The Division & Unification of the Dreaming & Waking Experience
“Because you have in the past convinced yourselves that the conscious mind must of necessity be cut off from inner reality, you think that it must be alienated from the dream state.
Following such beliefs, you find yourselves thinking of dreaming as chaotic, unreasonable, and as completely divorced from normal conscious direction, purpose, or function.
If often seems that sleep is almost a small death, and psychologists have compared dreaming with controlled insanity.
You have so divorced your waking and dreaming experience that it seems you have separate “lives,” and that there is little connection between your waking and dreaming hours.
The rich tapestry of probable actions from which you choose your official life becomes just as invisible. This is quite needless.
You have not understood the great give-and-take that exists between waking and dream experience.
You have been taught to believe in the existence of an artificial barrier between the two that does not in fact exist.
There must be some differentiation between dreaming and waking experience just so that you can manipulate in the more narrowly focused daily life.
However, there is no great reason for the vast separation that now exists between your waking and sleeping lives.
The division is largely the result of your mass and private beliefs in the nature of reality, and in the habits the race has acquired of separating “objective” data from subjective.
It is quite possible to take your normally conscious “I” into the dream state, to your advantage.
When you do this you will see that the dreaming “I” and the waking “I” are one, but operating in entirely different environments.
Therefore, you become familiar with depths of experience and knowledge unknown to you before.
You acquire a true flexibility and expanded awareness of your own being, and open channels of communication between your waking and dreaming realities.
This means that you are far better able to utilize unconscious knowledge, and also to acquaint the unconscious with your present physical situation.
Such a procedure can bring you in contact with wisdom you have been denying yourself, help unify your entire life situation, and release your energy for practical everyday purposes.
Even the decision to try such a venture is beneficial, since it automatically presupposes a flexibility of attitude on the part of the conscious self.”1
Probable Events, Multidimensional Time & Dreams
“Probable events, experienced dream-wise, and quite valid in other areas of reality, become, say, false in your world, while the same kind of event, physically actualized, becomes true.
Your wars are fought, lost or won in the dream world first of all, and your physical rendition of history follows the thin line of only one series of probabilities.
To you a given war was either lost or won by a particular side.
In your skimpy comprehension of events there can be only one definite outcome of a battle, for instance.
There will be certain hard facts; a fight with so many people involved, occurring on a particular day at a given place, culminating in a definite victory.
Historically there will be treaties signed, yet in far greater terms you are perceiving but one small dimension, or one corner, of a much larger happening that quite transcends your ideas of the times or places involved.
The initial battle, so to speak, took place on a dream level, then privately and en masse the race decided which portions of the event to actualize in physical terms.
Even in those recognized terms, however, it is quite apparent that the victor is often the loser.
The entire event transcends any true or false judgments.
An entire event, with all of its probabilities included, obviously cannot fit within your current frame of reference.
Again, in your dreams you work with probabilities and decide which ones will become your physical “true facts.”
Here you have great freedom both individually and as a race.
Here each man works out his own destiny, and with the use of this dream information quite consciously chooses which episodes he will physically materialize and experience.”2
After-Death Experiences & Dreaming
“After-death experiences will not seem so alien or incomprehensible if you realize that you encounter similar situations as a normal part of your present existence.
In sleep and dream states you are involved in the same dimension of existence in which you will have your after-death experiences.
You do not remember the most important part of these nightly adventures, and so those you do recall seem bizarre or chaotic as a rule.
This is simply because in your present state of development you are not able to manipulate consciously within more than one environment.
You do exist consciously in a coherent, purposeful creative state while the physical body sleeps, however, and you carry on many of the activities that would be encountered after death.
You simply turn the main focus of your attention in a different dimension of activity, one in which you have indeed continuously operated.
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.
Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death.
You may speak with dead friends or relatives, revisit the past, greet old classmates, walk down streets that existed fifty years earlier in physical time, travel through space without taking any physical time to do so, be met by guides, be instructed, teach others, perform meaningful work, solve problems, hallucinate.
In physical life there is a lag between the conception of an idea and its physical construction.
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.
Not very many people want to take the time, or energy.
The methods are available, however, and those who do use them will not find themselves alienated when the full focus of their attention is turned in that direction after death.
With proper understanding, therefore, it is quite possible for you to become quite familiar now with after-death landscapes and environments and experiences.
You will find them to be as vivid as any you know.
Such explorations will completely alter somber preconceptions about existence after death.
It is very important that you divest yourself of as many preconceptions as possible, however, for these will impede your progress.”3
The Ancient Art of Dreaming
“Your global situation as a race requires the new acquisition of some “ancient arts”.
These arts are useless if they are not practiced – useless in that they lie ever latent, that they are not brought out into the exterior framework of your world.
To use these arts requires first of all the knowledge that beneath the world you know is another; that alongside the focus of consciousness with which you are familiar there are other focuses quite as legitimate.
You dream, each of you, but there are few great dream artists.
Many of the true purposes of dreams have been forgotten, even though those purposes are still being fulfilled.
