“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, regarding again the nature of action, I would like to discuss action in relation to the dream reality, for you are intimately familiar with action in dreams, and your practical experience will enable you to understand the true nature of action more clearly.

Many of these actions performed by dream images are muscular ones, physical manipulations. But many of these actions are also mental manipulations, or esthetic realizations and even esthetic performances. These dream images are not one-dimensional, cardboard figures by any means. Their mobility in terms of perspectives and within space is far greater than your own.

You perceive, however, but a very small portion of these images which you have yourselves created. You simply cannot bring them back into the limited perspectives of your own present field, and are left with but glimpses and flimsy glimmerings of images which are actually as actual, vivid, and more mobile than those in the physical field.

I have mentioned that what I call the dream universe is indeed composed of molecular structure, and that it is a continuing reality, even though your own awareness of it is most usually limited, for quite necessary reasons, to the hours of your own sleep. There is a give and take here, for if you give the dream universe much of its continuing energy, much of your own energy is derived from it. There is, between the physical field and the dream universe, an interdependence that is not at all unusual, for all fields are indeed dependent one upon the other.

Nor is the dream universe a shadow image of your own. It carries on according to the possibilities inherent within it, as you carry on according to the possibilities that exist within the physical field. The possibilities for action vary, however, within these two fields as they vary within all other fields. You may say that in sleeping you focus your energies to form a different reality than the reality of waking physical matter.

You focus your awareness in altered form into another universe, that is in every way as valid and permanent as your own. It is also as changing as the physical universe. A small amount of energy only is focused upon the physical field during sleep, enough simply to maintain the physical body within its physical environment.

In many respects actions within the dream universe are indeed more direct than in your own. It is because you remember but vague glimmerings and disconnected episodes that dreams appear, sometimes, chaotic or meaningless, particularly to the ego, which censors rigidly much of the information that the subconscious does retain.

The feeling of unreality is not felt when the dream experience is being participated in by the dreamer. At that time the experience is felt to be real, and some dreams indeed are more vivid than waking experience. It is only when the personality passes out of the dream experience, or the dream universe, that the dream experience in retrospect may appear unreal. For now, again, the focus of attention and energy is in the physical universe. Reality then is a result of the focus of energy and attention.

On leaving the dream state, he becomes more and more aware of the ego, and creates then activities which have meaning to it. In the deep dream state the inner purposes are more involved. As I have mentioned however, all dream symbols have meanings to all portions of the personality.

I will have more to say concerning the connection between the two fields and their manifestation in action, for one of the closest glimpses you can get of pure action is action as it is involved within the dream universe, and in this mobility as the personality passes into and out of the dream field. Within your own universe you deal with the transformation of action into physical manipulations, but this involves but a small portion of the nature of action, and it is my purpose to familiarize you with action as it exists more or less in its pure form.

Your own universe expands as an idea expands, in ways that have nothing to do with space.

The whole reality of the dream world, or of the dream universe, lies along these lines. Within it fulfillment and development are not dependent upon permanence of physical matter, however, and are not at all dependent upon any concept like that of your physical time. There [are] therefore possible bursts of developments, that have matured within perspectives that are not bound up in time, and that would appear spontaneous to the waking self.

There is no particular boundary to the circle. It widens outward indefinitely. Now. In the dream universe, in all systems of such nature, development is achieved not by traveling your single line, but by delving into that point that you call a moment. The physical laws simply do not apply here, within such a value fulfillment system. Basically your own physical universe is at the apex of such a system itself, and it is only because of the purpose and nature of the particular apex that experience appears, from my viewpoint, to be so slowed down. The particular point, in one manner, is being pursued by you in such a slow fashion that it appears to be a series of happenings strung out in a thread of continuity. You experience action as one happening after another, not because of the nature of action itself but because of the nature of your own structure and perception.

This is in itself, you see, a form of value fulfillment, since you are perceiving one simultaneous action as if it were a series of separate actions. You are delving into one action, and within it continually creating action within action. This is however, or this can be, while fulfilling, also limiting.