“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(I would like to remind the reader here that when Seth uses the term “area,” he means what up until recently he has called a “level” of the subconscious. Actually, he states, the subconscious is not neatly divided into levels, but is marvelously intertwined, like a labyrinth. Seth has mentioned this at various times.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

(End at 10:55. Jane was dissociated as usual. She said that while she was delivering the above material on one level, she also received the thought from Seth “on another level” that she should sleep for three-quarters of an hour after supper on session nights. She has reported this dual reception on a few occasions before, and as before she said she was able to give voice to but one level at a time.