“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The dream could be said to be a message to the multitudinous levels of the self. For purposes of analogy only, imagine that each subconscious layer is personified into a personality, who is then subjected to rendition of a dream or more, who watches a screen upon which the dream images flicker.

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 dreams the inner “I” changes its point of focus, and this is important. It is therefore able to view the self as a whole, with its past and present life. And because the focus brings it outside of camouflage time and space, it is also able to project itself into what you call the future.

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.

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.

When I spoke of the fine discrimination used in the construction of a dream, I had reference to the amazing work done by the inner self in the choice of its individualized symbols, which would have meaning to the many and various levels of the subconscious.

The dream objects are not randomly chosen, but only those are chosen which will be significant to the many layers of the self, according to the need or according to that part of the subconscious area which is to be instructed; that is, the portion which is directly a participant in the dream activities, and which plays out the dream drama while other parts of the self observe.

You must again realize that we speak of the self as being so divided only for simplicity’s sake. While the self is whole, it is however compartmentalized for efficiency’s sake, but beneath consciousness the doors are open. Again, the conscious self is most necessary. However it cannot be stressed too strongly that consciousness is merely a state of focus, and not a self.

Consciousness is the direction in which the self looks at any given time.

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.

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.

Another man in an airplane above sees the whole landscape, and through radio communicates to those below about those conditions which they cannot perceive. The man in the airplane, then, can be compared to the inner self, sending messages to other areas of the subconscious, whose energies and focus are necessarily used in limited fashion.

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.

I am, again, not minimizing the practical necessity for the conscious self as it appears to be. But man is much more than the conscious self, and what he calls the conscious self is merely the whole self as seen through the direction in which the whole self chooses to direct its energies and focus.

A man stands in the center of a room. When he looks to the right you say “This is my conscious self.” When he looks to the left, we have something else again. You say “This is the dreaming self.” The dreaming self, or if you will, the left-handed self, indeed is as important as the so-called conscious self. The whole self merely changes direction and viewpoint, and focuses its energies along a particular line.

It turns beams of attention off and on. It has many facets and many volumes and many dimensions. It acts out roles, but the whole self is entire, and every individual innately knows and is intimately familiar with the intents and purposes of the whole self. And in dreams and in intuitions and unspoken thoughts, the individual comes to terms with the whole self, of which it is merely one portion, and not necessarily the dominant portion.

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?

The idea that sparked the book came to him, though he may forget, in two ways. First as intuition; in other words from his inner self as he sat down to write poetry, and in a dream the following night.

Intellectually he followed the ideas, but his inner self gave him the all-important initial message. His poetry does not spring from the conscious self, yet he would not disinherit it for that reason. Intuition represents the directions of the inner self, breaking through conscious barriers.

Messages from the inner self if strong enough will pass through the conscious barriers, and the conscious ego is only too happy to receive them. But such intuitions have usually first appeared in dream form, appearing to the ego later; and many such messages appear in dreams ahead of time, to be released to the conscious mind when situations demand it.

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.

The conscious self does not perceive, or the so-called conscious self does not perceive, the equally valid dream constructions. You will discover that the whole self is composed of many so-called conscious selves. But neither of those conscious selves are aware of the existence of the others.

The dreaming self, dear friends, is not aware of the conscious self. The whole self, the entire inner self alone, holds knowledge of the direction in which it moves. The directions can be likened to conscious selves. Any individual on the physical level who has achieved great things has done so because his so-called conscious self was intuitively (and underline the word intuitively) aware of the selves of which he could not be consciously aware.

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.

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.

However, I have said that the conscious mind is but a small portion of the whole self, and the information thus received through dreams is automatically acted upon or assimilated, regardless of conscious cognition.