“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Trance states, daydreaming, hypnotism — these give you some hint of the various differences that can occur from the standpoint of waking consciousness. [...] The key to the dream state, however, lies in the waking one as far as you are concerned. [...] Otherwise your own waking prejudice will close the door.

[...] In my “waking” condition, I operate at many levels of consciousness at once, and deal therefore with different systems of knowledge. [...] “Waking” again, I become consciously aware of those activities, and use them to add to the dimensions of my usual state, creatively expanding my experience of reality. [...]

[...] I do not alternate between waking and sleeping as you do. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

In waking life you experience certain events as real, and generally these are the only ones that can be captured by an ordinary photographer. [...]

[...] You may make one particular decision in physical and waking consciousness, and that decision may bring forth certain events. [...]

[...] You can stand before the shadow of a friend in the afternoon, in waking reality, and snap your fingers all you want to, but your friend’s shadow will not move one whit. [...]

We have been speaking of dream events and waking reality, the nature of creativity and the formation of events. [...]

[...] Your dreaming and waking experience has a direct effect upon the entire universe. [...]

[...] Each chapter of this book is written in such a way that the ideas presented will activate your own intuitions, and open pathways between your dreaming and waking states.

[...] You will recall them more easily, and as you do you will be able to maintain a sense of continuity between the waking and dream states.

You usually glide from wakefulness through to sleep without ever noticing the various conditions of consciousness through which you pass, yet there are several. [...] Then there is an undifferentiated level between wakefulness and sleep where you act as a receiver — passive but open, in which telepathic and clairvoyant messages come to you quite easily.

Dictation: There are also various states of consciousness in waking life, upon which you do not focus, and of which you are usually quite unaware. [...]

On occasion even in waking life a personality may spontaneously shift gears, so to speak, and suddenly find itself for a second or perhaps a few moments within another such realm. [...]

[...] Almost the same kinds of fluctuations and stages occur even when you are waking, however, though you are even less aware of them because then the egotistical self acts quite purposefully to blanket out these other areas of experience.

Your dreams are private, as your waking life is, and yet there is a mass waking experience and a mass dreaming experience in which each individual finds his or her own place, and accepts or rejects events. [...]

[...] In waking life you test your ideas in the world of facts. [...]

In waking life you perceive only certain portions of events that fall within your space-time continuum. [...]

[...] If you do not trust your waking self you will not trust your dreaming self, and the landscape of your dreams will appear threatening. [...]

[...] Projections of a kind do also occur while the normal waking consciousness is up and about its normal chores. These are rarely remembered: that is, the waking consciousness retains no memory of them.

[...] The very training helps you manipulate more effectively in both ordinary waking and dream conditions.

[...] The most extensive traveling is done in nightly excursions, but it is easiest to remember those dream projections that occur during naps in the day, simply because the waking consciousness is more alert.

[...] You do not lose contact with your ordinary waking self. [...] If you were looking at your daily normal self from the other viewpoint, you see, using an analogy here, you might find that physically waking self as strange as you now find the sleeping self. The analogy will not hold however, simply because this sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.

[...] Such things as telepathy and clairvoyance can give you hints of other kinds of perception, but you are also involved in quite definite experiences both while you are normally waking and while you are asleep.

Now: These other existences of yours go on quite merrily whether you are waking or sleeping, but while you are awake ordinarily you block them out. [...]

[...] Many people take excursions into other realities — swim, so to speak, through other streams of consciousness as a part of their normal waking lives. [...]

(10:11.) The final and more specific interpretation is done in areas of dreaming closer to the waking self, when the symbols grow more and more specific. There is a much more narrow aspect to symbolism, therefore: The closer you get to waking consciousness, the more limited and narrow the symbol. The handier it is in a given physical circumstance, the less valuable it is as a waking lifetime characteristic symbol.

To some extent this transmutation of symbol can be observed in various stages of waking consciousness also. [...]

[...] 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.

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

[...] In ordinary dreaming, without the awareness of usual waking consciousness, perception of dream reality is limited and instinctive. [...] When you learn to take waking awareness into the dream condition, you are reaching adolescence, so to speak.

[...] You have both occasionally learned to take our waking consciousness into the dream state, and here Fox is correct, for you must start at this point.

[...] They must be capable of taking waking consciousness into the dream state. [...]

(10:40.) Now, briefly: The overall stance of the species is largely maintained by the waking-sleeping patterns that you mentioned recently. [...]

[...] Waking up now, he stretched, jumped down, then up into Jane’s lap as she spoke for Seth. [...]

[...] Waking and sleeping reality is therefore balanced in the world mind — not the world brain.

