“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Many of you do not really want to step out of the photograph, or leave your world view, yet in the dream state you are far freer. You can pretend that dreams are not “real,” however, so you can have your cake and eat it too, so to speak.

Different varieties of dreams often provide frameworks that allow you to leave your own world view under “cushioned conditions.” You step out of the normal picture that you have made of reality.

Your alterations of consciousness frequently occur in the dream state, therefore, where it seems to you at least that your experiences do not have any practical application. You imagine that only hallucinations are involved. Many of your best snapshots of other realities are taken in your dreams.⁵ They may be over-or-underdeveloped, and the focus may be blurred, but your dreams present you with far more information about the unknown reality than you suppose. In the most intimate of terms your body is your home station, so when you leave it you often hide this fact from yourselves.

In your sleep, however, your consciousness slips out of your body and returns to it frequently. You dream when you are out of your body, even as you dream inside it. You may therefore form dream stories about your own out-of-body travel, while your physical image rests soundly in bed. The unknown reality, you see, is not really that mysterious to you. You only pretend that it is. Sometimes you have quite clear perceptions of your journeys, but the actual native territories that you visit are so different from your own world that you try to interpret them as best you can in the light of usual conditions. If you remember such an episode at all it may well seem very confusing, for you will have superimposed your own world view where it does not belong.

(11:16.) In dream travel it is quite possible to journey to other civilizations — those in your past or future, or even to worlds whose reality exists in other probable systems. There is even a kind of “cross-breeding,” for you affect any system of reality with which you have experience. There are no closed realities, only apparent boundaries that seem to separate them.⁶ The more parochial your own world view, however, the less you will recall of their dreams or their activities, or the more distorted your “dream snapshots” will be.

Before you go to sleep, tell yourself that you will mentally take a dream snapshot⁷ of the most significant dream of the night. Tell yourself that you will even be aware of doing this while asleep, and imagine that you have a camera with you. You mentally take this into the dream state. You will use the camera at the point of your clearest perceptions, snap your picture, and — mentally again — take it back with you so that it will be the first mental picture that you see when you awaken.

You will, of course, try to snap as good a picture as possible. Varying results can be expected. Some of you will awaken with a dream picture that presents itself immediately. Others may find such a picture suddenly appearing later in the day, in the middle of ordinary activities. If you perform this exercise often, however, many of you will find yourselves able to use the camera consciously even while sleeping, so that it becomes an element of your dream travels; you will be able to bring more and more pictures back with you.

These will be relatively meaningless, however, if you do not learn how to examine them. They are not to be simply filed away and forgotten. You should write down a description of each scene and what you remember of it, including your feelings both at the time of the dream, and later when you record it. The very effort to take this camera with you makes you more of a conscious explorer, and automatically helps you to expand your own awareness while you are in the dream state. Each picture will serve as just one small glimpse of a different kind of reality. You cannot make any valid judgment on the basis of one or two pictures alone.

Now this is a mental camera we are using. There is a knack about being a good dream photographer, and you must learn how to operate the camera. In physical life, for example, a photographer knows that many conditions affect the picture he takes. Exterior situations then are important: You might get a very poor picture on a dark day, for instance. With our dream camera, however, the conditions themselves are mental. If you are in a dark mood, for example, then your picture of inner reality might be dim, poorly outlined, or foreboding. This would not necessarily mean that the dream itself had tragic overtones, simply that it was taken in the “poor light” of the psyche’s mood.

(Pause at 11:40.) Inner weather changes constantly, even as the exterior weather does. One dream picture with a dreary cast, therefore, is not much different from a physical photograph taken on a rainy afternoon.

Many people, however, remembering a dark dream, become frightened. You even structure your dreams, of course. For that matter, your dream world is as varied as the physical one. Each physical photographer has an idea of what he wants to capture on film, and so to that extent he structures his picture and his view. The same applies to the dream state. You have all kinds of dreams. You can take what you want, so to speak, from dream reality, as basically you take what you want from waking life. For that reason, your dream snapshots will show you the kind of experience that you are choosing from inner reality.

5. All in Volume 1: Note 1 for Session 698 contains quotations from the dream material Seth gave in the 92nd session for September 28, 1964. Then see the equally interesting information on dreams in Session 699; I especially like Seth’s statement that “In a way, one remembered dream can be compared to a psychological photograph….” Jane’s poem, My Dreaming Self, is presented in the notes following that session, along with references to other dream material.

7. See the 710th session for Seth’s material on dreams, and the “snapshots” the conscious mind can learn to take during out-of-body travel.