“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Jane didn’t remember the dream material. [...] More and more I appreciate the fantastic reality of dreams—the tremendous knowledge and variety, literally unending, that’s embodied within them. “Just think of the number of people who have dreams like that,” I said, “but who either don’t remember them, or pay any attention to them if they do. [...] Later I thought that I should have asked Seth what kind of interpretation of the dream a conventional psychologist would have given. [...]

[...] Before the session I’d mentioned to Jane that I’d like something from Seth about my dream of early this morning. A copy is attached, and a copy of this part of the session is attached to the dream in my dream notebook.

I referred to that, I thought, in my preliminary statement about time references—that you recognize yourself in a dream even if the other references do not agree with known reality. There is no contradiction in a dream if you and your father are approximately the same age, for example. [...]

In dreams you can recognize yourself even though the usual space and time references may be quite different than the ones with which you are familiar in the waking state. [...]

(Pause.) When you examine the state of dreams, however, you do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality. You try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are your usual criteria for judging events. Therefore, you are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when you “come awake” within your dreams—a matter we will discuss later on in this book. But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that your own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization. You think your thoughts and you dream your dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself.

Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed possesses. [...] It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream. In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated. It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.

I told Jane she needn’t have a session if she wanted to paint, but that if she did go into trance I wouldn’t mind getting something from Seth on the dream I’d had early this morning. [...] The fact that my father is dead didn’t enter into the dream.)

(Long pause.) The waking state as you think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of your awareness, just as your physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.

(At 10:30 AM, I checked the clock and I awoke at 11 AM, so the following two dreams took place within the half-hour period. The first dream was entirely forgotten until I had completed writing my notes on the second dream, then I recalled the first one.

[...] Now I got out of bed [in the dream], went into Rob’s room and found that another radio sat on the bookcase where the Seth material is kept, and that the voices were coming from this radio also. [...] Here the dream becomes unclear. [...] From this scene I went directly into the second dream. [...]

[...] Now I begin to realize that the whole thing is a dream. I think of looking at the other apartments now, before the dream is over, but realize that if I do I run the chance of forgetting this part of the dream, and I want to write it down.

(This is the first dream. I was in bed, and then I realized that I heard voices in my head; was not at all sure that this was a dream. [...]

[...] “Ruburt,” Seth commented, “is just beginning his own dream endeavors, which could not seriously start until he learned to have faith in his own being.” [Appendix 11 contains excerpts from The Wonderworks, the paper Jane wrote almost two weeks ago on Seth, dreams, and the creation of our reality. In my notes for The Wonderworks I described her own recent dream series — which still continues, by the way.] And: “In our case,” Seth said a bit later, “Ruburt almost ‘becomes’ the material he receives from me. If certain other beneficial alterations occur, and further understanding on Ruburt’s part, we may be able to meet at other levels of consciousness — in the dream state, when he is not cooperating in the production of our book material.” For Jane has never met Seth, face to face, you might say, in a dream. The closest she’s come to this situation is in giving a session for him in the dream state, as she does in waking life.

(10:39.) Simply as an analogy, look at it this way: Your present universe is a mass-shared dream, quite valid — a dream that presents reality in a certain light; a dream that is above all meaningful, creative, based not upon chaos (with a knowing look), but upon spontaneous order. To understand it, however, you must go to another level of consciousness — one where, perhaps, the dream momentarily does not seem so real. There, from another viewpoint, you can see it even more clearly, holding it like a photograph in your hands; at the same time you can see from that broader perspective that you do indeed also stand outside of the dream context, but in a “within” that cannot show in the snapshot because of its limitations.

[...] There are some individuals embarked upon a study of dreams, working in the “dream laboratories”; but here again there is prejudiced perception, with scientists on the outside studying the dreams of others, or emphasizing the physical changes that occur in the dream state. [...]

