“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: It is well known that fluctuations of consciousness and alertness exist in the sleep state. Some periods of dream activity do indeed supersede those of some waking states. But there are also fluctuations in normal waking consciousness, rhythms of intense activity followed by a much less active period of consciousness.

Some waking states, of course, come very close to sleep states. These blend one into the other so that the rhythm often goes unnoticed. These gradations of consciousness are accompanied by changes in the physical organism. In the more sluggish periods of waking consciousness there is a lack of concentration, a cutting off of stimuli to varying degrees, an increase in accidents, and generally a lower body tone.

(10:28.) Because of your habits of an extended sleep period, followed by an extended waking period, you do not take advantage of these rhythms of consciousness. The high peaks are to some extent smothered, or even go unnoticed. The sharp contrasts and the high efficiency of the natural waking consciousness is barely utilized.

Now I am giving all of this material here because it will help you understand and use your present abilities. You are asking too much of normal waking consciousness, smoothing out the valleys and peaks of its activity, demanding in some cases that it go full blast ahead when it is actually at a minimal period, denying yourself the great mobility of consciousness that is possible.

[...] The “dreaming” psyche is actually as awake as you are in your normal waking life. The organization of wakefulness is different, however. [...]

When you are dealing with normal waking reality, you are operating at one level of the many that are native to your psyche. When you are dreaming, from your viewpoint you are entering other levels of reality quite as native to your psyche, but usually you are still experiencing those events through your current “waking station.” [...]

[...] So in your waking and dreaming experiences, you will make the same kind of distinctions. You will be touched or untouched by waking or dreaming events according to the significance you place upon them.

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.

Projections continue in the waking state, beneath it, as they continue beneath the dreaming state, you see. [...] There are methods that will allow you to catch yourself in the middle of projections embarked upon from the waking state. [...]

You must allow the normal waking consciousness to become transparent, so to speak, without however disturbing its flow. [...] This is almost like working backward, for directly beneath the thoughts and impressions of waking consciousness, you will glimpse dream images like those that appear just as you fall to sleep.

[...] You are following levels of your own consciousness until you discover yourself in an environment of which the ordinary waking consciousness had been previously unaware. This is a relatively difficult feat, for the waking consciousness must not be shut off, or you defeat your purpose.

[...] The waking self may be engaged in normal activities while the inner self is someplace else entirely. [...]

The various levels of consciousness discussed here may appear to be very divorced from ordinary waking ones. [...] Even normal waking consciousness, then, is not innocent of all other traces of existence, or devoid of other kinds of awareness. It is only because you usually use your waking consciousness in limited ways that you do not encounter these clues with any regularity.

[...] In the usual creative state of consciousness, the regular waking consciousness is suddenly supported by energy from these other areas. Waking consciousness alone does not give you the creative state. Indeed, normal waking consciousness can be as afraid of creative states as it is of blank states, for it can feel that the I is being thrust aside, can feel the upthrust of energy that it may not understand.

In these lapses you are perceiving other kinds of reality — with other than normal waking consciousness. [...] Normal waking consciousness pretends there was never any break. [...]

Normal waking consciousness weaves in and out of this infinite supportive webwork. [...] Normal waking consciousness, while having memory of itself, obviously does not retain all memory all of the time. [...]

[...] The alternate waking and sleeping patterns—that is, one portion of the species sleeping while the other portion wakes—allows a clear division between waking and sleeping information. In the waking state you check your perception against physical conditions. [...]

The preparation of the bridges, again, is an unconscious process, done in sleeping, though some “maintenance” is also carried on beneath usual consciousness, even in the waking members of the species. [...] The sleeping-waking division then is not only a human one. It is as if, figuratively speaking, in sleep you build a constant foundation for waking life.

Deeper communications than you realize happen between the waking and sleeping members of the species, and in such a manner the formation of physical events is to some extent timed, or paced. The planning stages for events, and the inner communications necessary, occur on the part of the sleeping members, while the waking doers are involved in objective events.

[...] Waking life involves the expenditure of energy, so in this way a portion of the species uses energy while the other half is being replenished. [...] The waking portion provides, say, the material supplies that visibly appear as objects or as events. [...]

