“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.

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.

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.)

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.

(After the end of break at 11:17, Seth came through with a fairly long block of material on another matter. He closed out the session at 11:43 P.M. with this line about the questions I had waiting for him: “I bid you a fond good evening — and I know when your material will fit.” Since I take this to mean that some time may pass before the questions enter into the scheme of this book, I’ll briefly note their subjects below.

(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)

1. Seth’s evocative material on dream images reminded me of an equally evocative poem about the dreaming self that Jane wrote in 1965, a year and a half or so after the sessions began. I’ve always wanted to see the poem published; I think it very rich in both subject matter and visual content.