“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

An emotion obviously does not take up physical space, yet it takes up varying amounts of psychic space according to its intensity. It seems to recede in time and to shrink in psychic space as the intensity of it begins to diminish. An intensive emotion will represent the present in time, a particular instant of now.

Because of the physical structure, experiences within your system have a slow-motion distortion which creates the appearance of time. Time as you know it, waking time, is intimately connected with the emotions and with emotional intensities. Now. There is also a connection here that can be explored most clearly by using color designations.

Red is the most present or immediate of colors. The cool colors are more contemplative, or more indicative of contemplation. They do not however have the same type of intensity. They leave room within psychic space for other emotional experiences also.

(For some related material concerning time, intensities and moment points, see the following sessions: 149, 150, 151, 152.)

Experiences are more directly felt, although the same sort of differences occur here as far as intensities are involved. In the dream state as in the waking state, experiences vary in their intensity. There is however a more mobile element and an easier movement through experiences. Transitions are more rare in the dream state, since physical time lapses are not necessary.

Spontaneity is more the rule. Images appear and disappear, for there is no necessity to construct them as continuous physical constructions. There is therefore greater opportunity for new creations. These dream experiences take up psychic space, as do waking experiences. Their intensity is immediately felt however without any reliance upon physical time.

They are felt according to their intensity only. You might say, returning to our analogy, that there is more color-mixing within the dream state, and the materials are immediately at hand. Distance is then seen in its true light, not in relation to physical space but in its basic relationship to emotional intensity. As you seem in the waking condition to travel out of an experience, or as you seem to separate yourself from it, then physical time enters into your awareness.

You move from the outskirts of one dream into the core of another without a change of intensity, and therefore without the sense of physical time passing. It goes without saying that a sense of time may or may not be interwoven in any given dream sequence, but you as the dreamer are not conscious of the physical hours that pass as you sleep.

The creative abilities have full reign within the dream state, and it is here that the personality first tests its creative intensities and methods. The personality’s physical environment therefore is greatly colored and formed by his dream existence. There is some leakage from waking-life experience to dream experience, but this leakage usually represents the material needed, or the problem to be solved. Mental events and dream events are primary. The individual first manipulates situations within the dream reality, and then transposes his characteristic method of handling them upon the physical reality.

The subconscious in sleep has great freedom, and has at its command information gained through past experience in this life and in other lives. In the intense focus of awareness that occurs within the dream state, the inner self is able to direct all of its energies for the purpose of solving a given problem.