In a manner of speaking, they are indeed learning centers.⁴ Many people have dreams in which they are attending classes, for example, in another kind of reality. Whether or not such dreams are “distorted,” many of them represent a valid inner experience. All of this, however, is but a beginning for our dream-art scientist, for he or she then begins to recognize the fact of involvement with many different levels and kinds of reality and activity. [...]

(Pause.) Your “dreaming” psyche seems to be dreaming only because you do not recognize that particular state of awareness as your own. The “dreaming” psyche is actually as awake as you are in your normal waking life. [...] You come into dreaming from a different angle, so to speak.

[...] You may have a dream, however, in which you see a tailor’s shop. [...] Later, in waking life, you may discover that a friend of yours, a Mr. Taylor (spelled), has a party, or dies, or gets married, whatever the case may be; yet you might never connect the dream with the later event because you did not understand the way that words and images can be united in your dreams.

The “off-center” quality sensed in dream activity, comma, the different viewpoints, the perspective alterations, all can add to a chaotic picture when the dream state is viewed from the waking one.

Centuries ago, in your terms, words and images had a closer relationship — now somewhat tarnished — and this older relationship appears in the dream fabric. [...] The great descriptive nature of names, for instance, can give you an indication of the unity of image and word as they appear in your dreams. [...]

Quite frankly, I believe that normal dreams are the outside shell of deeper inside experience. The interior reality is clothed in dream images as, when we are awake, it is clothed in physical ones. Dream objects and physical objects alike are symbols by which we perceive — and distort — an inner reality that we do not seem able to experience directly. In certain states of consciousness, particularly in projections from the dream state, we achieve a peculiar poise of alertness. [...]

[...] I think there is a “mass” dream experience, however, as there is a collectively perceived physical life and definite interior conditions within which dream life happens. [...]

[...] Dream interpretations — which are after the dream event — were not covered in this book, therefore.

Seth’s own book will carry his discussions of the dream state still further. [...] Rob tells me, however, that it contains a good deal of new material on the nature of dreaming consciousness.

In his dream he is also aware that these people like him, and that in some manner he has been acquainted with them in the past. This also brings forth feelings of rediscovery and joy that accompanied the dream. [...] They were images of the men whose voices spoke to him in his earlier dream, when he was so frightened; and when he leaped so gracefully from the banister, I was the one who extended an arm to assist him.

(Jane said she hadn’t consciously connected the voices in the first dream with the olive-skinned males in the second dream. She well remembered the young man who gracefully assisted her off the banister in the second dream. [...]

They formed the outer framework for the second dream. At the same time the dream generated sufficient energy to lift Ruburt and his moods from a slavery to physical events. That is, the dream allowed his native good spirits to return in force, and to operate in a healthy fashion regardless of physical events.

(During our daily life we do not take the time to describe in detail each dream we have to the other, unless obvious connections arise in future events, or the dream happens to be unusually vivid in some way. My two short dreams mentioned above were a little more vivid than usual, but otherwise not unusual, I thought. [...]

Now when Ruburt dreams that he has discussed a dream with you, in most cases he has indeed done so. [...] With enough training, these conversations can be recorded in both of your dreams. The amount of work necessary is literally astounding, but I tell you that you can both do this; and you can make general, through your work, a knowledge of the true potential of the dream state.

[...] (See the 262nd session.) The other was Ruburt’s dream form of you, created by himself in the dream state. When you appeared in form two he was conscious enough, you see, to recognize your arrival, and then to point out to you the dream image which he had already created. [...]

(On Tuesday, before the dream, I remember thinking casually about Fate Magazine, and that perhaps a new issue was out. [...] I was alone when I had it; I was therefore a little surprised to see that she had bought the magazine the next day, Wednesday, but the surprise was not connected with my recalling my dream. Until I read over my notes Wednesday evening I had forgotten the dream.

[...] The plants in Ruburt’s dream did represent the books upon which he has worked and is working. [...] The Lydia episode contained many ordinary dream elements. [...]

