The "chapter introduction" and "chapter key points" in this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during his lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the block quotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).
Introduction
This chapter uses the metaphor of photographs to explain: each moment of waking life is like a photograph, framing only one present moment and excluding other possibilities; dreams, by contrast, are "living psychological photographs," not bound by time and space, able to present material overlooked in waking life. The dreams you remember are only conscious interpretations and snapshots of a larger event. Dreams have continuity and serve as the energy source and blueprint for daily experience; cells and atoms also have states akin to dreaming. Finally, it offers a method for remembering dreams: after waking, stay still, recall the main thread first, then note the branches.
Key Points of This Chapter
- Each waking moment is like a photograph, framing only one present moment and excluding other possibilities.
- Dreams are living psychological photographs, not framed by time and space, and can present subjective data overlooked in waking life.
- A remembered dream is only a conscious interpretation and a snapshot of a larger event.
- Dreams have their own continuity and organization, provide data about the future and the past, and are the energy source and blueprint of waking experience.
- Cells and atoms also have a relaxed state similar to dreaming; after waking, staying still and recalling the main thread before the branches helps in remembering dreams.
Main Text
Seth comes right out and says
In your terms, a photograph freezes motion and frames that moment.
Just like all the moments you can concretely perceive, it is the same. Looking at this issue through our human concepts of time and space, a photograph is like a freeze-frame, solidifying that time. Within that time frame, you, in that moment, inside it, are solidified, frozen, freeze-framed -- any of those works. And all of your moments can be understood this way.
Under ordinary circumstances, you may remember the emotion you felt when your photograph was taken; you may remember the feeling of that present moment at the time. That emotion will more or less show through your posture or your facial expression -- for example, whether you were happy or unhappy at the time can be shown. But the larger subjective reality within that moment does not concretely appear in such a photograph. What you were thinking in your heart at the time, your psychological feeling at the time, cannot be displayed in the photograph. It can be recorded through some of your movements and expressions, but what you were really thinking at the time is not in this photograph.
As far as its concrete presentation within that photograph is concerned, that subjective reality which appears in the form of movements and expressions has completely escaped; it is not in the photograph. In the same way, the past and the future are also shut outside this photograph. That photograph only records the present of that one instant, that moment when the picture was taken. Thus, such a photograph produces the specific focus that is required, and necessarily excludes other data. When that picture was taken, it excluded the other possibilities; the other possibilities are not in this photograph.
That is indeed obvious, too simple -- every one of us knows it. Because you must operate within clear segments of time, we must be within this definite time -- human beings have no choice, we live within this space and time, and we absolutely must operate all our actions within this segment of time. So in your daily life you are doing the same thing -- at the level of consciousness, ignoring or excluding much information that would otherwise be available.
In daily life, we are just like taking photographs. Our life can also be understood as one photograph after another linked together, just like a movie camera shooting on film -- the old movie cameras all shot on film, taking pictures of you at twenty-four frames per second. So you could say that the movie of your life is composed of such frame-by-frame photographs, and in each photograph you have actually also ignored and excluded the other possibilities. And outside this photograph there is actually a great deal more information, but you have not obtained any of it, and it is not within this photograph.
A Dream Is a Psychological Photograph
To put it one way, a dream that has already occurred can be compared to a psychological photograph.
From this angle, your dreams can all be considered a psychological photograph—a motion that has not been materialized, that has not been frozen, something you could call a psychological photograph of yours. It is also not framed by space or time—inside your dreams there is still their own time and space, the dreamscape has its own time and space, so it is not framed by time and space, it is alive.
Those components that must remain outside during any waking moment of conscious activity appear in the dream. Your life, your living, is made up of one moment-point after another, and within these moment-points there are many things beyond the photograph. But in your daily waking life, those things beyond each moment-point are all ignored by you; you only pay attention to what happens within that moment-point. So those probable matters, probable events—you have not paid attention to them, and you have not thought about them. Yet those things in dreams can actually be revealed. So a dream, then, is a living photograph. You can imagine a dream as a living photograph in your psyche—it is different from your ordinary photographs; your ordinary photographs are dead, while the photograph in a dream is alive, it is a photograph of your psyche.