There are many other natural and spontaneous kinds of comprehension that can also result from the waking and sleeping rhythms that I have suggested. [...] But changed wake-sleep habits can, again, bring about a transformation in which it is obvious that dreams contain great wisdom and creativity, that the unconscious is indeed quite conscious, and that in fact the individual sense of identity can be retained in the dream state. [...]

When you find yourself as alert, responsive, and intellectual in the dream state as you are in waking life, it becomes impossible to operate within the old framework. This does not mean that in all dreams that particular kind of awareness is achieved, but it is often accomplished within the suggested wake-sleep pattern.

[...] (Pause.) Such a change in your waking and sleeping patterns very nicely helps cut through your habitual ways of looking at the nature of your own personal world, and so alters your conception of reality in general.

Animals follow their own natural waking-sleeping schedules, and in their way derive far greater benefits from both states than you, and use them with greater effectiveness — particularly along the lines of the body’s built-in system of therapy. [...]

Abilities unused by the waking personality are utilized in the dream state. A study of dream activities will often allow the waking personality to recognize abilities of which it is not aware, to discover talents that are not being used. [...] There is no doubt that the whole self is a composite formed by the various aspects of the personality as it is seen in the waking and dream states, and at other levels of operation.

Suggestions made by the waking personality are also carried out by the sleeping self. The characteristics of the sleeping personality therefore partially determine the physical existence of the waking self. [...]

[...] The connections between the dreaming self and the waking self, and between the dream universe and the physical universe, exist on chemical, electromagnetic and psychic levels.

[...] As you have already supposed Joseph, suggestions received during the sleeping state are often carried out by the waking personality.

[...] At certain times some behavior has been primarily expressed in the waking state, and sometimes in the dream state. [...] Men went to sleep to do their work, in other words, and the realm of dreams was considered more real than waking reality. [...]

In the life of the psyche a dream is no more or less “true,” whether or not it is duplicated in waking life. [...]

[...] Then, freed from waking limitations, you process your experience, weigh it according to your own intents and purposes, correlate it with information so vast you could not be consciously aware of it. [...]

[...] It demands a peculiar and distinctive mixture of various kinds of consciousness, and the transformation of “nonphysical perception” into symbols and codes that will be sensually understood, though not directly experienced as in waking experience.

(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. [...] 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.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] That state of sleep, therefore, is not simply the other side of your consciousness, but makes your waking life and culture possible.

[...] Dreaming provides all the conditions of life and death, therefore — a fact that often frightens the waking self. [...]

[...] When you are alive, corporally speaking, what you think of as dreaming becomes subordinate to what you refer to as your conscious waking life. You always examine your dreams then from an “alien” standpoint, one prejudiced in favor of the ordinary waking state. [...] By contrast to waking consciousness it can appear hazy, not precise, or off-focus. [...]

[...] Many others, though untrained, can clearly trace certain decisions made in waking life to dreams. [...] In waking life there are fluctuations in your consciousness, periods when you are more or less alert, in your terms, when your attention wanders from issues at hand; or when, instead, you are certainly brilliantly focused in the moment. So there are gradations of consciousness in the waking state. [...]

[...] You are used to examining your dream state from the viewpoint of your “waking” condition, but some time in the dream state try to examine your normal waking reality. [...]

In a way, one remembered dream can be compared to a psychological photograph, one picture that is not physically materialized, not frozen motion, not framed by either space or time; therefore many of those ingredients appear that are necessarily left out of any given moment of waking conscious activity.

Now, many diseases are simply caused by this division of yours and this long period of bodily inactivity, and this extended focus of attention in either waking or dreaming reality. Your normal consciousness can benefit by excursions and rest in those other fields of actuality that are entered when you sleep, and the so-called sleeping consciousness will also benefit by frequent excursions into the waking state.

[...] The seeming great division between the waking and the sleeping self is largely a result of the division in function, the two being largely separated — a block of time being allotted to the one, and a larger block of time to the other. [...]

You have trained your consciousness to follow certain patterns that are not necessarily natural for it, and these patterns increase the sense of alienation between the waking and dreaming self. [...]

[...] His sleeping periods were instead for two or three hours, stretched through the nighttime from dusk to dawn, but alternated by periods of high wakefulness and alert activity. [...]

[...] When you do this you will see that the dreaming “I” and the waking “I” are one, but operating in entirely different environments. [...] You acquire a true flexibility and expanded awareness of your own being, and open channels of communication between your waking and dreaming realities. [...]

