“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Without dreams the outer camouflaged self would lose all touch with inner realities, or would be in danger of thus denying its own heritage; and therefore the physical body is so constructed that excess chemicals must be discharged and transformed into human action, or the physical mechanism would be clogged with poisons.

That is perhaps the most important sentence of this session, and many others. For the direction or the focus of the self does indeed change, and even in your own daily lives you experience the fact that what is conscious today may not be tomorrow.

The self, in this manner, looks about. The direction in which the self looks is not the self. In dreams the self looks elsewhere, and the “I” is a conscious “I”, and the working ability is tremendous. The inner self perceives realities that it observes in many directions, being free from the intense focus within limited directions of camouflage existence.

(Jane well remembers the evening when she first consciously conceived Idea Construction, and so do I. Checking her manuscripts yields the date of September 10,1963, as when she made her first notes. I remember walking out to the living room where she writes her poetry, having finished my own work in my studio in the back of the apartment at about 9 PM; Jane’s first words were “Boy, have I got a great idea,” or to that effect. She then told me about idea construction, which I didn’t go for very much. Checking with her while writing this up, she said that she never did do any poetry that night; the idea came to her as she sat down to write poetry after supper, and she spent the evening on it.

(It might be interesting to quote here the first paragraph of notes Jane made that evening: “Basic idea is that the senses are developed not to permit awareness of an already existing material world, but to create it. The inner image [idea] is projected by the senses outward to create the world of appearances. [Camera in reverse, for the eye, for example.]”

Men are not islands, even unto themselves. They merely perceive islands, or they perceive bits of realities. The dream correlates the various manifestations of the self with the whole portion. Dreams bring intuitive knowledge of the whole self to its own parts.

(This bit of data really made me sit up and take notice. Jane has not heard from her schoolgirl friend Marie Tubbs for some months, and if Marie was pregnant we did not know it. They have exchanged a desultory correspondence for some years, and have not met since the early days of our own marriage, ten years ago. But because they were such good friends in school days, they have managed to keep in touch with each other over the years.

This information itself may enable you to interpret your own dreams more effectively, and should enable others who read the material to interpret their own dreams with more sense.

(Then Bill and Jane were gone. I was in the living room of the apartment with Alice and Clark, looking back toward a kitchen finished in brown wood paneling. In an intermediate room I saw Larry Potter. He was wearing a chamois-type fall jacket with knitted cuffs. He seemed to me to be taller and heavier than I had known him to be, which was about my own size. The amazing thing to me was that Larry was frantically busy at a wringer-type washing machine that was gushing forth a stream of water from its outlet, into a bucket that was almost full.

(These two dreams impressed me considerably, and I wondered whether they were clairvoyant in that they might presage an illness or farewell on Father’s part. I might as well add here, as well as in the session, that the three boys do not get together very often—on the average less than once a year I would say—because we all live in different communities, Loren and Dick have families, and of course each person is always busy with his or her own life.