“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Men repress many mammalian images in your particular civilization, because they do not want to be reminded of the female’s reproductive advantages. But these apply to your social frameworks alone. The level of sleep is the real indicator. The individual becomes aware of cellular consciousness at certain sleep levels.

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.

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.

(Break at 10:17. Jane said she was dissociated as usual during the delivery. Her eyes remained closed. She reported no images within at first, but memory of a few did return as we discussed Seth’s data.

(The negative mention in the data is interesting, and has several connections, both here and in the rest of Seth’s data. Jane and I did not think of negative in connection with the word no, for instance, but in relation to pictures or visual images. On page two of his letter Wendell tells about a friend who works for the Neilson TV survey people—having to do with pictures. But also, negative, meaning pictures, is called to mind because Wendell’s letter deals with a group of artists who worked together in a studio, drawing comic strips, in 1941-3. In addition I personally have a studio here in the apartment, and the envelope used as object was kept in this studio. These references about studios, pictures, and the object crop up again later in the data also.

(Jane had a mental image within while giving this data, but could not put it into words beyond saying she saw something curved, like a tunnel. Driving into New York City by tunnel from New Jersey, I remember a long curving tunnel lit by strings of lights. I cannot now say whether this refers to the Holland or Lincoln Tunnel. Wendell’s home in Edgewater is north of both tunnels. If he drove to New York City by private car, he would presumably head south and take the first tunnel he met—the Lincoln.