“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

The pajamas merely represented symbolically your refusal to admit the fact of, first, nakedness; to hold off birth, to gaze about in the theatre of existence before permitting yourself to be born again on the physical plane, this deliberation always having been somewhat a portion of your makeup.

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 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.