“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We mentioned that there are always actions within actions, and made it clear that all action does not necessarily involve motion that is apparent as motion to you. Actions may be thresholds or openings for other actions. To one extent or another all actions involve unfoldings. The action of dreaming itself is partially a physical phenomena. There is then, comparatively speaking, the outside action that makes dreaming possible, the action that is dreaming.

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.

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.

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.

Now basically even the physical universe itself is so constructed, but for all practical purposes, as far as general perception and experience is concerned, time and the physical growth development apply, so that we find the ego portion, particularly of the human personality, is to a large extent dependent for its maturity and development upon the amount of time that the physical image has spent within the system.

A certain portion of physical growth, in terms of a series of physical moments, is therefore necessary for value fulfillment to show itself within a physical organism. Within the dream field and within many other systems, this series of moments is unknown. Development comes not from a series of actions strung out along a single line, one before the other in lengthwise fashion. Instead development is largely a matter of value fulfillment, which is achieved through the perspectives of action, through traveling within any given action, and following it and changing with it. To make this clearer, I have said that action exists within limitless perspectives, and that you are mainly familiar with it as it is materialized along a single line of continuity within the physical system. You experience action then as if you were moving along a single line, each dot on the line representing a moment of your time. But at the imaginary point on your line that represents any given moment, action moves out in all directions. From the standpoint of that moment point, you could imagine action forming an imaginary circle with that point as an apex. But this happens at the point of every moment.

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.

(For some material on travel through concepts and impulses and time, see sessions 131 and 135. [A note: All underlined words are called for by Seth.])