“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 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.

(9:50.) For many reasons, some mentioned here and some not as yet discussed, you have closed your dreams out of your lives to a large extent. While you must of course hold accurate focus in time and place, there is still no basic reason why you must so divorce yourselves from dream experience.

The official³ line of consciousness that you accepted blithely ignores any deviations, and when such events occur usually continues merrily on as if nothing had happened. In the dreaming state, such fluctuations also happen. It should be obvious that there you can leap from time to time.

Much more is involved, however, for there are “separate” strands,⁴ if you prefer, of consciousness that are naturally pursued in the dream state, and these can be followed with some training and diligence. They involve probable “series” of events. For example, if one particular dream event is chosen for physical materialization, then in your reality other events will appear in due time, and in serial fashion.

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.

(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.