A remembered dream is a product of several things.
A dream that you can still remember after waking is not just one event; it is a product of several things.
But it is often only an interpretation by the conscious mind of an event that might have been quite different from the one you remember.
That dream is not a straightforward telling; it is often—a conscious interpretation of another event entirely different from the one you remember.
Let us look at the end of this section, where Teacher Xiyu takes an actual dream analysis to explain to you: why it is that this dream is a conscious interpretation of an event quite different from the one we are familiar with or might remember, and why dreams are like this. So in that part, we can see the meaning of the example Teacher Xiyu gives.
To that extent, the dream you remember is a snapshot taken by your conscious mind of a larger event.
At that time, the dream you can recall is already incomplete; it is a snapshot, a miniature of a larger event.
There are many kinds of dreams; within dreams there are many kinds of dreams. Some are relatively faithful to your memory of them—the actions you recall, you still remember that dream, they are the same; but some are different—you think you remember that you had a dream, but actually the real dream is not the same as what you remember.
But when you remember a dream, you automatically pull certain portions of subjective events away from the others.
When you recall a dream, when you remember a dream, you actively pull a certain portion of subjective events out from the others, and try to frame them in time and space in a meaningful way according to your usual orientation. The dreams you remember are all ones that you have pulled out from probable time, a time you have grabbed based on your own subjective judgment, and placed into a dream's time and space to let it happen.
But even so, the dream world is so diverse, so multidimensional—the dream world is multidimensional, extremely multidimensional—that this attempt often fails, and you often simply cannot remember your dreams.
Perhaps here it will be easier if you compare the scene in a dream to the scene in a photograph.
If you compare the scene in a dream to the scene in a photograph, it may make it easier for you to understand. Why? Because this way you can remember some things. For example, a photograph will show certain times that are natural to the time in which it was taken: for instance, it will not show a photograph of a Turk at the time of the Crusades1. But a dream scene will portray such a subject to you.
What does this mean? In a dream you can dream of the Crusades, a man and a Turk in a Crusades scene, but these would not appear in a photograph, because at the time of the Crusades there were no photographs, no cameras. So he uses this as an analogy: the time span of dream scenes is far less restricted, far freer than your ordinary photographs, so you will find it more natural. A photograph, on the other hand, is subject to certain time limitations.
Conversely, it will also help if occasionally you imagine a vivid dream scene as though it were in a photograph.
Conversely, occasionally think about your vivid dream scenes—for example, you dreamed of going to this place or that place, and the storyline in the dream was such and such—and then imagine it as though it were in a photograph. This will help you remember the dream. Earlier he was turning a photograph into a scene in a dream; here he is treating a dream as a photograph. Conversely, both will help you, letting you understand your dreams and the things that happen in your waking reality.
Subjective Photographs in Dreams
Just as in your lifetime you collect a series of photographs taken at different times and places.
Think of the scenes in your dreams as photographs, one by one, just like the series of photographs you take when you go to different times and places in your physical life -- that is, different times and places. You collect those dream scenes in your dreams and imagine them as photographs, just as when you travel in physical reality, go to various places, take photographs, and collect them. The method is the same.
So in the dream state, you also collect a different kind of subjective photograph.
He is teaching you a method: in dreams you can also look for these photographs and collect them. But they do not appear in sequence -- it is not like going on a trip. You can tell which photos are from when your parents took you traveling as a child, which are from when you traveled on your own after growing up, which are from after you got married, which are from traveling with your children. But these dream photographs do not appear in order; they have no sequence.
Yet on a conscious level, they can provide you with valuable information about your future and your past.
Although they have no sequence, they can still provide you with valuable information about your future and your past. This is interesting: they have no chronological order, so why can they provide this information? And how can you tell which of this future information or past information belongs to the past and which belongs to the future? This requires your discernment and judgment.
In normal, generally accepted terms, the images in a photograph do not change, move, or alter their relationships to one another.
For example, if you take a photo of yourself with your boyfriend, the relationship between the two of you will not change at the moment the photo is taken. Maybe later the two of you break up, but at the moment the photo was taken, the two of you were boyfriend and girlfriend.