[...] There must be some differentiation between dream and waking experience just so that you can manipulate in the more narrowly focused daily life.

(9:35.) However, there is no great reason for the vast separation that now exists between your waking and sleeping lives. [...]

(9:39.) There is nothing inherent in the waking state that causes it to be so limited. [...] The natural healing that often occurs in the dream state is undone in the waking state, in which any such cure is seen as “miraculous” and against “the rules.”

Generally speaking, you use one particular frequency in waking life. [...]

[...] Waking, however, you forget — or you do not trust what you remember.

[...] If you were that “dumb” in the waking state, then you would be in far better health.

[...] The waking consciousness, dear friends, is not the ego. The ego is only that portion of waking consciousness that deals with physical manipulation.

[...] I thought of waking Rob to tell him, but decided not to interrupt his sleep.

[...] But I do suggest that perhaps some of them have already done so without knowing it, waking only with the memory of a particularly bad nightmare.

This episode was an out-of-body experience from the dream state, though, and it will serve to make one point: dream reality is as valid and real as waking reality. [...]

The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to you in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension.

(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.

(Pause.) When you examine the state of dreams, however, you do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality. [...]

[...] Your subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that you call the waking one, in which you recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates. [...]

Creativity connects waking and dreaming reality, and is in itself a threshold in which the waking and dreaming selves merge to form constructs that belong equally to each reality. You cannot begin to understand how you form the physical events of your lives unless you understand the connections between creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking hours. [...]

[...] The focus of your consciousness blots these out while you are in the normal waking state. [...]

[...] The larger psyche deals with the greater dimension of events, and the dream state itself is like a laboratory in which your waking reality is constructed. [...]

[...] The lack of normal time and space intersections means that you cannot share your dreams with others in the way that you can share waking events. [...]

The interrelationship between the waking state and the sleeping state has never been clearly understood. One of the main differences between the waking and sleeping states is merely the almost complete change of focus that is involved. [...]

I am not suggesting that you substitute dream reality for your so-called waking reality. [...] Also it is difficult for you to accept the idea that experience within dreams is as vivid and valid a part of the personality as its waking experience.

[...] The personality does not differentiate between a waking or a sleeping experience in any real manner. [...]

If I may indulge in a fantasy, theoretically you could indeed imagine a massive experiment in dream therapy, where wars were fought by the sleeping and not by the waking nations. [...]

[...] The mechanics of your waking psychological behavior are brilliantly delineated. [...] Yet there will always be a veil between the waking and sleeping consciousness, for while you are physical, the waking mind can only deal with so much information. [...]

(9:53.) These events and responses continue to operate, however, particularly in the dream state where they do not intersect directly with full physical experience, as waking events do. [...]

[...] It certainly seems that waking events are more steady and dependable than dream events.

Waking events happen and vanish quickly. [...]

[...] (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. [...] Waking, your dream experience is peripheral also, but you are less aware of that condition. [...] In waking life you are also working out challenges set for yourselves in the dream state. [...]

In the dream state you range beyond your waking world view. [...] These can remain in the background during waking life — or you can decide to enlarge your world view by taking advantage of your dreaming activities. [...]

[...] There is a constant waking give-and-take. [...] You affect your world through your dreams, then, as much as you do through your waking activities. [...]

Your physical life and your dreaming life are so intimately connected that it can be misleading to say what I am about to say, colon: that waking experience springs from the unknown dream reality. [...] Freedom from time and place, the wider kind of communication, the great mobility of consciousness — all of these experiences under dreaming conditions are characteristic of the basic nature of reality — whereas your waking experience provides limitations that are indicators of certain conditions only. [...]

[...] The events of which you are conscious are only those fragments of activities that intrude or appear to your normal waking consciousness. Other portions of these events are quite clear to you both in the dreaming state and beneath waking consciousness during the day.

[...] You use your inner senses when you are in the dream state, and ignore them when you are waking.

[...] They operate constantly beneath normal waking consciousness…

While you go about your daily chores and endeavors, beneath normal waking consciousness you are constantly focused in other realities also, reacting to stimuli of which your physical conscious self is not aware, perceiving conditions through the inner senses, and experiencing events that are not even registered within the physical brain. [...]