“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your film, however, will only take pictures today, of today. No yesterday or tomorrow will suddenly appear in the snapshots of the present. The photographer in the dream world, though, will find an entirely different situation, for there consciousness can capture scenes from entirely different times as easily as the waking photographer can take pictures of different places. Unless you realize this, some of your “dream albums” will make no sense to you.

In waking life you experience certain events as real, and generally these are the only ones that can be captured by an ordinary photographer. The dream world,¹ however, presents a much larger category of events. Many [events] may later appear as physical ones, while others just as valid will not. The dream camera, therefore, will capture probable events also.

When you awaken with a dream photograph in mind, it may appear meaningless because it does not seem to correlate with the official order of activities you recognize. You may make one particular decision in physical and waking consciousness, and that decision may bring forth certain events. Using your dream camera, you can with practice discover the history of your own psyche, and find the many probable decisions experienced in dreams. These served as a basis from which you made your physical decision. There is some finesse required as you learn to interpret the individual pictures within your dream album. This should be easy to grasp, for if you tried to understand physical life having only a group of snapshots taken at different places and in different times, then it would be rather difficult to form a clear idea of the nature of the physical world.

Give us a moment … When you take a physical photograph you have to know how your camera works. You must learn how to focus, how to emphasize those particular qualities you want to record, and how to cut out distracting influences. You know the difference between shadows, for example, and solid objects. Sometimes shadows themselves make fascinating photographic studies. You might utilize them in the background, but as a photographer you would not confuse the shadows with, say, the solid objects. No one would deny that shadows are real, however.

Following our analogy, in the dream world the shadow of the oak tree, once cast, would then be free to pursue its own direction. Not only that, but there would be a creative give-and-take between it and the tree that gave it birth. Anyone fully accustomed to inner reality would have no difficulty in telling the dream oak tree from its frisky shadow, however (humorously), any more than awaking photographer would have trouble distinguishing the physical oak tree from its counterpart upon the grass.