“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A remembered dream is a product of several things, but often it is your conscious interpretation of events that initially may have been quite different from your memory of them. To that extent the dream that you remember is a snapshot of a larger event, taken by your conscious mind. There are many kinds or varieties of dreams, some more and some less faithful to your memories of them — but as you remember a dream you automatically snatch certain portions of subjective events away from others, and try to “frame” these in space and time in ways that will make sense to your usual orientation. Even then, however, dream events are so multidimensional that this attempt is often a failure. It might be easier here, perhaps, if you compare a scene from a dream with a scene in a photograph. A photograph will show certain events natural to the time in which it was taken. It will not show, for example, a picture of a Turk at the time of the Crusades. A dream scene might portray just such a motif, however.

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.

(2. A photograph of Jane and her parents, Marie and Delmer. It was taken in the summer of 1932, when Jane was 3 years old, and as far as we know it’s the only one of the Roberts family in existence. I anticipated hearing what Seth would say about some of the probable paths since taken by the photograph’s three subjects. I’ve had the question in mind ever since Seth discussed separate, childhood snapshots of Jane and me in the same terms during the first session for “Unknown” Reality. [See the 679th session, with the notes relevant to Jane and her family background. In that session, Seth told us that the 12 year old Jane in the photo under discussion was to become probable to the one I eventually met and married.] Beside whatever Seth could tell us about her parents, I was curious to know whether the Jane who was shown at the age of 3 might be — or was destined to become — another probable Jane.⁶)