“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.

(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.

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.

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.

(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.

Dreaming, for example, can be “brought into focus” in a far sharper fashion, so that at least some of those experiences can be consciously utilized. When this happens, you are consciously taking advantage of experience that is physically and logically extracurricular.

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.

There are also what I will call body dreams. No consciousness, to whatever degree, is fully manifested in matter. There is always constant communication between all portions of the body, but when the conscious mind is diverted that activity often increases. Cellular consciousness at its own level then forms a body dream. These do not involve pictures or words, but are rather like the formations of electromagnetic intent, anticipating action to be taken, and these may then serve as initiators of therapeutic dreams, in which “higher” levels of consciousness are psychologically made aware of certain conditions.

Now: While consciousness enjoys its physical orientation, it is also too creative to confine its activities in one direction. Dreams provide consciousness with its own creative play, therefore, when it need not be so practical or so “mundane,” allowing it to use its innate characteristics more freely.

Many people are aware of double or triple dreams, when they seem to have two or three simultaneous dreams. Usually upon the point of awakening, such dreams suddenly telescope into one that is predominant, with the others taking subordinate positions, though the dreamer is certain that in the moment before the dreams were equal in intensity. Such dreams are representative of the great creativity of consciousness, and hint of its ability to carry on more than one line of experience at one time without losing track of itself.

In double dreams and triple dreams consciousness shows its transparent, simultaneous nature. Several lines of dream experience can be encountered at the same time, each complete in itself, but when the dreamer wakes to the fact, the experience cannot be neurologically translated; so one dream usually predominates, with the others more like ghost images.

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.

Take all the time you want to with this. Then explore your own conscious sense perceptions of the orange. Dwell on its taste, texture, odor, shape. Again, do this playfully, and take your time. Then let your own associations flow in your mind. What does the orange remind you of? When did you first see or taste one? Have you ever seen oranges grow, or orange blossoms? What does the color remind you of?

Then pretend you are having a dream that begins with the image of an orange. Follow the dream in your mind. Next, pretend that you are waking from the dream to realize that another dream was simultaneously occurring, and ask yourself quickly what that dream was. Followed in the same sequence given, the exercise will allow you to make loops with your own consciousness, so to speak, to catch it “coming and going.” And the last question — what else were you dreaming of? — should bring an entirely new sequence of images and thoughts into your mind that were indeed happening at the same time as your daydream about the orange.

The feel and practice of these exercises are their important points — the manipulation of a creative consciousness. You exist outside of your present context, but such statements are meaningless, practically speaking, unless you give yourself some freedom to experience events outside of that rigid framework. These exercises alter your usual organizations, and hence allow you to encounter experience in a fresher fashion.

A double dream is like the double life lived by some people who have two families — one in each town — and who seemingly manipulate separate series of events that other people would find most confusing. If the body can only follow certain sequences, still consciousness has inner depths of action that do not show on the surface line of experience. Double dreams are clues to such activity.

While each person generally follows a given strand of consciousness, and identifies with it as “myself,” there are other alternate lines beneath the surface. They are also quite as legitimately the same identity, but they are not focused upon because the body must have one clear, direct mode of action.

(11:41.) These strands are like double dreams that continue. They also serve as a framework to the recognized self. In periods of stress or challenge the recognized self may sense these other strains of consciousness, and realize that a fuller experience is possible, a greater psychological thickness. On some occasions in the dream state the recognized self may then enlarge its perception enough to take advantage of these other portions of its own identity. Double or triple dreams may represent such encounters at times. Consciousness always seeks the richest, most creative form, while ever maintaining its own integrity. The imagination, playing, the arts and dreaming, allow it to enrich its activities by providing feedback other than that received in the physical environment itself.

(11:49 P.M. By now it should be obvious that this session is an excellent example of the way Seth often winds our questions and concerns into book dictation, couching his answers so that they also fit the larger framework he has in mind. But even if our private lives do sometimes influence the way Seth delivers his material, we’ve discovered that he still pretty much covers the subject matter he wants to.)