“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Perhaps ten minutes before the session began, I showed Jane an article I found in the New York Times for October 3,1966. She read it, then I clipped it for future use. It concerns a study of animals in dreams, conducted by a psychologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

I have a few comments to make concerning the article on dreams, that you read in the paper.

Maturity has nothing to do with the meaning of the reptiles and mammals mentioned as dream images. There is generic imprint stamped within the cells, and at various levels of cell consciousness. These are reactivated. The reptilian images do not represent maturity nor immaturity, but are simply designations natural to a particular level of cellular consciousness.

The difference noted in this respect between the dreams of men and women are only differences apparent within your own structure of civilization. In your social framework women are afraid of reptiles, and they do not consciously remember dreams involving these. Except in strong nightmare situations, they repress those images. They remember the mammal dreams more easily however because mammals are warmblooded creatures whose reproductive systems bear similarities to your own.

Cellular consciousness itself straddles, so to speak, various levels of sleep activity. Various aspects of it come to the forefront at definite times. This consciousness is constant, whether you wake or sleep. It existed before the ego’s formation, and in many cases exists after the ego’s organization is altered. In sleep cellular consciousness often intrudes into the dream process, appearing in the form of dream images. Cellular consciousness is highly codified in actuality, much more emotional than visual, and the visual dream images are but translations of inner comprehensions. (Long pause, nearly one minute.)

The bird dreams are in this same category. No generalizations can completely answer these questions however, for despite them individuals, regardless of their sex, will show great variations in the dream images that they recall or forget entirely.

Children recall animal dreams more frequently simply because they are closer to cellular consciousness to begin with. Such dreams do carry the individual out away from ego identity, and at the same time closer to an inner identity that the ego usually attempts to deny.

Such dreams do not basically imply a return to a distant past, for to the cells all things are present. (Long pause.) This reality is a basic part of your present existence, and simply represents a dimension of actuality that the ego cannot, by its nature, admit.

Now, the future is also present in cellular consciousness. The ego, again, simply censors dreams from the cellular consciousness level when they deal with time that is not yet physical in your terms. Cellular consciousness is usually considered as simply a repository for past knowledge having to do with personal or racial existence. Because of the spacious present however, cellular consciousness also contains blueprints of the future.

You know that this is distortive. You recognize elements from the past, since your ego is familiar with them. You accept them into the organization of your perception on a conscious level, usually. The ego does not recognize elements of the future when they do appear within dreams, and it does not therefore admit them into perceptive patterns. The ego does not perceive their significance. It is only for this reason that certain events seem to be always in your future: this lack of recognition, identification, acceptance and organization into patterns that can be used and manipulated.

In your dreams, in other words, you are familiar with images like the mammals and reptiles, that would seem not to belong to the present. These however would seem to belong to the future rather than to the past, and these you forget almost instantly, as a rule. This does not mean that some individuals do not recall them.

Even if they are recalled as dreams however, they may appear meaningless, for they are unfamiliar to the ego. Yesterday’s events reenacted in a dream touch off familiarity. Tomorrow’s events in tonight’s dreams do not, not at least to the ego. Generic codes apply in other words to the future as well as to the past, but mankind does not generally perceive them as such for they appear meaningless to the ego, because of the ego’s inherent nature and limitations.