“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As there is in actuality no beginning or end to a dream, so there is no beginning or end to any reality. A dream does not then begin or end; only your awareness of a dream begins and ends. You come into awareness of a dream, and you leave it, but in your terms of time, the dreams that you seem to dream tonight have been long in existence. They seem to begin tonight because you are aware of them tonight.

You do create your own dreams. Nevertheless, you do not create them during a specific point in time. The beginnings of dreams reach back into ‘past’ lives of which you are not aware and beyond even this; the origins are part of a heritage that was before your planet existed.

I mentioned the Crucifixion once, saying that it was an actuality and a reality, although it did not take place in your time. It took place where time is not as you know it… in the same sort of time in which a dream takes place. Its reality was felt by generations and was reacted to. Not being a physical reality, it influenced the world of physical matter in a way that no purely physical reality ever could.

However, with the ego at rest in sleep, the individual often allows communications and dream constructions through — past the ego barrier. For example, if his present expectations are faulty, when the ego rests, he may recreate a time when expectations were high. The resulting dream will partially break the circle of poor expectations with their shoddy physical constructions and start such an individual along a constructive path. In other words, a dream may begin to transform the physical environment through lifting inner expectation.

This not only applies to your physical field but also to all others. Your field is contained within its own range of intensities, a tiny band of electrical impulses a million times smaller than one note picked at random from the entire mass of musical composition that has ever been written or ever will be written. I am not going too deeply into this now because you are not ready. But because of the infinite range of intensities available, each individual has limitless intensities within which he can move.

All motion is mental or psychological motion, and all mental or psychological motion has its electrical reality. The inner self moves by moving through intensities. Each new experience opens up a new pulsation intensity. … To move through intensities within the electrical system gives the result, in the physical field, of moving through time. We will also discuss this later, in connection with so-called astral travel.

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.

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. …

Within the reality of the dream world, fulfillment and dependence, then, are not dependent upon permanence in physical terms. Bursts of developments are possible that have matured in perspectives that are not bound up in time.

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.

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. …

These night-time projections rise
Like insubstantial lines of chalk,
Yet travelers follow them,
Suspended dark to dark.