“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“The Dream World, Dream Images and Actions, Dreams as Actions”

I would like to discuss dreams in relation to action. We mentioned earlier that all action does not necessarily involve motion that is apparent as such to you. To one extent or another, all actions are unfoldings. The action of dreaming itself is partially a physical phenomena. There is, then, the outside action that makes dreaming possible, the action that is dreaming.

Then there are the endless varieties of actions within the dream which is, in itself, a continuing act. The images within a dream also act. They move, speak, walk, run. There is, at times, a dream within a dream where the dreamer dreams that he dreams. Here, of course, the dimensions of action are more diverse.

Many of these actions performed by dream images are muscular ones, physical manipulations. But many of these actions are also mental manipulations or aesthetic realizations and even aesthetic performances. These dream images are not one-dimensional cardboard figures by any means. Their mobility, in terms of perspectives and within space, is far greater than your own.

In many respects, actions within the dream world are more direct than your own. It is because you remember only vague glimmerings and disconnected episodes that dreams appear often chaotic or meaningless, particularly to the ego which censors much of the information that the subconscious retains. For most people, this censoring process is valuable, since it prevents the personality from being snowed under by data that it is not equipped to handle. The ability to retain experience gained within other fields is the trend of further developments. … Nevertheless, every man intuitively knows his involvement here. …

I used the term, pass out of the dream world purposely, for here we see a mobility of action easily and often accomplished — a passing in and out that involves an action without movement in space. The dreamer has, at his fingertips, a memory of his ‘previous’ dream experiences and carries within him the many inner purposes which are behind his dream actions. On leaving the dream state, he becomes more aware of the ego and creates, then, those activities that are meaningful to it. As mentioned earlier, however, dream symbols have meaning to all portions of the personality.

The dream world has a molecular construction, but this construction takes up no space as you know it. The dream world consists of depths and dimensions, expansions and contractions that are more clearly related, perhaps, to ideals that have no need for the particular kind of structure with which you are familiar. The intuitions and certain other inner abilities have so much more freedom here that it is unnecessary for molecules to be used in any imprisoning form. Action in the dream world is more fluid. The images appear and disappear much more quickly because value fulfillment is allowed greater reign.

The slower physical manifestation of growth that occurs within the physical system involves long-term patterns filled by atoms and molecules which are, to some extent, then imprisoned within the constructions. In the dream world, the slower physical growth process is replaced by psychic and mental value fulfillment which does not necessitate any long-range imprisonment of molecules within a pattern. This involves a quickening of experience and action that are relatively unhampered by the sort of time necessities inherent within the physical universe. Action is allowed greater freedom. …

One of the closest glimpses you can get of pure action is action as it is involved with the dream world and in this mobility as the personality passes into and out of the dream field. Within the physical world, you deal with the transformation of action into physical manipulations — but this involves only a small portion of the nature of action, and it is my purpose to familiarize you with action as it exists, more or less, in pure form. In this way, you will be able to perceive the ways in which it is translated into other fields of actuality that do not involve matter as you know it.

These developments are the result of actions that occur in many perspectives at once and not developments that happen as within the physical system through a seeming series of moments. Basically, even the physical universe itself is so constructed, but for all practical purposes, as far as perception and experience is concerned, time and physical growth apply. As a result, the ego portion of personality is, to a large extent, dependent for its maturity and development upon the amount of time that the physical image has spent within the system.

A certain portion of physical growth, in terms of a series of moments, is, therefore, necessary for value fulfillment to show itself within a physical organism. But in the dream world, ‘growth’ is a matter of value fulfillment which is achieved through perspectives of action — through traveling within any given action, and following it and changing with it.

Now, you experience action as if you were moving along a single line, each dot on it representing a moment of your time. But at any of these ‘points,’ action moves out in all directions. From the standpoint of that moment-point, you could imagine action forming an imaginary circle with the point as apex. But this happens at the point of every moment. There is no particular boundary to the circle. It widens outward indefinitely. Now, in the dream world, and in all such systems, development is achieved not by traveling your single line, but by delving into that point that you call a moment. … Basically the physical universe is at the apex of such a system itself. …

Quite simply, the self travels to areas of reality that are far divorced from the physical areas of mobility. The muscles are lax then because physical activity is not required. The energy that is not being expended physically is used to sustain mental actions. The chemical excesses built up in the waking state are automatically changed as they are drained off, into electrical energy which also helps to form and sustain dream images.

I have said often that any action changes that which acts and that which is acted upon; and so in the sort of experiments that are currently being carried on to study dreams, the acts of the investigators are changing the conditions in such a way that it is easy for them to find what they are looking for. The investigator himself, through his actions, inadvertantly brings about those results for which he looks. The particular experiment may seem, then, to suggest conditions which are by no means general, but may appear to be. Under hypnosis a subject is not as much on guard, as is the subject of an experiment who knows in advance that he will be awakened by experimenters, that electrodes will be attached to his skull and that laboratory conditions are substituted for his nightly environment.