The conscious art of creating, understanding, and using dreams has been largely lost; and the intimate relationship between daily life, world events, and dreams almost completely ignored.”4
Dream-Art Scientists
“Your scientists spend many long years in training.
If the same amount of time were spent to learn a different kind of science, you could indeed discover far more about the known and unknown realities.
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.
The trouble is that many in the sciences do not comprehend that there is an inner reality.
It is not only as valid as the exterior one, but it is the origin for it.
It is that world that offers you answers, solutions, and would reveal many of the blueprints that exist behind the world of your experience.
The true art of dreaming is a science long forgotten by your world.
Such an art, pursued, trains the mind in a new kind of consciousness — one that is equally at home in either existence, well-grounded and secure in each.
Almost anyone can become a satisfied and productive amateur in this art-science; but its true fulfillment takes years of training, a strong sense of purpose, and a dedication — as does any true vocation.
To some extent, a natural talent is a prerequisite for such a true dream-art scientist.
A sense of daring, exploration, independence, and spontaneity is required.
Such a work is a joy.
There are some such people who are quite unrecognized by your societies, because the particular gifts involved are given zero priority. But the talent still exists.
A practitioner of this ancient art learns first of all how to become conscious in normal terms, while in the sleep state.
Then he becomes sensitive to the different subjective alterations that occur when dreams begin, happen, and end.
He familiarizes himself with the symbolism of his own dreams, and sees how these do or do not correlate with the exterior symbols that appear in the waking life that he shares with others.”5
The Dream-Art Scientist & ‘Learning Centers’
“There are inner meeting places, interior “places” that serve as points of inner commerce and communication.
In a completely different context, they are quite as used as any city or marketplace in the physical world.
Our dream-art scientist learns to recognize such points of correlation.
In a manner of speaking, they are indeed learning centers.
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.
He must learn to isolate these, separate one from the other, and then try to understand the laws that govern them.
As he does so, he learns that some of these realities nearly coincide with the physical one, and on certain levels even become physical in the future, for example, while others do not.
He is then beginning to glimpse the blueprints for the world that you know.”6
Evolution of the Species & Dreams
“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.
In the old terms of evolution I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.
Now many of the characteristics you consider human — in fact, most of them — appear to one extent or another in all other species.
It was the nature of man’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what you like to think of as the evolution of your species.
You learned to dream differently than other creatures.
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. He walks there. The sun is hot.”
You would not have had that kind of bare statement of physical fact.
You would not have had any way of conceiving of objects that did not already exist.
You would not have had any way of imagining yourselves in novel situations.
You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span.
It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.
Using the intellect alone, man did not simply learn through daily experience over the generations, say, that one season followed the other.
He lived too much in the moment for that.
In one season he dreamed of the others, however, and in dreams he saw himself spreading the seeds of fruits as he had seen the wind do in daily life.
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.
As a species you literally learned to walk by first being sleepwalkers.
You walked in your sleep.
You dreamed your languages.
You spoke in your dreams and later wrote down the alphabets—and your knowledge and your intellect have always been fired, sharpened, propelled by the great inner reality from which your minds emerged.”7
Early Humanity & Their Use of Dreams
“Man explored the physical world in the dreaming state long before he explored it physically.
Such dreams gave him the assurance that other lands existed outside of his own, and spurred him onward into those physical expeditions in which the species have always taken a particular delight.
A man or woman might be while dreaming suddenly in strange territory, looking at the sky from a different viewpoint, with, say, a familiar river nowhere in sight, and with a mountain where ordinarily a plain might be.
This was in a way as startling an experience as it would be to you to find yourselves on some distant planet.
You do, for that matter, explore space in the same fashion, and on at least some occasions your own “visitors from outer space” are dream travelers from other dimensions of reality.
In such a fashion man learned the location of the oceans upon the earth – or at least was given the assurance that such large bodies of water existed, along with clues as to their locations, and the placement of the stars overhead.
Also, in the same manner dreams were an aid in navigation, so that they served to let sailors know when land was near before it could by physically perceived – and there is no human activity to which dreams and group dreams have not contributed.
They were of great aid, of course in human politics, so that through dreams the intents of tribal leaders were known to the others.
In a certain manner, dreaming helped sharpen such individual tendencies while still directing them toward the public value fulfillment.
The person interested most in herbs and plant life would also find that nightly dreams mirrored that daytime preoccupation, so that nightly dream excursions might find the dreamer examining strange herbs in another location than the native one.
Or he might be given knowledge as to how the herbs could best be used for healing purposes.
People are natural mimics, as are some animals and birds, so when tribal members related their dreams, they did not just tell them but acted them out with great mobility, carefully mimicking whatever animals or people or elements of land they may have encountered.
The origins of drama began in just that fashion.
Tribal leaders were usually chosen only after long “dream investigations,” in which the new leader’s name cropped up, say, time and time again in the people’s dreams.
They expected to receive counsel from their dreams.
