“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Your dreams are quality. Your dreams are quality. No one need tell you how to dream. You dream instinctively, automatically, and beautifully. You commit a beautiful dream each time you dream. And each dream is a dream of quality. [...] Yet always must your existence flit between the two; between the desire and the ideal; between the dream and its execution; between your love and your expression of it. [...]

[...] Now all of you this evening tell yourselves you will have a true dream from the Gates of Horn and we do have a City building. [...] And you forge such dreams in your sleep and in your private imaginings, and in your inspirations. For when one member of a species dreams such dreams, those dreams are transmitted to all other members. [...] Dream a grand dream. For when one member of the species dreams, all members, to some extent, participate. [...] So trust yourselves, and trust your love and your dreams (to Rick, Sheri, and Van Zandt, looking at Rick), and tell your students I said R-A-Y!!!! [...]

(Rick talked about a suggestion for a dream from the Gates of Horn, and that he felt his dream had related to the City. [...]

[...] And if it is, it will be created in your terms now, through your dreams, your love, your desire and your intent. [...] Can I say to you that your Earth originated in a sphere of dreams? [...]

[...] Most dreams are like animated postcards brought back from a journey that you have returned from and largely forgotten. Your consciousness is already oriented again to physical reality; the dream, an attempt to translate the deeper experience into recognizable forms. The images within the dream are also highly coded, and are signals for underlying events that are basically not decipherable.

The Speakers help you in the formation of dreams which are indeed multidimensional artistic productions of a kind — dreams existing in more than one reality, with effects that dissect various stages of consciousness that are real, in your terms, to both the living and the dead and in which both the living and the dead may participate. It is for this reason that inspirations and revelations are so often a part of the dream condition.

[...] As mentioned, these experiences are translated into dreams later, necessitating a return to areas of consciousness more familiar with physical data. Here a great creative synthesis and a great creative diversification takes place, in which any given dream image has meaning to various layers of the self — on one level representing a truth you have lived and on other levels representing this truth as it is more specifically applied to various areas of experience or problems. There will be a metamorphosis, therefore, of one symbol turning into many, and the conscious mind may only perceive a chaos of various dream images, because the inner organization and unity is partially hidden in the other areas of consciousness through which the reasoning mind cannot follow.

[...] If you have particular conscious goals and if you are reasonably certain that they are beneficial ones, then you can suggest dreams in which they occur, for the dreams themselves will hasten their physical reality.

There may be other terms I could use, in some ways more advantageous than the term, “the dream world.” I am emphasizing this dream connection, however, because the dream state is one familiar to each reader, and it represents your closest touchstone to the kind of subjective reality from which your physical world emerges. The dream state appears chaotic, shadowy, suspicious, or even meaningless, precisely because in life you are so brilliantly focused in daily reality that dreams appear to be staticky objective background noise, left over from when you sleep. [...]

[...] There were dream trees, with dream foliage, that gradually became aware within that dream (with gentle emphasis), turning physical, focusing more and more in physical reality, until their dream seeds finally brought forth physical trees.

[...] They had pseudoforms—dream bodies, if you prefer—and they could not physically reproduce themselves. Their experience of time was entirely different, and in the beginning the entire earth operated in a kind of dream time. [...]

[...] (With many pauses:) When I speak of the dream world, I am not referring to some imaginary realm, but to the kind of world of ideas, of thoughts, of mental actions, out of which all form as you think of it emerges. [...]

Keep particular track of your dreams. You are working out reconciliations in the dream state involving your reincarnational episodes. Now your class reflects what you are doing, so always look beneath the surface, and examine your class reactions as you examine your dream reactions. All actions are valid—and I do not want to hurt anyone’s feelings—but some dream actions are far more intelligent than some waking ones; and I will close Ruburt’s eyes so that no one knows to whom I am speaking. [...]

Now, our regular members will find themselves having more group class dreams, and when you do not have group class dreams, there is a reason for it. [...]

[...] And watch your progress this week, in the dream state. And remember to correlate your dream activities with your waking activities. [...]

[...] You have met many strangers lately, both in the dream state and in regular waking reality. [...]

[...] If you let yourself drift off into sleep here, you would most probably manufacture two or three dreams that symbolized the fear, dreams in which you consider and try out possible solutions within the dream context. The job situation might never appear as such within any of the dreams, of course.

