“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: In your terms a photograph freezes motions, frames the moment — or all of the moment that you can physically perceive.

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 a way, one remembered dream can be compared to a psychological photograph, one picture that is not physically materialized, not frozen motion, not framed by either space or time; therefore many of those ingredients appear that are necessarily left out of any given moment of waking conscious activity.

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.

It will help if now and then you imaginatively think of vivid dream imagery^l as if it appeared in a photograph instead. As during your lifetime you collect a series of photographs of yourself, taken in various times and places, so in the dreaming state you “collect” subjective photographs of a different kind. They do not appear in sequence, however. Nevertheless, at a conscious level they can provide you with valuable information about your future and your past.

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.

The picture is a relatively simple one, all in all — one in which each consciousness is assumed to be directed toward a particular focus, is ensconced in one body, with its existence bounded by birth at one end and by death at the other. (Pause.) Unfortunately, that picture is as limited as any one of your photographs. You are used to examining your dream state from the viewpoint of your “waking” condition, but some time in the dream state try to examine your normal waking reality. Simply give yourself the instructions to do so. You may be quite surprised with the results. Speaking as simply as I can, and using concepts that you can understand, let me put it this way: From the other side — within what is loosely called the dream state — there is an existence quite as valid as your own, and from that viewpoint you can be considered as the dreamer. “You” are the part of you concentrating in this reality. You form it through information and through energy that on the one hand has its source outside this system, and that on the other constantly flows into this system — and so in that respect the systems are united.

So, from other streams of actuality you choose those events that you want physically materialized; and you do this according to your beliefs about the nature of reality. A photograph is taken, and you have before you then a picture of an event that in your terms has already happened. In dreams you take many subjective “photographs,” and decide which ones among them you want to materialize in time. To a certain extent, therefore, the dreams are blueprints for your later snapshots.

(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)