“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Any of these changing characteristics of symbols should alert you to the altered state of your consciousness. If you let yourself drift off into sleep here, you would most probably manufacture two or three dreams that symbolized the fear, dreams in which you consider and try out possible solutions within the dream context. The job situation might never appear as such within any of the dreams, of course.

Still, to the unconscious the problem has been set and given. In the following deep protected areas of sleep, the higher centers of the inner self are allowed to function and come to the aid of the three-dimensionally oriented portion of the personality. This more liberated self sees the situation much more clearly, suggests a given line of action (but does not order it), and informs the dreaming self. The dreaming self then manufactures a group of dreams in which the solution is stated within a symbolic dream situation.

(10:11.) The final and more specific interpretation is done in areas of dreaming closer to the waking self, when the symbols grow more and more specific. There is a much more narrow aspect to symbolism, therefore: The closer you get to waking consciousness, the more limited and narrow the symbol. The handier it is in a given physical circumstance, the less valuable it is as a waking lifetime characteristic symbol.

To some extent the more precise a symbol is, the less meaning it can contain. In the most important dream work, done in the deep protected sleep periods, the symbols are powerful enough and yet condensed enough so that they can be broken down, used in a series of seemingly unrelated dreams as connectives, retain their original strength and still appear in different guises, becoming in each succeeding dream layer more and more specific.

(Pause at 10:20.) There is a great unity between your daytime symbols and your dreaming ones. In a miraculous shorthand, many symbols carry the burden of far more than one experience, of course, and one symbol will therefore evoke not only one given experience, but similar ones. Personal association, therefore, is highly involved with your personal bank of symbols, and it operates in the dream states precisely as in waking life — but with greater freedom, and drawing from the future, in your terms, as well as from the past.

Therefore, you have greater use of symbolism in the dream state, for you are aware of past and future symbols. These vary in intensity; often they cluster together. Such multidimensional symbols will appear then in many ways, not simply visually. They will affect not only your own physical reality, but all realities in which you are involved. In a manner of speaking the symbols that you know are but the tail end of greater symbols.

(11:00.) Trees as they stand are a sound that, again, you do not perceive. In your dreams and particularly beyond those dreams that you recall, are areas of consciousness in which these sounds are automatically perceived and translated into visual images. They operate as a sort of shorthand. Given certain sounds, you could recreate your universe as you know it unconsciously, and any one multidimensional symbol can contain all the reality that you know. End of dictation. (Pause.) Now a few remarks.