“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper Jane had read the two dreams quoted previously involving my father. My dream notebook lay open on the table. As session time approached Jane no longer felt nervous. I could tell however that she was somewhat tired, and when she began delivery I thought her voice had a peculiar, flat, expressionless quality that could be the result of fatigue. She spoke very deliberately, in measured phrases, in a voice somewhat lower than usual, but not loudly, and as though she were giving a lecture before a number of people. Again her glasses were off, her eyes very dark. Her pacing was also quite slow.)

They were adapted to meet a specific situation in which the inner self found it must operate, and it therefore took unto itself the adoption of these specific constructions. Therefore since dreams are manifestations of inner reality, they cannot be interpreted or investigated with any success through the use of the outer senses.

Dreams therefore cannot adequately be understood or probed into on an intellectual level. The results of another kind of investigation may be given to the intellect, which may then be able to register the facts involved, but only with some difficulty since the intellect is bound and determined to study facts in the light of so-called cause and effect, which appears so logical to the intellect, since it deals so often with appearances registered by the outer senses, then trying to interpret them into some kind of order.

The investigation of dreams, then, must be accomplished in or on a subconscious level. In order to study dreams properly you must indeed immerse yourself in that medium in which dreams occur. The intense but limited focus of usual consciousness will itself distort the true nature of dreams, and the ego will hold any such conscious examination of dreams within rigid bonds.

Hypnosis is one method of examining dreams. Our method is perhaps the best one. The inner self constantly changes its focus. I have said that consciousness is merely the direction in which the inner self focuses at any particular time. In order to examine the reality of dreams it is necessary to change the focus of the inner self to those directions in which the inner self moves, when the ego does not limit its scope to camouflage reality only.

Now during the dream drama the inner self may focus at various, or at one of various subconscious areas which it uses as a point of departure. This area, whichever one it may be, will be the one in which the main dream sequence originates and in which the dream activity occurs.

The dream objects and activities will then be interpreted at other subconscious areas, so that to understand a dream properly we should first discover at which subconscious area it originates. Individuals can be enabled to find this point of origin for themselves, after an attempt is made to recall any given dream or dreams.

A familiarity must be gained by an individual with the general nature of his own dreams first, as Ruburt now has some knowledge or intuition that enables him to distinguish between dreams that originate in areas having to do with past lives, and those which originate in other areas, though he is not yet able to further differentiate.

In the interpretation of your dreams then Joseph, as with Ruburt’s, we must change our focus, for what appears as a logical interpretation through conscious examination is often distorted.

The basic and originating dream sequence occurred in that area of the subconscious having to do with past lives, and of course expanded into other areas. The dream was partially triggered, as is often the case between closely related individuals, by Ruburt’s own dream in which the leaking vessel was featured.

(Again, see the 87th session for Jane’s dream.)

It, the sequence, referred again to that ocean voyage, and gave you additional subconscious knowledge, informing you that the Larry Potter of your acquaintance was a seaman on the same vessel. He loomed above you in the dream because during that voyage he had rank, and you as a stowaway had none.

And when you were discovered it was he, a first mate, who had you pressed into duty, and who belittled your efforts until finally he struck you; a fact, incidentally, which you were not willing to face in the dream.

Because of the present situation, where the man in your present life is a mere lad, the dream then changed levels. The vessel becomes a masculine symbol. The first symbol was built around Ruburt’s dreams, which involved a female symbol; that is, the present Ruburt interpreted vessel as tub, hence washing machine, the leaking vessel becoming a leaking washing machine.

Your dream began with this, but you quickly changed into a masculined interpretation. A ship is thought of as a she. The symbol changed then to a woman: she who carries men within her. Because of the originating area of the dream, you chose the Potter lad’s mother, and she was the connecting image from one area to another. Even in your dream, she carried you in a car from one location to another.

You found out later and felt somewhat at fault. In the dream the lad’s present mother is seen to comfort you, this being a way to relieve the past uneasiness that at a certain subconscious area still lingers. At the time the lad was in his very early thirties, but you were much younger.

You then found yourself, in the dream, wearing pajamas, first though deposited in front of your parent’s home, but not entering. This being a symbolic connection again, a transference not yet into this life, that is not into your parents’ home. But just immediately preceding birth you find yourself in the dream wearing pajamas, entering a theatre, looking for someone.