(11:59.) Because that state is also connected with waking life, you also take into it many of the elements of your daily existence, so that your recalled dreams are often cast in fairly conventionalized terms. As a rule you remember the dream’s outer veneer, or what it turns into as you approach your usual level of consciousness. In a dream you are basically aware of so many facets of an event that many of them must necessarily escape your waking memory. Yet any real education must take into consideration the learning processes within dreams, and no one can hope to glimpse the nature of the psyche without encouraging dream experience, recall, and the creative use of dream education in waking life.

In nature nothing is wasted, so the luxurious growth of man’s dream landscapes are also utilized. [...] But they are also formed equally by your dreaming experience, by the learning and knowledge and encounters that occur when many would tell you that you are beyond legitimate perception. Dreams, then, are deeply involved with the learning processes. Dreams of walking and running occur in infants long before they crawl, and serve as impetuses.

(11:23.) On the one hand, dreaming on the part of animals — and men in particular — involves not only information processing, but information gathering. Dreaming prevents life from becoming closed-ended by opening sources of information not practically available in the waking state, and by providing feedback from other than the conventional world. Data gained through waking learning endeavor and experience are checked in dreaming, not only against physical experience, but are also processed according to those “biological” and “spiritual” data, colon: Again, that information is acquired as the sleeping consciousness disperses itself, in a manner of speaking, and merges with other consciousnesses of its own and other species while still retaining its overall identity. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama (A one-minute pause.) Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess. [...]

Books have been written about the nature of dreams. There are classic accounts of precognitive dreams, or prophetic dreams involving saints and honored personages in the Bible. Yet each dream alters the physical world to some extent. [...] Dreams involve you with the most intimate mechanics by which physical events are formed. There are hormonal and chemical changes occurring in the body — often at minute but important levels — in direct response to dream experience. Your dreams then are tied into your biological makeup. There are also coded biological connections within dream images themselves that relate to cellular activity — not generally, but specifically.

To some extent your dreaming state is a connective between the kind of life you recognize and this far vaster dimension that is its source. Dreaming involves a far greater input of information than is realized, then — that is, you take in far more data when you are dreaming than when you are awake, although the data are of a different kind. You form your dreams in part from that information. The dreams themselves are further processed so that they become a fabric for recognizable waking events.

(9:48.) Dream dramas are highly complicated, artistic productions. [...] Such events are not lost, however, but translated into dreams as your own consciousness returns closer to its “home base.” Each aspect of a dream stands in coded form as a symbol for greater, undecipherable events.

Now the dream comes in the same fashion. You do not have to wonder about how to form a dream before you go to bed at night. You do not have to know any of the mechanisms involved, so dreaming often seems to “just happen” in the same way that an inspiration seems to just come.

Humanity dreams the same dream at once, and you have your mass world. [...] The dreamer dreams and the dreamer within the dream dreams, and sometimes the dreamers are aware of each other. But the dreams are not meaningless, and the actions within them are highly significant. [...]

As you dream, and have a dream existence while still involved in the physical dimension, so is the physical dimension a dream within another dimension in which your consciousness is far more acute. And as in your dream you set up situations and work out problems, so you do the same in your physical existence.

You do not feel guilty for those you kill in your dreams. You do not feel that your dream existence is useless, hopeless or beyond redemption, and it seldom occurs to you to think of your dream existence in such a manner.

Often you are aware that you are dreaming, and you are sometimes aware while in physical existence that you are dreaming. You can change an unpleasant dream by realizing that you are creating it, and that the problems are of your own making. [...]

[...] (Pause.) The dreams of the species are highly important to its survival — not just because dreaming is a biological necessity, but because in dreams the species is immersed in deeper levels of creativity, so that those actions, inventions, ideas that will be needed in the future will appear in their proper times and places. [...] I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

You dreamed you spoke languages before their physical invention, of course. It was the nature of your dreams, and your dreams’ creativity, that made you what you are, for otherwise you would have developed a mechanical-like language — had you developed one at all — that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there. [...] You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span. [...]

