“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: In their play children often imaginatively interchange their sexes. The young selfhood is freer in its identification, and as yet has not been taught to identify its own personality with its sex exclusively.

Play then at another game, and pretend that you are of the opposite sex. Do this after an encounter in which the conventions of sex have played a part. Ask yourself how many of your current beliefs would be different if your sex was. If you are a parent, imagine that you are your mate, and in that role imaginatively consider your children.

Your beliefs about dreams color your memory and interpretation of them, so that at the point of waking, with magnificent psychological duplicity, you often make last-minute adjustments that bring your dreams more in line with your conscious expectations. The sexual symbols usually attached to dream images are highly simplistic, for example. They program you to interpret your dreams in a given manner.

(9:45.) Give us a moment… You do have a “dream memory” as a species, with certain natural symbols. These are individually experienced, with great variations. The studies done on men and women dreamers are already prejudiced, however, both by the investigators and by the dreamers themselves. Men remember “manly” dreams — generally speaking, now — while women in the same manner remember dreams that they believe suit their sex according to their beliefs.

This artificial aggressiveness has nothing to do either, basically, with the struggle for survival. It is the direct result of the fact that the male has been taught to deny the existence within himself of certain basic emotions. This means that he denies a certain portion of his own humanity, and then is forced to overreact in expressing those emotions left open to him. The reasons for such a lopsided focus have been discussed at various times in my works. The male, however, chose to take upon himself a kind of specialization of consciousness that, carried too far, leads to a hard over-objectivity. Only in dreams in your time, in your society, is the male free to cry unabashedly, to admit any kind of dependency, and only at certain occasions and usually in relative privacy is he allowed to express feelings of love.

His rage turns outward as aggression. It is the highest idiocy, however, to project that artificial aggression outward upon the animal kingdom in general. Such beliefs invisibly affect all of your studies — and worse, they help you misread the activity in nature itself.

Those who imagine they look upon nature with the most objective of eyes are those whose subjective beliefs blind them most of all, for they cannot see through their own misinterpretations. It has been said that statistics can be made to say two things at once, both contradictory; so the facts of nature can be read in completely different fashions as they are put together with the organizational abilities of the mind operating through the brain’s beliefs. The exterior core of dreams is also blemished to that degree, but the inner core of dreams provides a constant new influx of material, feedback, and insight from the psyche, so that the personality is not at the mercy of its exterior experience only — not confined to environmental feedback only, but ever provided with fresh intuitive data and direction.

Events are processed in dreams, put in the necessary perspective, sorted and arranged. This is done when the conscious mind is separated from direct involvement with physical events. Dreams serve to dull the impact of the day’s events just past, while the meaning of those activities sifts through the various levels of the personality, settling into compartments of intent and belief. Often the true impact of an event does not occur until it has been interpreted or reexperienced through a dream.