“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I hope that you will not find that he is now bigheaded, as well as pigheaded. He knows I speak only in jest. I did nevertheless tell you that he had been an artist at one time, did I not?

Now. The “I” who dreams, who is aware of motion, action and participation in a dream, this “I” is of course the inner self, focused momentarily upon the particular subconscious layer at which the dream is originated.

In other words, a dream allows the inner self to view itself within the spacious present. Now, chemically the physical body does need to dream. That is, dreaming is a necessity if the physical body is to survive. This is the result of certain chemical reactions and chemical necessities, chemical excesses that build up during the days, inciting the mental dream mechanism.

(Break at 9:35. Jane was dissociated as usual. She now told me that she had been upset by the delay in starting the session. This time wearing her glasses, she resumed in a rather unhurried but emphatic manner, her voice a little stronger, at 9:40.)

Without dreams the whole self would have no way of holding its various manifestations together, and the so-called conscious present personality would soon falter. Imagine if you will now a band of men, some in cars with the high beams of the headlights gleaming, so that some generalized conditions can be seen; and some with low beams showing only the road that the automobiles directly pass. The men can be compared to personified areas of the subconscious, with partial vision of existing conditions.

Now. The conscious self responds without knowing it, often changing course and direction, to these dreams of which he is often not aware. The ego, the conscious ego, the so-called conscious self, is only the front man in the front lines, supported by multitudinous areas or portions of himself that he does not know, and whose messages come to him only through the correspondence of dreams.

(Now Jane perched on the table, sitting down upon it, and laughed and pointed at me.)

Our friend Ruburt prides himself that his conscious self, before the sessions began, started a book called The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. Ha ha, did he really now?

Now. The conscious mind perceives matter. Yet even then it does not perceive matter directly, but by a very indirect path, and only because the whole self directs a certain portion of its energies in that direction.

(Jane will now write to Marie to see if Seth is correct; if not, or the data is distorted, Jane will try to learn from Marie what association she could have been involved in with water. Marie’s married name is: Marie Sterrett, of Boynton Beach, Florida.)

Now, in any dream you will find a unifying image that will seem as diverse as this to the conscious mind. But it will speak to various portions of the self. In that dream you found the word tub referring to many various meanings, but in many cases you will find various other images, all cunningly connected so that it seems most unfortunate to you that the conscious mind cannot interpret them.

I hope to get into your father’s appearance in your dream. However the explanation will take nearly an hour, and is not what you think. I would suggest now that we end the session, although if you wish me to continue I will.

(Then, Alice Potter and I were driving down Route 17 to Sayre. She was very sympathetic to me, and I may have forgotten the reasons. I believe she was wearing a nightgown but am not positive. Alice parked the car in front of my parents’ home in Sayre, put her arm around my shoulder and said something. I then got out of the car and she drove away. I saw my parents’ home clearly there on Wilbur Avenue, but I did not go into it. Instead I started walking up Mohawk Street, around the corner toward Keystone Avenue, a block away. I was going to a theatre, a big one, on the corner of Keystone and Mohawk, though actually none exists there. I was now in striped pajamas. [I have none like this.] I was well covered by the pajamas, which were loose and baggy, and not at all nude.

(Then my brother Dick, looking perhaps a little younger than he is now [about 36], was approaching me, smiling down at me and saying something to me. He was fully dressed, wearing a jacket. Dick was accompanied by a thin, sharp-faced man in dark-rimmed glasses, neatly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt and colored tie, and a slim rather good-looking woman I did not know. This couple with Dick did not speak to me, as I recall.

(Next, Jane and I had been attending a party in a building on a busy downtown street corner, on the second floor. I did not actually see Jane but knew she was there at the party. Many people were about. I entered this part of the dream as I left the stairway to move out on the corner for a breath of fresh air. I was now dressed, and it was daytime. As I stood on the corner with people passing me in all directions, I stretched my arms high above my head. Then to my surprise I saw my father ride past me, past the corner, on a bicycle. Father was wearing a familiar brown hat, and a long brown topcoat, incongruously enough, and he was his present age. His face was very smooth-looking and pink-cheeked, looking very healthy, and he seemed to pedal past me quite easily, as a youth would do.