Animals, as a rule (underlined) are less physically-oriented in their dreaming states. They do dream of physical reality, but much more briefly than you. Otherwise, they immerse themselves in dreams in different kinds of dreaming consciousness that I hope to explain at a later date (louder).

His dreams reminded him that a cold season had come, and would come again. Most of your inventions came in dreams, and, again, it is the nature of your dreams that makes you so different from other species.

Ruburt wondered later if I dreamed. [...] Still, I have states of consciousness that could be compared to your dream state, in that I am myself not as involved in them as I am in others. If I said to you, “I control my dream state,” you might have an idea of what I mean. Yet I do not control my dreams — I fulfill them. What you could call my dreaming state is involved with the levels I spoke of that exist beneath your remembered dreams.

One level of dream life deals particularly with the biological condition of the body, giving you not just hints of health difficulties, but the reasons for them and the ways to circumvent them. [...] You have taught yourselves that you cannot be conscious in your dreams, however, because you interpret the word “conscious” so that it indicates only your own prejudiced concept. As a result, you do not have any culturally acceptable patterns that allow you to use your dreams competently.

[...] In the dream state far greater variations occur. The key to the dream state, however, lies in the waking one as far as you are concerned. You must change your ideas about dreaming, alter your concepts about it, before you can begin to explore it. [...]

(While we were out for a drive in the country yesterday, Jane abruptly wondered aloud if Seth ever dreamed. If he did, what was his dream state like? [...]

Every man dreams. I have told you that as the dream is only connected by the smallest thread to your time, so also, although it is difficult, you could manage to pinpoint the apparent beginning of a dream in clock time. This time, you know intuitively, has no psychological inner relationship to the dream experience.

It is true that physical stimuli may signal a dream, but the stimuli, the physical stimuli, does not actually signal the beginning of the dream; but it calls your attention to the dream, which has been in progress, as if you walked into a darkened theatre and began to see portions of a production which had been going on.

With his intellectual appreciation of the benefits of fire that followed his physical mastery of it, then his dream universe became enriched with a new freedom. [...] That is, a concept may be brilliantly alive in the dream universe but unexpressed physically, or for one reason or another an intellectual comprehension in the physical universe may not find expression in the dream universe. [...]

There are breakthroughs in the dream universe from the physical universe, as well as from the dream universe into your own. The dream universe, for the purposes of our explanation, is a specific one. [...]

“If we really understand how dreams worked and allowed ourselves to explore dream levels, we’d see how the universe is formed. It is the … creative product, en masse, of our individual and joint dreams … Our world is a dream level for some other types of consciousness; it’s shared to some extent, then, and can serve as a meeting point.

“Seth straddles many of these points and appears in the dream levels of others at their personal symbol level. I haven’t gotten to the deeper level of dream experience yet, where I could meet him directly. [...] This intersection of Seth-Jane in trance also happens in dreams, when book sessions occur there. [...] When he comes into my dreams the automatic intersection takes place, so I’m not aware of him separately.

[...] She realized immediately that it was connected to the extraordinary series of dreams she began having early this month. [...] I’ve barely mentioned them in recent notes — just for sessions 696 and 698 — but Seth has had a good deal to say about them in current personal material.] Many of the dreams have been quite long and involved. I’d say that some of them are classics of their kind; Jane’s own symbolism is beautifully illustrative of the way dreams can offer insights and solutions to very real physical challenges. [...]

“Other species of consciousness gain their experience at different ‘levels’; often we encounter such consciousnesses in the dream state, then interpret their actions in the wrong order of events … according to our own camouflage³ system … Our bodies are the focuses for only the physical part of our consciousnesses … My latest dreams are giving me a picture of the nonphysical inner wonderworks …”

Now the dreams that you would have, and had, in shared experience, are root dreams. Such root dreams serve as a method of maintaining inner identity, and of communication. There may be flashes of realization in such dreams. Projections may occur also from root dreams. [...]