[...] If you think of a mass world brain — one entity — then it must wake and sleep in patterns. [...]

It would seem to be that the waking personality could learn much from his sleeping counterpart, and this is indeed the case. Theoretically speaking, and in theory only, anything that a personality can do or achieve in the sleeping state, he can do and achieve in the waking state. [...]

[...] The personality will be seen to operate in some manners that would be considered quite normal, if he were in the waking state.

[...] The personality also operates within the dream state in ways that would not be considered normal in the waking state. [...]

[...] He has freedoms and abilities and talents in the dream state of which his waking self may be unfamiliar.

Dreams, for example, were once as clear, vivid, and real as waking life was. People did not expect their dreams to be vague, or unreasonable or chaotic, any more than they expected waking experience to be. Men and women in fact learned how to deal with daily life—daily waking life—by studying the lessons they received in the dream state. [...]

[...] Knowledge came from experience, and that experience was a product of both the waking and the dreaming states. Man tried out in waking life those lessons that he received in dreams. [...]

[...] Their importance to you lies precisely in the similarities and differences that characterize them in contrast to waking events.

The psyche’s basic experience, then, deals with a kind of activity that you cannot directly perceive, yet that existence is responsible for the events that you do perceive, and therefore acts as the medium in which your dreaming and waking events occur.

[...] There are obvious differences between what you think of as waking and dream events. [...]

[...] In the dream or sleep state, when you do not meet as directly with physical activity, there is the opportunity to learn more about the psyche by a study of dreams — those events that are so like and so dissimilar to your waking experience.

In your sleep, you may have greeted friends who are strangers to your waking self. [...] For when you are asleep, you usually cannot find the street upon which you live your waking hours, and when you are asleep, you do not know your waking self. [...]

[...] The first: ‘I will wake up after each of my first five dreams and record each one immediately.’ The second alternative wording would be the same as the one I have just given, but the ‘wake up’ would be omitted. [...]

Usually the dream state is considered from a negative standpoint and compared unfavorably with the waking condition. Emphasis is laid upon those conditions present in the waking state but absent from the dreaming experience. [...]

[...] Seth maintains that we will understand ourselves as dreamers only if we are also aware of the larger environment in which dreams take place, that we interact in the dream state as we do in the waking one and that we form mass dream events as we form physical events on a mass basis.

[...] (Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, August 10, 1975.) In a state between usual waking or sleeping he found himself giving a session such as this one, where earlier he had only heard my words in his head.

[...] The experience was quite vivid, obviously not a dream, yet not a normal waking event. [...]

[...] He was that portion as the normal waking self, the focus personality.

[...] His main consciousness was merged with mine in the session format; while in the waking experience his consciousness was in the normal image, which sensed the projected one. [...]

[...] I wanted to be sure that the material given on the Speakers, so far, adequately dealt with the methods by which they were able to contact others in both the waking and dream states. [...]

Now these efforts go on whether you wake or sleep. [...]

Obviously you cannot become aware of that stage of consciousness now, but you can keep track of the way symbols appear to you in both waking life and the dream state, and learn to connect them with the feelings they represent. [...]

[...] The dog’s accident may be a dream experience, for that matter, that then changes your conscious symbolic feeling toward dogs in the waking state. [...]

[...] As a rule most of you wake up in the same bed in the same house or town, but certainly you wake up as the same person in the same century. In those terms the entity wakes up as a different person each day, in a different century, each life seeming like a day in its level of experience. [...]

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

[...] 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. [...]

[...] And remember to correlate your dream activities with your waking activities. [...]

You are bringing into your consciousness traces of events that have not been registered in the same way that waking events are (emphatically) by the brain. The dream events are partially brain-recorded, but the brain separates such experience from waking events. [...]

[...] Those dream experiences often seem out of joint or out of focus in morning’s hindsight, or in retrospect, simply because they occur with a complexity that the brain could not handle in ordinary waking terms.

In physical waking life, you must do one thing or another, generally speaking. [...]

[...] Several lines of dream experience can be encountered at the same time, each complete in itself, but when the dreamer wakes to the fact, the experience cannot be neurologically translated; so one dream usually predominates, with the others more like ghost images.

(9:15.) Now, as you have memory of your waking life and as you retain a large body of such memory for daily physical encounters, and as this fount of memory provides you with a sense of daily continuity, so also does your dreaming self have an equally large body of memory. [...]

[...] Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned: You are the dreamer it sends on its way. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

Now: Since your conscious memory is connected so strongly with awareness within the body, although you leave the body when it sleeps, the waking consciousness usually has no memory of this.