“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.)

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.

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.

Once again, however, these are of course blueprints of probabilities. As you know, the past itself is constantly changed as your own attitude toward it changes. Therefore you see, even dealing with the past, cellular consciousness does not involve knowledge of a closed and finished time of existence. Obviously then, the future is also constantly changing. Cellular consciousness mirrors these changes, you see.

Cellular consciousness is a part of the consciousness of the inner ego or inner self. Very loosely speaking, cellular consciousness is to the inner self what the subconscious is to the outer ego. There are of course many differences however.

Cellular consciousness is therefore expansive.

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.

A double, or something twice, or a negative. Something standing vertical.

(Seth will occasionally comment about the lack of emotional impetus surrounding an object if I pick one that happens to bear little charge. I cannot be sure that I am choosing an object that carries little charge, however, for Seth’s data will often shoot off at an angle entirely unexpected by me. This data can be related to the envelope object in a variety of quite valid ways. I make no conscious effort to dwell on the object chosen for an envelope experiment, and when I do choose an object it is usually a spur-of-the-moment decision.

(“A double, or something twice, or a negative.” Relatively little of the data refers to the envelope object itself. Instead the empty envelope from Wendell serves as a springboard. This data is a case in point. After break Seth agrees with Jane and me when we assign the double or twice mentioned here to the frequent use of the numeral 2 on the second page of Wendell’s letter.

(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.

(“Two again, like a double exposure.” See the “twice” and “negative” data on page 77, and the listing of Wendell’s use of the numeral 2 on the second page of his letter. Double exposure, above, also has picture and artist connotations.