2 results for (book:ur1 AND session:698 AND stemmed:purpos)
You dream, each of you, but there are few great dream artists. Many of the true purposes of dreams1 have been forgotten, even though those purposes are still being fulfilled. The conscious art of creating, understanding, and using dreams has been largely lost; and the intimate relationship between daily life, world events, and dreams almost completely ignored. The “future” of the species is being worked out in the private and mass dreams of its members, but this also is never considered. The members of some ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians, knew how to be the conscious directors of dream activity, how to delve into various levels of dream reality to the founts of creativity, and they were able to use that source material in their physical world.2
Because you have in the past convinced yourselves that the conscious mind must of necessity be cut off from inner reality, you think that it must be alienated from the dream state. Following such beliefs, you find yourselves thinking of dreaming as chaotic, unreasonable, and as completely divorced from normal conscious direction, purpose, or function. It often seems that sleep is almost a small death, and psychologists have compared dreaming with controlled insanity.5 You have so divorced your waking and dreaming experience that it seems you have separate “lives,” and that there is little connection between your waking and dreaming hours. The rich tapestry of probable actions from which you choose your official life becomes just as invisible. This is quite needless.
“Camouflage” became a familiar word to us in those early sessions, and we thought it an excellent one for Seth’s purposes — but rather oddly, except for using it once in a while in recent years, he’s largely dropped it from his vocabulary.