Such information was then aired and shared, studied and examined along with all physical considerations that applied before important decisions were made.”8
Tribal Migrations & Dreaming
“Culture throughout the ages was spread by more than physical means.
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.
Group dreaming was at one time taken for granted as a natural human characteristic – in a tribe, for example, when new locations were being sought, perhaps in time of drought.
The various tribal members would have dreams in which the problem was considered, each dreamer tackling whatever aspect of the problem that best suited his or her abilities and personal intents.
The dreamers would travel out-of-body in various directions to see the extent of drought conditions, and to ascertain the best direction for the tribe to take in any needed migration.”9
Civilizations & Manufactured Objects & Dreaming
“All of your manufactured objects also originated in the realm of dreams, first obviously being conceived of mentally, and in the same way man produced his first tools.
Man’s dreams have always provided him with a sense of impetus, purpose, meaning, and given him the raw material from which to form his civilizations.
The true history of the world is the history of man’s dreams, for they have been responsible in one way or another for all historic developments.
What you really had in the beginning were images without form, slowly adopting form, blinking on and off, then stabilizing into forms that were as yet not completely physical.
These then took on all of the characteristics that you now consider formed physical matter.”10
Technology, Inventions & Dreaming
“The dream state serves as a rich source for the world’s knowledge, and is also therefore responsible for the outgrowth of its technology.
This is a highly important point, for the “the technological world out there” was at one time the world of dreams.
The discoveries and inventions that made the industrial world possible were always latent in man’s mind, and represented an inner glittering landscape of probability that he brought into actualization through the use of dreams – the intuitive and the conscious manipulation of material that was at one time latent.”11
Dream Experiments
“Psychiatrist Montague Ullman is the founder of the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, and a professor emeritus of clinical psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, also in New York.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he was responsible for many ESP dream experiments.
Even today the ESP dream studies conducted at Maimonides stand as some of the best empirical evidence that, in our dreams at least, we are able to communicate with one another in ways that cannot presently be explained.
Ullman believes such findings are evidence of the underlying state of interconnectedness physicist David Bohm is talking about. He feels that an even more profound example of holographic wholeness can be found in another aspect of dreaming – that is the ability of our dreaming selves is often found to be far wiser than in our waking state.
But no matter how spiritually blind a person may be, or unwilling to recognize his or her own shortcomings, dreams invariably depict their failings honestly and contain metaphors that seem designed to prod him or her gently into a state of greater self-awareness.
Truth would surface again and again in his dreams.
He also agrees with Bohm on the importance of wholeness and feels that dreams are nature’s way of trying to counteract our seemingly unending compulsion to fragment the world.
“An individual can disconnect from all that’s cooperative, meaningful, and loving and still survive, but nations don’t have that luxury. Unless we learn how to overcome all the ways we’ve fragmented the human race, nationally, religiously, economically, or whatever, we are going to continue to find ourselves in a position where we can accidentally destroy the whole picture,” says Ullman.
Given that the implicate order [metaphysical source reality] represents in a sense an infinite information source, perhaps it is the origin of this greater fund of knowledge.
Perhaps dreams are a bridge between the perceptual and non-manifest orders and represent a “natural transformation of the implicate into the explicate” [the metaphysical into the physical].
Ullman also theorizes that when we dream, most of us have a natural protective mechanism that keeps us from coming into contact with more of the implicate order than we can cope with.”12
Your Life is a Dream You are Remembering and Creating
“I do not want you to concentrate your efforts in memorizing methods of perceiving other realities but to realize that such insights are everywhere within your grasp.
It is far more important to read your own thoughts than it is to learn to read the thoughts of others, for when your own feelings are known to you, you easily see that all other feelings are also reflected in your own.
When you look away from the world you are looking at it more closely.
When you read sentences like the last one you are somewhat freeing your own minds, opening greater organizations.
Your life is one dream that you are remembering.
You are remembering it and creating it at once, watching it grow from the attention of your own love and knowledge, and as you seem to stand at its center, so you stand at the center of all of your dreams, which then spin themselves seemingly outward.”13
Answers are Everywhere – Not Just in the Dream State
“I do not want you to think that the answers to your questions lie prepackaged in the dream state, relatively inaccessible except to those who possess unique talents or some secretive knowledge of the world of the occult.
Many people, long before the time of printing or reading, learned to read nature very well, to observe the seasons, to feel out the seasons of the soul.
The answers, therefore, lie as close as your own back-door steps, for at the thresholds of your beings you automatically stand in the center of knowledge.
You are never at the periphery of events.
Regardless of your circumstances, your condition in life, your training or your aptitudes, at your own threshold you stand at the center of all realities – for at your center all existences intersect.
You are everywhere part of them, and they are of you.
Each portion of the universe carries the knowledge of all other parts, and each point of a reality is that reality’s center.
You are then, centered in the universe.”14
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol I, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1977
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol II, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol I, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1977
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol II, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Talbot, Michael, The Holographic Universe, Harper Perennial, 1991
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol I, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1977
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
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