But the living subjective photographs of dreams provide a framework in which these images have their own mobility.
Dreams are different. The subjective photographs in dreams -- the living photographs -- the images within them have their own mobility. The scenes in dreams often change, and they often jump and leap about.
They represent a creativity far different from what you usually understand.
They represent a creativity that we ordinarily do not understand, one that is different from what we comprehend.
You understand what physical things are, because you have seen the children born of your flesh.
You know what is material and what is real, because your child was born from you -- mothers are even more familiar with this, since the child was born from their own body, so of course you have a real, physical sense of him. But you do not experience your dream children in the same concrete way. The child in a dream is not experienced the way a child in physical reality is -- you can dream that you have a child, but it is not like the feeling of holding him in your arms in physical reality. It is different.
Nor do you understand that your dream life is continuous.
You also do not understand that dream life is actually continuous. When you enter it, you feel that it is jumpy, that it has no temporal or spatial order.
On your own level, dreams have an organization that you do not understand.
From our physical perspective, dreams have an inner organization that we cannot understand.
And from that rich source, you draw most of the energy with which you form your daily experience.
Although we do not understand its organization, we still draw from this rich source in dreams most of the energy with which we form the experiences and events of our daily life. It all comes from dreams.
And your conscious mind is the director of that experience.
The director of our daily experience is this conscious mind.
Yet in your terms, whether you are alive or dead, you dream.
From your human perspective, you have a state of being alive and a state of being dead. He says that whether alive or dead, you dream. At this point you might break down and say, I understand dreaming while alive, but how do I dream after death? Think about it -- have you ever had a dream within a dream? Is not that dream within a dream equivalent to the feeling of dreaming after you die? It is the same.
When you are physically alive, what you think of as dreaming becomes subordinate to what you call your waking life.
While you are alive, the dreams you have are necessarily subordinate to your living life. You always view dreams from a strange vantage point -- why is it called a strange vantage point? You always look at dreams from the standpoint of physical life. This physical life is a strange vantage point for dreams, because your dreams are attached to this physical life, viewed from the state of you being alive. So this vantage point is biased, tilted toward your ordinary waking state, and he uses this angle to look at your dreams. So in your interpretation of dreams, you still look at your dreams from the angle of your three-dimensional world.
The dream situation is therefore experienced in a distorted fashion.
Because you always use the state and thought patterns of the three-dimensional world to think about your dreams, the dreams become distorted, and they often seem unclear.
In contrast with waking consciousness, it may appear vague, imprecise, or out of focus. But this does not always apply, for in some dreams the state of alertness is undeniable.
Compared with your experiences while awake, your dream experiences may seem less clear and less precise -- that is, the sensations are not as clear or as intense. But sometimes this is not the case; sometimes they are very clear. Especially after people study spiritual knowledge or study the Seth material, many people's dreams become unusually clear, as clear and vivid as their waking life. Many people have experienced this. Your dreams will change, because your discernment has increased.
For many reasons, some discussed here and some not yet mentioned, you shut your dreams out of your lives to a large extent.
You cut your dreams off from your life. You feel that dreams are not part of your life, just a little interlude or something insignificant.
Although you must of course maintain your precise point in time and place, because your conscious mind must focus upon the physical world, there is still no basic reason why you must so separate yourself from your dreams.
It is not wrong for you to remain in your waking state and maintain your physical focus, but there is no need for you to completely cut your dreams off from your life, making them unrelated to your life. That is unnecessary.
Inventors, writers, scientists, and painters who are accustomed to dealing directly with creative material are quite aware of the fact that many of their creative ideas come from the dream state.
These scientists, artists, and inventors all know that dreams are often the source of their ideas, and they see the results of dream activity in their actual physical lives. For example, the periodic table of elements -- Mendeleev saw it in a dream2, and this periodic table of chemical elements changed humanity, advancing human chemistry by a great leap.
Many other people, though untrained, are also able to trace certain decisions and certain determinations in waking life back to dreams.