[...] This more liberated self sees the situation much more clearly, suggests a given line of action (but does not order it), and informs the dreaming self. The dreaming self then manufactures a group of dreams in which the solution is stated within a symbolic dream situation.

[...] In the most important dream work, done in the deep protected sleep periods, the symbols are powerful enough and yet condensed enough so that they can be broken down, used in a series of seemingly unrelated dreams as connectives, retain their original strength and still appear in different guises, becoming in each succeeding dream layer more and more specific.

(Pause at 10:20.) There is a great unity between your daytime symbols and your dreaming ones. [...] Personal association, therefore, is highly involved with your personal bank of symbols, and it operates in the dream states precisely as in waking life — but with greater freedom, and drawing from the future, in your terms, as well as from the past.

Jane did such a fine job interpreting the dream (in my estimation!) that I didn’t bug her for more details. [...] I would have liked my wife’s comments on my brother Linden being in the dream. [...] I think that as I joyfully talked about my magical exploration in the dream, I was telling him something like: “Hey, there’s more than one way to explore the self, to be religious!” And I think that Linden and I were in correspondence in the dream state, and that in some way he got the message. [...]

“After the Gus part of the dream, I saw through the glass door a man standing quite at military attention. [...] He looked something like the blue male I’m painting from a recent dream, although that one is in civilian clothes. [...] I only want to note that this would make the second instance recently in which I might have had the same character appear in separate dreams.

“Later in the dream Rob is reminded of this incident by something someone says, either on TV or in the room — signifying a different mobility of consciousness, almost a dream within a dream, and also establishing the fact that physical and magical events are related.

“Dream of August 16, Saturday 1980 — the hand thru glass dream.

(4:24.) Now: The dream of the car represents beliefs that you had when you had the car. [...] In the dream you are quite angry simply because those beliefs did, in a fashion, take the vehicle of your life out of your own hands, since you did not recognize those beliefs as your own in the past. At the end, the car or the vehicle is (underlined) returned to you, and the dream shows that you understand, now, the process that the dream outlined.

[...] I don’t equate this figure with my dream. I think, and as Seth agreed, that the dream means far more than sums of money received alone. It’s a very encouraging dream, and I’m very pleased to have had it. [...]

[...] Next, I described my vivid dream of last night: Jane and I were still driving our old yellow Cadillac convertible. [...] I told Jane the dream almost sounded like an exercise in exploring a probable reality.

[...] Jane had a cigarette while I read her the account of my dream that I’d just written for my daily notes, since she didn’t remember the dream all that well.

We will have many sessions yet dealing with the dream universe. Beside the interpretation of dreams specifically, in which I realize you are most interested, beside the explanation of dreams as they apply to your manipulation in the world of matter, we will discuss dream symbols as they apply not to the world of matter but to the dream universe itself.

[...] I have said that dream universe data has its effect upon your universe, as your universe has its effect upon the dream universe. It is also true that the dream universe is at least as familiar with your own universe as you are familiar with it; and as you tune in on it, so to speak, and while you are necessary for its survival, creating it, so does the dream universe tune in on you. [...]

[...] It will be simplest to discuss at first such correlations occurring within the dream universe, and the universe of matter, since the dream universe is closest to you in both psychic and electromagnetic terms.

As we progress and pick up the study of our dream universe once more, we will be involved also with the study of mental events as they occur within both systems. And because I am presently uninvolved within your system, it is possible for me to give instances as they occur of such mental actions, as they are perceived in both the universe of matter and the dream universe.

If you are having a dream as yourself from your own perspective, another reincarnational self may be having the same dream from its perspective—in which, of course, you play a minor role. In your dream, that reincarnational self may appear as a minor character, quite on the periphery of your attention, and if the dream were to include an idea, say, for a play or an invention, then that play or invention might appear as a physical event in both historic times, to whatever degree it would be possible for the two individuals living in time to interpret that information. [...] Abilities and inventions were not dependent upon human migrations, but those migrations themselves were the result of information given in dreams, telling tribes of men the directions in which better homelands could be found.

Your dreaming self possesses pyschological dimensions that escape you, and they serve to connect genetic and reincarnational systems. [...] You experience your dreams from your own perspective, as a rule. (Long pause.) I am simply trying to give you a picture of one kind of dream occurrence, or to show you one picture of dream activity of which you are not usually aware.