You were looking for the person who was to become your brother, and indeed you found him, or he found you. People in your dream did not notice your strange attire, incidentally, because in your dream you had not yet elected to be born.

His nod however was a blessing upon you. It was of course the knowledge that he would necessarily die before you will that gave rise to his passing by, but the dream did not involve an immediate clairvoyant knowledge of his death.

Now we come to a dream that originated on quite a different subconscious area, and that did include a certain clairvoyant knowledge. It gave you inner warning to prepare for last Sunday’s very real occurrence, in which you did indeed to some extent sit in judgement. There was necessarily of course distortion, and rather tricky distortion at that.

Your mother sat in the dream before a higher bar, symbolizing your own inner conviction, based on early rather puritanical bases, that your mother and her actions should be judged, and a child’s natural but unfortunate vindictiveness: “She who has hurt me, particularly if my mother and a female, shall meet justice.” You have her in the dream before the bar of justice.

The other sons are present. On the childlike area of the subconscious you believe your mother mainly responsible for family difficulties. However her defense, which you recognize basically as insincere but superficially correct in this particular instance, was that your father hit her in the chest. You identified with your father, and could not permit, in this dream at any rate, an identification of this kind, since at this childish level you did not blame him and would have wished as a child, to have the power to do the same thing.

So, even in the dream you misinterpreted and distorted the violence. Instead of having your mother say “He hit me in the chest,” and in order to punish yourself through your identification with your father, instead you translated the words to “He has a spot on his lungs,” therefore punishing symbolically both your father and yourself for the violence.

However, the dream was basically clairvoyant, in that it foresaw the actual situation of Sunday, in which the mother ended up on trial before her sons; and it did prepare you so that you automatically adjusted yourself, coming through the actual situation rather intact, since you had already faced it on another level.

You were aware incidentally of your own misinterpretation, and the appearance of your father in both the dreams was opposed by the female vessel symbol, as the opposition between both parents has been an important element in your subconscious life.

You will find such sequences often, and this should be expected. The dream also allowed you to see ahead of time beyond the surface of the situation which did arrive on Sunday, and you were much easier on your father Sunday because the dream tipped you off as to the tactics that your mother would use on one level, and also allowed you to punish yourself and your father symbolically rather than actually, for a violent tendency which is now apparent in him toward her, but is not as readily apparent, but repressed, in yourself.

Had the dream not so prepared you, you may well have struck out verbally at your father most forcibly, in an actual attempt to make him suffer for his own rather restrained violence, because you would have feared and not been able to face its somewhat weaker but still definite latent manifestation in yourself.

Because I have kept you without your break, I will now close the session. I did not want to break the context or the continuity here, and it was much better that Ruburt remain in a constant state of deep dissociation for the most faithful interpretation of the dreams.

(Since Seth had not actually discussed the very beginning of my first long dream, Jane and I spoke of this during break. It was a mistake, for no sooner did the subject come up than Jane began again with but one minute’s rest. As it was, she remained seated at the table, sitting with her eyes closed and her glasses off. Her voice, surprisingly, was quite at ease.)

The dream of the drawings occurred on another level, and we will discuss in detail these various subconscious areas, though I speak of them as separated only for convenience.

The dream represented a correlation of past, present and future, a knowledge that Ruburt was indeed an artist in a distant life, that he has strong abilities in that direction now; and it represents your inner realization of the type of painting he can ultimately produce in this life if he utilizes the ability. Your surprise in the dream represents your feeling that he is not using the ability. Therefore the quality of the painting in the dream amazed you.

(The pastel drawing of Jane’s that I saw in my dream was so vivid that I still retain it clearly, and plan to do an oil painting of it soon. Both Jane and I of course have been aware of her artistic ability, and I have made various attempts to get her to use it more regularly. Although she understands perspective which I have tried to teach her, she has no feeling for it, and prefers to work without it; she calls her work primitive, and it has a childlike quality when she is left alone to paint her own way.

(Thinking the session now over, I then brought up the thought that I suspected a distortion in Seth’s interpretation of the first dream, where he stated that before being born I saw my brother Loren as a woman. I thought I recalled Seth stating many sessions ago that Loren had been three times a man, but never a woman, and had a woman’s life ahead of him.