Some people without special training can still consciously discover that some of the decisions they make while awake are connected to events in dreams. They can trace them back to dreams. They say, I dreamed of something, and then such and such, and a few days later something happened, and then they connect the dream with that event, linking them together.
Few people, however, understand that your personal reality is like a finished product, born of the vast production that takes place in the dream situation.
Actually, your life experiences are already a finished product, born of the vast production that takes place in the dream situation. Seth has actually talked about this and introduced it in many books, and here he repeats it again: your life emerges and surfaces from the rehearsals in dreams. Ruburt's calling this magical work is a rather apt metaphor.
Stages of Consciousness and Units of Consciousness
In waking life, your consciousness fluctuates. In your terms, there are times when you are more aware or less aware, times when you are less alert.
Sometimes your attention drifts away from the current problem, you space out, and the moment you space out, you have drifted away; or conversely, sometimes you are indeed extremely focused on the attention of the present moment. So in the waking state, consciousness has its stages, and you usually pay very little attention to them—your consciousness also has peaks and troughs.
Actually I can't remember this clearly. I think it was in The Nature of Personal Reality—no—in Seth Speaks, or in The Nature of Personal Reality, there was a chapter specifically on the stages of consciousness, and then the following chapter specifically on the levels of consciousness. Here you need to understand that the wavebands of consciousness and the levels of consciousness are two different concepts: the wavebands of consciousness refer to the periodic fluctuations of consciousness; the levels of consciousness refer to the different states of consciousness, and under different frequency states of consciousness you have the levels of consciousness. So you can understand the stages of consciousness as the intensity, the strength or weakness of consciousness, while the levels of consciousness refer to the different frequencies of consciousness.
The official line of consciousness that you accept casually ignores any given beginning.
Your consciousness has an official route, that is, one main experience of a life, and it ignores all those branches. And when this sort of thing happens, it often continues merrily along, as if nothing had happened at all. Within the official route of your life's development, there are actually many probable branches, many small branches, but because they are too far from your main-line task, you choose to ignore them, you do not follow them, and then you simply jump, jump to the next stage of consciousness, to the next main line, as if this branch, any of these beginnings, had never happened.
In the dream state, such fluctuations also occur.
In dreams, consciousness also fluctuates. In there you can jump from one time to another. In the dream state, your consciousness cannot stay focused on one frequency; it breaks free, and like a sudden shift within the dream, consciousness enters another scene, so you often jump from one time or one scene to another scene.
But more is involved here, for you could say that consciousness has separate units, which you could call different units of consciousness.
He has talked about this before: consciousness comes in units, one unit at a time. These units of consciousness are naturally pursued in the dream state, and they can be diligently followed through certain training.
Units of consciousness are a series of consciousness-type events, and they involve probable series of events.
For example, if a particular dream event is chosen to be physically actualized, then in your reality, other events will actually also appear, and they will appear in the form of a connected series. He says that in dreams, things often appear in the form of units of consciousness, and when you choose this event to manifest it in real life, when the timing is ripe and the dream event manifests in reality, it also manifests as a connected series, and a series of events will occur. That series of events is actually all the result of this one unit of consciousness.
As individuals, and as a species, you have painted a very beautiful picture of what you think of as your reality.
We have painted a very beautiful picture for our physical world, and within it there are starry skies and vast oceans, there are cosmic stars. And all your institutions, beliefs, and activities also seem to prove that the picture is very beautiful.
Because everything within that framework seems bound to be consistent with everything else.
It is as if all the things in that picture follow certain objective laws—according to the laws of the universe described by our scientists, the law of universal gravitation, the laws of space and time—as if they are all consistent with one another.
The picture is a fairly simple one, in which each consciousness is assumed to be directed toward one particular focus, hidden within a body, and its existence is limited at one end by birth and at the other end by death within that span of time.
He says it is not that the picture is wrong, but that the picture is too simple, too oversimplified. It covers over all those possibilities. He thinks that all consciousness has only one particular focus, and that this consciousness is hidden inside the body—he says these are all wrong, and too thin. The key point is that this consciousness also exists within the span of time bounded by birth at one end and death at the other.