In the dreaming state the characteristics of the reasoning mind become altered, and from a waking viewpoint it might seem distorted in its activity. What actually happens, however, is that in the dreaming state you are presented with certain kinds of immediate knowledge. [...] It is not organized according to the frameworks understood by the reasoning portions of your mind, and so to some extent in dreams you encounter large amounts of information that you cannot categorize.

[...] There are, in fact, many important issues connected with the dreaming state that can involve genetic activation of certain kinds: information processing on the part of the species, the insertion or reinsertion of civilizing elements—and all of these are also connected with the reincarnational aspects of dreaming.

[...] Games figure prominently in chapter five of the dream book. To make some of her points in the chapter Jane uses a recurring childhood dream of her own. This dream involved the large playground she visited often in waking life, across the street from her school in Saratoga Springs, NY. [...] In addition, in her recurring dream Jane kept recreating a series of games at the playground, in a section where there were none. There is more to the dream, but enough is said here to make the game connection.

[...] See the recurring childhood playground dream, mentioned in the data dealing with the interpretation of “a game connection.” This dream, over a period of a couple of years during her childhood, had a powerful effect upon Jane; she has talked about it ever since I have known her. In the dream Jane constructed a set of games, involving physical apparatus like swings and jungle gyms, in a section of the playground where in physical life none existed. The morning after one of these dreams Jane would hurry to the playground before going to school, to investigate to see if by chance there were swings, etc., in that particular section of the playground. [...]

I visit you therefore, but I do not dream of you in the way that you might think. Now Ruburt has not, in his imagination, given me a particular physical image, and dreaming at your level involves visual images. So he does not dream of me in that way.

[...] The object is the first half page from the first draft of chapter five of Jane’s dream book, and thus would be something begun or initiated, but not completed. There can be extensions here: Not completed could refer to the whole first draft of chapter five, or to the whole dream book itself. [...] Jane’s idea is that this data refers to the dream book itself being started but not completed.

Now, Ruburt has had the first of the seven dreams. (See the 497th session, for July 7, 1969.) It is the dream of the sands, and I mentioned the series of dreams earlier. I want to give you an explanation of that dream.

(Humorously again:) You do not consider a dream as a success or a failure. If the dream ends in a moment of destruction you do not consider the dream a failure. [...]

(Jane had the dream in question on August 22, 1969, a Friday night, and has it recorded in her dream notebook. She described it to me at breakfast Saturday morning, mentioning the impression it had made upon her, but without connecting it to Seth’s series of seven dreams.)

Two things in the dream held him back: a gigantic nostalgia for the writings in the sand that had remained for so long, the jottings of children—and for a moment he did not want to be part of anything that would wipe them out. He wondered aloud in the dream whether or not you and he should really be there: what credentials you had that would give you the right to make new footprints.

Dream images, not astral projections, operate within certain electrical limits, limits that form the boundaries of the dream universe. Dream images are nevertheless almost fibrous projections, almost a thinned-out composition, more plastic basically than physical matter, but composed of a number of the same properties. For again there must be this connection between the nature of dreams and the matter of physical reality.

The dream images however are projections sent out, so to speak, by the personality, and many astral projections occur within the dream state of which the waking personality is unaware. [...] The dreamer who dreams he was in Paris may well have been there.

It goes without saying that dream images certainly have form to the dreamer, even as physical objects have form. [...] The images that appear in dreams exist as forms in another dimension. [...]

Dream images are indeed, in density, between the tangible nature of physical objects and the intangible reality that is entirely independent of physical matter. The dream reality cannot be entirely disconnected from the material universe because of its connections with human personality. [...]

[...] When you dream or sleep, however, the world of cause and effect either vanishes or appears confused and chaotic. [...] The known rules that govern the behavior of creatures and objects in dreams seem no longer to apply. [...] When you think of dreams you usually consider those aspects of it only, commenting perhaps upon the strange activities, the odd juxtapositions and the strange character of dream life itself. Few are struck by the fact of their dreams’ own order, or impressed by the ultimate restraint that allows such sometimes-spectacular events to occur in such a relatively restricted physical framework.

