“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In such a case, you will have already been convinced of the power of evil. Your natural feelings, denied, will also carry the great charge of repression. You may be filled with the feeling that you are in the midst of a great cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil — and indeed, this often represents a valid picture of your own view of the world.

Close your eyes. Imagine a photograph of yourself (in parentheses: Yes, we are finally back to photographs).³ In your mind’s eye see the photograph of yourself on a table or desk. If you are working mentally with a particular snapshot, then note the other items in the picture. If the photograph is strictly imaginary, then create an environment about the image of yourself.

Look at the image in your mind as it exists in the snapshot, and see it as being aware only of those other objects that surround it. Its world is bounded by the four edges of the picture. Try to put your consciousness into that image of yourself. Your world view is limited to the photograph itself. Now in your mind see that image walking out of the snapshot, onto the desk or table. (Pause.) The environment of the physical room will seem gigantic to that small self. The scale and proportion alone will be far different. Imagine that miniature image navigating in the physical room, then going outside, and quite an expanded world view will result.

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.

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.