“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In usual circumstances you may remember the emotions that you felt at the time a picture of yourself was taken, and to some extent those emotions may show themselves in gestures or facial expression. But the greater subjective reality of that moment does not appear physically in such a photograph. It completely escapes insofar as its physical appearance within that structure is concerned. In the same way the past or the future is closed out. The particular focus necessary to produce such a picture then necessitates the exclusion of other data. That certainly is obvious. Because you must manipulate within specific time periods, you do the same kind of thing in daily life, and on a conscious level ignore or exclude much information that is otherwise available.

In those normal, generally accepted terms, the images in photographs do not change, move, or alter their relationships. The living subjective photography of dreams, however, provides a framework in which these “images” have their own mobility. They represent creativity in far different terms than you usually understand. You know what physical issue is (intently), because you see the children of your loins, but you do not experience the children of your dreams in the same physical way, nor understand that your dream life is continuous. It has organization on its own levels that you do not comprehend, and from its rich source you draw much of the energy with which you form your daily experience. Your conscious mind is the director of that experience.

In your terms, however, you dream whether you are living or dead. When you are alive, corporally speaking, what you think of as dreaming becomes subordinate to what you refer to as your conscious waking life. You always examine your dreams then from an “alien” standpoint, one prejudiced in favor of the ordinary waking state. However, the dreaming condition is consequently experienced in distorted form. Often it does not seem clear. By contrast to waking consciousness it can appear hazy, not precise, or off-focus. This does not always apply, because in some dreams the state of alertness is undeniable.

Give us a moment … Some inventors, writers, scientists, artists, who are used to dealing with creative material directly, are quite aware of the fact that many of their productive ideas came from the dream condition. They see the results of dream activity in practical physical life. Many others, though untrained, can clearly trace certain decisions made in waking life to dreams. Few understand, however, that private reality is like a finished product, rising out of the immense productivity that occurs in the dreaming condition. Ruburt calls this The Wonderworks,² and with good reason. In waking life there are fluctuations in your consciousness, periods when you are more or less alert, in your terms, when your attention wanders from issues at hand; or when, instead, you are certainly brilliantly focused in the moment. So there are gradations of consciousness in the waking state. Usually you pay little attention to them.

In your terms, obviously, atoms do not dream of cats chasing dogs, yet (intently) there are indeed “lapses” from physical focus that are analogous to your dreaming state. Give us a moment … In those conditions the atoms pursue their own probable activities, and indeed make astounding calculations, bringing into your actuality the necessary probable actions to insure official life forms. But neither are they limited otherwise, for their other probable directions are also actualized. Period. On different levels in the dream state, then, you are also subjectively aware of other probable realities. Your conscious intent is unconsciously brought into the dreaming condition, and that intent helps you sort the data. (See Note 4.)