For example, in a dream of 20 minutes, events that would ordinarily take years can be experienced. [...] In dreams, experience is peripheral, in that it dips into your time and touches it, leaving ripples; but the dream events themselves exist largely out of time. Dream experience is ordered in a circular fashion. Sometimes it never touches the hub of your present moment at all, as you think of it, as far as your memory is concerned; yet the dream is, and it is registered at all other levels of your existence, including the cellular.

[...] The dream as you recall it is already a translation, then, but an experienced one. As a language that you know is, again, dependent upon other languages, and implied pauses and silences, so the dream that you experience and recall is also one statement of the psyche, coming into prominence; but it is also dependent upon other events that you do not recall, and that your consciousness, as it now operates, must automatically translate into its own terms.

DREAMS, CREATIVITY, LANGUAGES, AND “CORDELLAS”

To some extent, however, dream events are like physical ones a good deal of the time. Your dream perceptions seem physical — you walk, run, eat, and perform other physical functions. [...] Here the physical aspects of events largely vanish, comparatively speaking, the farther away you go from the dream state into inner reality. [...] Experience does become broader, but it changes in quality so that, for example, one moment in your terms of such experience would provide the working material for five years of dreams.

[...] In dreams you may experience an event seemingly as someone else, or you may find yourself in the past or future instead of the present. [...] In dreams you may find yourself married to someone else, or living an entirely different kind of life. In a way dreams are like variations of the theme of your life, though in reality your life is the theme you have chosen from those possible versions.

This is simply an analogy because you are steeped in that other reality constantly; but its illuminations and nature are transmitted to the self that you know through the formation of dreams, and in your terms, “it takes time to dream.” This larger experience, from which your dreams are finally formed, involves you in a kind of journey. [...]

Physically and psychically the dream itself is the result of the most precise kind of calculation and activity, in which complicated dramas and interactions occur, often highly charged and intense, and yet cut off from the body’s full participation. [...] To that extent in dreams you are “on hold,” involved with a range of action too wide to fit the contours of practical earth experience.

The action performed within the dream; the location; the lack of specific location; the time in which the dream appears to occur; the apparent movements through time within any given dream; the emotional content; the surface psychological content; the work done within the dream; the familiar persons spoken to; the unfamiliar persons spoken to; the relation of the dream to past events and to events immediately preceding sleep; the dream events in relation to future events; messages that are given or sent in sleep.

Dreams will be categorized in various ways when enough of them are gathered. You will find I believe that particular kinds of dreams occur with definite seasonal variations. Particular interest should be given to the space that you perceive within a dream. [...]

Whether or not you realize it, you have already begun such an investigation, and Ruburt’s careful notes and recordings of his dreams, over nearly a three-year period, and your own dream recordings, are only the beginning.

So far you have analyzed these dreams as best you could, but soon you will begin to look at them in a new way. The dream experiments with the recorder will be much more proficient. [...]

(8:47.) Ruburt interpreted one dream in particular for you. [...] He was correct (about the dream of July 7, involving my return to Sayre). The dream in which he was healed (of July 19) was to remind you that that probability is still highly active. The dream involving the old granary is of the same nature as the bookstore (Sayre) dream (as Jane said tonight)—another version of it, reminding you of the kind of nourishment generations of the past received. [...] In the bookstore you felt that in a way the store was bigger than life, however, and in the granary dream Debbie’s drawings of you are idealistically bigger than life. [...]

(Tonight as we waited for the session to begin I showed Jane my three recent dreams that I was interested in having Seth comment upon: July 7 [Sayre], 17 [reincarnation and Debbie Janney], and 19 [Jane recovering overnight]. [...] I’ve started a small oil painting based on the “chute” portion of the dream for July 7. I’ve also done a pencil sketch of one of the heads in the photos of myself in the reincarnational dream of July 17, in case I don’t get to paint it. [...]

[...] Seth had confirmed her reincarnational insight into my dream of July 17, but hadn’t given much data. [...] Note that originally Seth didn’t mention the reincarnational connections in his interpretation of the dream. [...] There could, of course, be almost endless questions about such reincarnational dream clues. [...]

(“Only that in the dream involving Debbie and me and the photos: Jane said the dream was reincarnational.”)

