“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Later you may not recall it, but you have a more direct connection with reality in the dream state, and the intensity of the dream experience is more completely perceived. I am speaking now in terms of basic reality. It is less camouflaged in the dream state. For this reason, in any projections you may be startled, for here you also enter a less strictly camouflaged situation.

There is a constant translation of inner reality into objects in the waking state, and a constant translation of ideas into pseudoobjects in the dreaming state. Within a certain portion of dream reality, ideas or thoughts can be translated into pseudoobjects, and transported. This can only happen within certain ranges of intensities. This is what happens when you adopt a pseudoform in projections, though I am simplifying this considerably.

Now during some projections you may be aware of nothing as far as surroundings are concerned. There will be only the mobility of your own consciousness. If this ever occurs you will be traveling through such an uncamouflaged area. You could then expect to encounter next a more differentiated environment, that seemed to become more clear as you progressed toward the heart of another system.

The completely uncamouflaged layer could be rather bewildering. However you might automatically attempt to project images within it. The images would not take, so to speak, but would appear and disappear with great rapidity. This would be a silent area. Thoughts as a rule would not be perceived here, for the symbols that form them would not be understood.

The tangerine then would be compared to a group of many systems, and yet it would represent in itself but one small portion of an unperceived whole. The tangerine would be but one segment, you see, of a larger system. You can see then why projections would lead you in a far different direction from your normal linear sort of travel, and why time as you know it would be meaningless.

Nor do such projections involve necessarily journeys through space as you know it. There are systems, extremely vivid in intensity, that have no existence in physical reality. It is now thought, I believe, that time and space are basically one, but they are both a part of something else. They are merely the camouflage patterns by which you perceive reality. Space, as you experience it in the dream state, comes much closer to reality.

Projections that deal with your own system will of course involve you in some kind of camouflage. If none is present you know you are out of the system. The dream universe is obviously then strongly connected with your own, since pseudoimages are present. Already you are free to some extent from the space-time reality of your system. Therefore within the dream state you are in the outward areas of your physically-oriented universe, you see.

The excellent work of art recreates for the observer inner experience of his own also, of which he has perhaps never been aware. As you know, paintings have motion, yet the painting itself does not move. This idea perhaps will help you to understand experience in terms of intensity, and projections, or the movement of consciousness, without necessarily any involvement with space.

The spacious present is always present (smile)—my pun—in any work of art. As you should know, there is a difference in the type of mobility of an objective painting, and an abstract one. The fluidity or the spacious present pervades the dream state as it pervades a painting, but the images are projected into the spacious present by the dreamer, according to his own understanding and experience.