Flying dreams you see are not symbolic of anything. They are valid and actual experiences, though often intermixed with other dream elements. Falling dreams are experience. [...]

[...] You act out many possibilities within dream reality, and within dreams you try out alternatives, and not necessarily short term ones.

In dreams consciousness operates to some degree independently of the physical system. [...]

A portion of you, therefore, is aware of each and every dream encounter and experience. Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your physical life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned: You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams, so when you look at your dreaming self or consider it, you do so with a highly prejudiced eye, taking it for granted that your “reality” is real, and its reality is illusion.

[...] It is very difficult to admit that you are in many ways more effective and creative in the sleep state than the waking state, and somewhat shattering to admit that the dream body can indeed fly, defying both time and space. It is much easier to pretend that all such experiences are symbolic and not literal, to evolve complicated psychological theories, for example, to explain flying dreams.

The simple fact is that when you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native to a consciousness not focused in physical reality. [...]

[...] In dream reality, this is not so. Therefore, the best way to become acquainted with after-death reality ahead of time, so to speak, is to explore and understand the nature of your own dreaming self. [...]

A system of checks and balances exists, however, so that in certain dreams you are made aware of these blueprints. They may appear throughout your lifetime as recurring dreams of a certain nature — dreams of illumination; and even if you do not remember them you will awaken with your purposes strengthened or suddenly clear.

If you want to clear up an argument, tell yourself that you will do so in the dream state. [...] Request the answer to any problem and it will be given, but you must trust yourself and learn to interpret your own dreams. There is no other way to do this except by beginning yourself and working with your own dreams, for this will awaken your intuitive abilities and give you the knowledge that you need.

(9:37.) You use your beliefs like searchlights in the dream state, looking for other events that fit in with your ideas about reality. Your convictions help you sift out probable actions appearing as dreams, of course — from others that do not concern you.

[...] In the dreaming state, when consciousness relates opaquely to physical concerns, glimpses of the multidimensional self can appear in dream imagery and fantasies that will symbolically express your greater existence.

As a civilization you fail to reap dreams’ greater benefit, and the conscious mind is able to handle much more dream recall than you allow. [...] Dreams educate you even in spatial relationships, and are far more related to the organism’s stance in the environment than is realized. The child learns spatial relationships in dreams.

(The first half of this session came through because of a dream Jane had last night, and interpreted on her own today. Although they aren’t book dictation, we’re presenting here some of Seth’s own comments about the dream, since they have a general interest and also fit in with his earlier dream material.

You could not physically handle anything like complete dream recall. [...] This does not mean that far greater dream recall than you have is not to your advantage, because it certainly is. I merely want to explain why so many dreams are not recalled.

[...] In important ways your dreams make your life possible by ordering your psychological life automatically, as your physical body is ordered automatically for you. You can make great strides by understanding and recalling dreams, and by consciously participating in them to a far greater degree. But you cannot become completely aware of your dreams in their entirety, and maintain your normal physical stance.

[...] Sometimes, however, your own dreams or inspirations startle you by giving you information that is usually not available in the recognized order of events. [...] You are so conditioned that even when you sleep you try to monitor your experiences, and to interpret dream events according to the habitual frequency that you have learned to accept as the only criterion of reality. Quite literally, however, when you are dreaming you are tuning in to different frequencies and biologically your body responds to those on many levels.

[...] You still try to carry your own cultural versions of reality into the dream state, for example, but the natural heritage of both body and mind escapes such repression — and despite yourselves, in your dreams you come in touch with a greater picture of reality that will not be shunted aside.

On occasion, definite physical cures happen in the dream state, even though you may think that you are intellectual and knowing when you are awake, and ignorant or half-insane in your dreams. [...]

In such dreams you tune in to other frequencies that are, indeed, closer to your biological integrity, but there is no reason why you cannot do so in the waking state. [...] Often in the dream state you become truly awake, and grab ahold of your spirithood and creaturehood with both hands, so to speak, understanding that each has a far greater reality then you have been led to suppose.