“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I would like to speak a few words concerning the nature of realities.

This will serve as a further connective to our discussion of the dream universe, and its interaction with the world of physical matter. It goes without saying that your definition of reality is extremely limited, and excludes more than it includes.

Even within the experience of men there are realities that are entirely different from the realities of physical objects. Psychological experience is one such indisputable reality. Ideas are another, and dreams are still another. Secondary effects of such realities may appear in material form, but the original reality of such experiences cannot be captured within physical matter.

If such experiences appear less real than more obviously material realities, they also have at times a peculiar vividness that cannot be overlooked. Their nature is simply different from the nature of physical realities. If they seem occasionally insubstantial, it is because their substance is of a different quality.

They appear to lack the apparent physical durability of, say, a table or a chair, the table and chair being examples of physical realities. And yet their effect is much more durable, and they impress and to some extent manipulate physical realities, in their strong and sometimes explosive emergence into your universe. Such realities do not bow to the artificial time measurements which so often limit you in daily life.

Just because your attention is no longer focused upon such realities, this does not mean that they do not continue to exist.

You do indeed give them energy, as they also give you energy. Dreams, or the dream universe, exists even while you wake, and you only become aware of certain portions of it even while you sleep. You do create it, but it is also to some degree independent of you. As your ego experiences changes in its relationship with the physical world, so do you change aspects of the dream world accordingly, and enrich it.

The dream universe also enriches your own existence. There is great interplay here, and a continual interchange of energies, and of energies that are transformed and recharged, so to speak, through their constant passage between fields. Dreams, perhaps more clearly than anything else, can help you understand the concept of value fulfillment, and of the expansion that does not take up space.

These dream locations are realities. They do exist, even though they do not exist in space as you know it, and certainly they do not take up space in the skull. There would be no room for anything else. As a brief byline here, I mentioned once the Crucifixion, 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. It took place in the same sort of time in which a dream takes place, and its reality was felt undeniably 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.

The Crucifixion was one of the gigantic realities that transformed and enriched both the universe of dreams and the universe of matter, and it originated in the universe of dreams. It was a main contribution of that field to your own, and could be compared physically to an emergence of a new planet within the physical universe.

The reality, the physical reality, of fire was such a contribution made by the physical universe to the universe of dreams. Physical man, observing fire, dreamed of it, thereby immeasurably enriching the universe of dreams. His discovery in the physical universe of domesticating fire was another such contribution to the dream universe.

The ascension of Christ did not occur in time as you know it. It is a contribution of the universe of dreams to your own universe, representing knowledge within the dream universe that man was independent of physical matter ultimately.

You necessarily limit your own knowledge, or the knowledge possible to you, when you limit your definition of reality, or possibilities of reality.

Many concepts, huge advancements and practical inventions, simply wait in abeyance in the world of dreams until some man accepts them as possibilities within his frame of reality. Why man so often mistrusts the dream reality would escape me, if I did not know the nature of the ego.

Now, and this can hardly be called a controversial statement, the imagination is waking man’s connection with the universe of dreams. Imagination often restates dream data, and applies it to particular circumstances or problems within the physical universe. Imagination is never basically destructive. In some cases the ego construction may be weak, or incapable of holding its own, in which case the imagination is often said to be too excitable, and to be at fault.

I cannot impress upon you too strongly that imagination is another such basically nonphysical reality, with a basis however, and interrelationship, in both dream and matter. Again, its effects may appear within matter but it is of itself not composed of matter.

These realities, because of their continuing effects within your system, and their actual transformation of it, should be studied thoroughly, for much can be gained in this way. Like transformations are made by events in your universe upon the dream universe. Often, again, the dream universe possesses concepts which will, some day, completely transform the history of your field; but a denial of such concepts as actualities or possibilities within reality, hold these back, and put off breakthroughs that are sorely needed.

Such developments would mean the releasing and availability of added energy into your field, that would have endless possibilities in all directions. Ideas and concepts are nonphysical actualities that attract unaligned energy, direct and concentrate it. The dream world exists more closely in that spacious present of which the inner self is so aware. It is not as involved with camouflage constructions as your own universe, and its actions are somewhat limited within its own framework.

The type of dream, or the types of dreams experienced by any individual, is determined by many factors. I am speaking now of the dream experience as it occurs, and not of the remnant of it that his ego allows him to consciously recall. As an individual creates his physical image and environment according to his abilities and defects, and in line with his expectations and subconscious and inner needs, so does he create his dreams; and these interact with the outer environment which he has created.

(I had one interesting experience, before the interruption, and felt that I could have had more. I was on the sidewalk of the main street of a small town. I looked up the rather empty and depressing street a few doors to an evidently empty storefront with big gray-colored plate glass windows. There was an indistinct male personage or figure on the sidewalk before me, passing the empty storefront. I then heard my own voice coming out of the store, saying something to this effect: “Now, you’ve known me before.” At this the personage began to scramble backward up the street toward the store, falling backward as though losing its balance at the same time.)