“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Your father’s sentence—the paper-bag reference—was one he actually made in his own mind, in the life that you actually knew him in, and he considered that sons rather than daughters represented his one physical triumph —that is, he believed sons preferable, and they alone compensated for a working man’s life—a life he felt did not befit him.

A daughter, however, would have given him a beneficial relationship, someone with whom he could discuss such feelings, as he did with you in the dream. With sons, he felt that he should not show emotions of defeat, and he felt that communication itself had the feminine overtones of an unfortunate nature.

The dream was simply a small scenario. (Long pause.) Such probable currents ride beneath all relationships. If your father did have daughters, rather than sons in the life that you know, he actually would have fared better in the physical world, because he would have felt it his duty to protect them financially: he would have considered them fairly helpless, and in need of his abilities. As his sons grew out of boyhood he felt that they dwarfed him. He was in a fashion frightened of the ideas of masculinity he grew up with—ideas he felt he did not embody, and he projected those upon his sons so that in a fashion they overawed him, or put him to shame.

Each son became the man he could not be. In the dream, however, you are a woman to whom he is able to express his feelings, and he therefore shows a side of himself to you with the paper-bag image.