“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you, a dream tourist, wander about the inner landscape with your mental camera, however, it may take a while before you are able to tell the difference between dream events and their shadows or hallucinations. So you may take pictures of the shadows instead of the trees, and end up with a fine composition indeed — but one that would give you somewhat of a distorted version of inner reality. So you must learn how to aim and focus your dream camera.

Dictation (whispering). Now, if you take a physical camera with you today and snap pictures as you go about your chores, walk, or talk with friends, then you will have preserved scenes from the day’s activities.

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.

He had been fussing with the camera at the other end of the house from the den. [...] Yet here he stood, camera and all.

[...] Not two minutes passed before Rob stood at my door with his camera! [...]

[...] If Rob hadn’t come in at that point, I wouldn’t have known that my thought about cameras had anything to do with his thoughts or activities at the same time. [...]

I took the fan into the bedroom, the coolest room in the house, sat down on the edge of the bed, and began to write down my own feelings about Rob’s notes (and) the camera affair — and what I called the Magical Connection.

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. [...] With our dream camera, however, the conditions themselves are mental. [...]

[...] Tell yourself that you will even be aware of doing this while asleep, and imagine that you have a camera with you. [...] 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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Sights can be captured by camera. But you do not expect music to come from a camera. You do not expect a phonograph to take pictures, yet while you are listening to music from a phonograph this does not mean, even to you, that cameras do not record sight. [...] You are expecting them to act like a camera that can pick up music, and because the camera does not pick up music you are saying that music does not exist.

[...] To insist upon evidence in terms of outside sensual data is as ridiculous a notion as to expect a camera to play music.

There are techniques for using cameras,¹ and a camera left at home will do you little good abroad. [...] Certain techniques will help you pack your conscious mind for your journey as you would pack your camera. [...]

1. A note added six weeks later Seth further “develops” his camera analogy (as dream photography, for instance), in Section 5. See sessions 719–20.

The television camera lights were warm on my face. [...]

[...] My face must have begun to change even then, the muscles rearranging themselves into Seth’s characteristic expressions, because in that last moment I saw what seemed to be a gigantic camera lens coming in for a close-up. [...]

When I came out of trance, Rob was smiling, Jack and Sonja looked dazed, the camera crew were staring at me and the program was over. [...]

A small group surrounded us — the producer and assistant producer, Jack, Sonja and the camera men. [...]

[...] He thought of asking you to take a snapshot of the table with your camera, showing the partially-opened front door, so that later he could paint the scene. Your camera could not take in all of that, a fact he never thought of. Less than two minutes later, you came out into his studio with the camera that you had not used for months. [...]

[...] Ruburt picked up your own camera activities because he was in correspondence with you. [...]

[...] Something like a camera. [...]

[...] Some kind of connection with a screen, or with a motion picture screen, or camera screen.

(“Some kind of connection with a screen, or with a motion picture screen, or camera screen.” [...]

[...] You had instant feedback — the interplay of a creative nature between the two of you involving your dreams and the camera,³ and so forth. [...]

[...] You can make your own connections here, as per Ruburt’s camera experience, and your own dreams of late.

3. Seth describes the camera episode after 9:15 P.M. in the next session, which Jane held on August 11.

(Peggy Gallagher visited briefly during the session, to tell me that a camera I wanted to buy was on sale at a certain store.

(“A connection with a camera and pictures.” As stated the object is related to transparencies, in that Doug’s father Loren brought his camera and transparencies with him. [...]

A connection with a camera and pictures. [...]

[...] I am going to let our friend return, I am not a camera hound. [...]

(Gert wound her camera.)

—and any time you want to try your tricky camera... [...]

[...] After joking with Peggy about interviews, cameras, etc., Seth said in time that he would interview Peg, who by then would be “notorious,” or better known. [...]

[...] I’ve prepared the typewritten camera copy so that it has just the look Jane and I want it to have, and now a local printer is making several hundred copies for us.)

[...] The atoms and the molecules in this chair, you see, and in our friend’s camera, all have a consciousness...

[...] When you viewed such a gigantic motion with a slow camera, then you would get the effect that you receive within your system, of a continuous time. [...]

A particular man with a camera slung over his shoulder, who gets our friend’s attention. [...]

[...] There will be a television camera somewhere, and the most secret atrocities will find their way into the public eye. [...]

There were frequent peepholes, so to speak, through to the surface, from which they could make observations, and cameras situated there that kept the most precise pictures not only of the earth, but of the stars.

[...] He played one of his own songs on camera. [...]

[...] The camera may be comprehending, or it may not be comprehending.