural responses. The entire package of physical reality is dependent upon the senses’ data being timed — synchronized — giving the body an opportunity for precise action. In dreams the senses are not so restrained. Events from past, present, and future can be safely experienced, as can events that would be termed probable from your usual viewpoint, since the body, again, is not required to act upon them.

Because of the brain’s necessary specifications, large portions of your own greater reality cannot appear through its auspices. The brain might consider such extracurricular activity as background noise or clutter that it could not decipher. It is the mind, then, as the brain’s nonphysical counterpart, that decides what data will activate the brain in that regard. The so-called ancient portions of the brain (among them the brainstem — limbic system) contain “the mind’s memories.” Generally speaking, this means important data to which, however, no conscious attention need be given.

None could be given, because the information deals with time scales that the more “sophisticated” portions of the brain can no longer handle.

(10:10.) The knowledge of the body’s own biological probabilities takes place at those ancient levels, and at those levels there is activity that results in a cellular communication existing between all species. The brain has built-in powers of adaptation to an amazing degree, so that innately one portion can take over for any other portion, and perform its activities as well as its own. Beliefs in what is possible and not possible often dull that facility, however. While the neural connections are specific, and while learned biological behavior dominates basically, the portions of the brain are innately inter-changeable, for they are directed by the mind’s action.

This is most difficult to explain, but the capacity for full conscious life is inherent in each portion of the body itself. Otherwise, in fact, its smooth synchronicity would be impossible. The brain has abilities you do not use consciously because your beliefs prevent you from initiating the proper neural habits. Certain portions of the brain seem dominant only because of those neural habits that are adopted in any given civilization or time. But other cultures in your past have experienced reality quite differently as a result of encouraging different neural patterns, and putting experience together through other focuses.

You are bringing into your consciousness traces of events that have not been registered in the same way that waking events are (emphatically) by the brain. The dream events are partially brain-recorded, but the brain separates such experience from waking events. Dreams can provide you with experience that in a manner of speaking, at least, is not encountered in time. The dream itself is recorded by the brain’s time sequences, but in the dream itself there is a duration of time “that is timeless.”

Theoretically, certain dreams can give you a lifetime’s experience to draw upon, though the dream itself can take less than an hour in your time. In a way, dreams are the invisible thickness of your normal consciousness. They involve both portions of the brain. Many dreams do activate the brain in a ghostly fashion, sparking responses that are not practically pertinent in ordinary terms. That is, they do not require direct action but serve as anticipators of action, reminders to the brain to initiate certain actions in its future.

(10:33.) Dreams are so many-leveled that a full discussion requires an almost impossible verbal expertise. For while dreams do not necessitate action on the part of the whole body, and while the brain does not register the entire dream, the dream does serve to activate biological action — by releasing hormones, for example.

There are too many varieties of such dreams to discuss here, but they all involve consciousness dispersing, yet retaining its identity, consciousness making loops with itself. Such dreams involve other sequences than the ones with which you are familiar. They hint at the true dimensions of consciousness that are usually unavailable to you, for you actually form your own historical world in the same manner, in that above all other experiences that one world is predominant, and played on the screen of your brain.