The freshness of dream experience lies in its direct nature. Your cultural world view does not have any clear understanding of the nature of dreams, so that their direct, clear expression is not recalled often in the morning. (Pause.) At night you tune in to dreaming reality simply by closing out so-called waking reality, but the same kind of dream experience continues beneath your focus in waking life. Dreaming, you are still aware of your daily experience, but it is seemingly peripheral. Waking, your dream experience is peripheral also, but you are less aware of that condition. [...] You can and often do work out in dreams the challenges of daily life. In waking life you are also working out challenges set for yourselves in the dream state. [...]

[...] The same give-and-take occurs in the dream state, however. You affect your world through your dreams, then, as much as you do through your waking activities. [...] In the dream state many kinds of communication occur, and there are inner translations. Two people with different languages can speak together quite clearly in certain dreams, and understand each other perfectly. [...]

(10:05.) To some extent in the dream state, you are freed of such cultural leanings. In the most effective of dreams experience is actually more direct, in that it is less limited by language concepts. [...] In the dream state, however, thoughts are often experienced directly, colon: “You live” them out. [...] That is why it is frequently difficult to remember your dreams in a verbal fashion, or squeeze them back into the expression of usual language. [...]

(Pause at 11:01.) You may understand that many of your dreams have a symbolic meaning. [...] You may spend time trying to understand the nature of dreams and their implications, without ever realizing that your physical life is to some extent a three-dimensional dream. It will faithfully mirror your dream images at any given time.

(I nodded, but I’d had a particularly interesting dream experience last night, and I also hoped that Seth might discuss that. As you’ll see, he managed to do both, winding a discussion of my dream into his own material about the psyche.)

Last night our friend, Joseph, had a dream experience that intrigued him, and yet seemed highly distorted. [...] The entire dream was very pleasant, and seemed to be like a home coming.

Even within that context, however, there are surprises and enchantments waiting, if you simply learn to expand your awareness, exploring not only the dream state, but your waking reality in more adventuresome ways. Your dreaming psyche is awake. [...]

In Joseph’s dream, his brother’s features had an Oriental cast. [...] If Joseph had seen two people — one his brother and one an Oriental — he would not have recognized the stranger, so in the dream his brother’s known appearance dominated, while the Oriental affiliation is merely suggested. [...]

Three particular dream-events highlighted my psychic initiation and led, indirectly, to this book. The first was a comparatively minor dream that was surprising to me when it happened, but it could easily have been forgotten. The second was an amazing experience resulting from a dream that I could not remember. The third was a dream that gave me a startling glimpse into another kind of reality.

As the days passed, the dream was more or less forgotten. [...] So for all general purposes, I put the dream out of my mind and went on my way. I later mentioned this dream in my first book in the field, How To Develop Your ESP Power. Even then, I had no idea that it would be only one of a series of psychic events involving Miss Cunningham, nor did I see its true significance in my own development.

[...] I awakened one September morning with the feeling that I’d had a most unusual dream during the night, one that would affect me deeply. Yet I had no memory of the dream at all, and as the day went on, the feeling vanished. That night I sat down to write poetry for an hour as usual, and, suddenly, the small rift that had opened so slightly with the first dream now yawned wide open.

[...] Yet my first precognitive dream involved her, and, in a strange way, my psychic experience became bound up with her life. I seemed to keep track of her in my dreams. [...]

[...] Yet in the dream level of reality those waves “break” into particles, so to speak. [...] While dreaming you accept that reality as real. Only upon awakening do the dream objects seem not-real, or imaginary. The nervous system itself is biologically equipped to perceive various gradations of physical matter, and there are “in-between” impulse passageways that are utilized while dreaming. From your point of view these are alternate passageways, but in the dream state they allow you to perceive as physical matter objects that in the waking state would not be observable.

(Still quietly:) It is true that you create your own dreams, but it is also true that you only focus upon certain portions of your dream creations. Even in the dream state, any present expands into its own version of past and future; so in those terms the dream possesses its own background, its own kind (underlined) of historic past, the moment you construct it.

Give us a moment … In the dream state, the freedom of events from time as you understand it can be more apparent. If you are alert and curious while dreaming (and you can learn to be), then you can catch yourself in the act of creating a dream’s past and future at once.

(Quietly:) I told you to take a moment while you were within a particular dream, and to use it to try to discover what had been happening within the dream before you experienced it.¹