Unfortunately, that picture is as limited as any photograph of yours.
If we depict a still picture of the human world as a very beautiful scene, it is actually like a photograph of human society, and the information within it is very limited. Those possibilities, those events beneath the photograph, are not shown, and those subjective consciousnesses are not shown either.
Viewing the Waking State from the Dream
You are used to examining your dreams from the standpoint of your own waking condition, but sometimes in your dreams, try to examine your normal waking time. It is enough to give yourself only that instruction to do so.
We are used to examining our dreams from the perspective of the waking state. He says, have you never thought about whether you could, in a dream, turn it around and use the dream's perspective to look at what your waking world is like? But you say, I don't know how to look at it, I don't know how. He says, it is enough to give yourself only that instruction, and your dream will show you how to look. You may be quite surprised by the results, he says, and here he leaves us hanging a bit.
I will keep it as simple as possible, and use concepts that you can understand.
He says, I will describe it briefly and in general terms—describe what? Describe what our physical reality looks like if you stand from the perspective of the dream.
From the other side—from that state loosely called the dream state—you look toward our physical world, an existence just as valid as your own.
From that energy state, you look toward our physical world. That dream state is just as valid as our present one. From that viewpoint, from that perspective, you can be seen as the dreamer—the one observing from within the dream, we can call the person in the dream; then the person outside is the one dreaming, the dreamer. Keep in mind that by this point he has already shifted perspectives; he is looking outward from within the dream. Looking outward from within the dream, who is that you that he sees? It is the one dreaming, the one still lying there asleep, the one who is dreaming. And you, within the dream, are awake.
The "you" in quotation marks is that portion of you that is focused in this reality.
This "you" in quotation marks is the you in the dream, the you within the dream state. Standing now within the dream and looking outward, you are that portion within this reality; while the you who is sleeping is another portion of you in that reality.
You form this reality out of data and energy, and that energy comes on the one hand from a source outside this system, and on the other hand constantly flows into this system as well.
Where does the image of this you in the dream, your energy, your information come from? They all come from your waking state, and the waking state and your dream world are another world, which can be called another system. So the energy that the you in the dream obtains, the energy of that character image of you in the dream, comes from outside—that reality out there, what we call physical reality, is one source of your dream reality. Therefore, in that sense, the two systems are connected. If you stand from the perspective of the dream, the two of them are connected, because the characters in the dream all come from reality.
This is the story of Zhuangzi dreaming of the butterfly3, and I won't elaborate on it here, since Chinese people are all very familiar with this story—Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, the butterfly dreamed of a child, the child dreamed of Zhuangzi sleeping. It's a very interesting matter.
In the meantime, please wait a moment.
Cells Dream Too
The same applies to any kind of consciousness. So in a manner of speaking, your cells dream too.
Other consciousnesses do the same. In the case of cells, and in the case of atoms and molecules as well, there are subtle changes in electric charge that cannot yet be perceived, and these can indicate such fluctuations. Cells dream too, and atoms and molecules dream too. When they dream, their electric charge also changes subtly, but our instruments cannot measure it.
Obviously, in your terms, an atom does not dream about a cat chasing a dog.
Cats do not chase dogs anyway; it is always dogs chasing cats. He is making a joke here, giving an example to tell you that what atoms dream about is not the same as our human dreams. You should not use human dreams to imagine what their dreams are like.
But it does have a relaxation of its physical focus, and that can be compared to your dream state.
Atoms also have a relaxation of their physical focus, and that relaxation is like how we humans relax our physical focus and enter into the dream state. When an atom relaxes its focus on the physical world, it enters into what is, relative to humans, the atom's dream.
In those circumstances, atoms pursue their own probable motions, and indeed make astonishing calculations.
Within the atom's dream of probabilities, within its dream state, it makes astonishing calculations in order to bring the necessary probable actions into your reality. He is drawing an analogy: atoms are the same. Atoms carry out a great many probability calculations within the atom's dream, and then select the best possible plan and actualize it in our physical world. So it tries out a necessary probable action—after it has tried out all the probable activities in the atom's dream, it brings the necessary probable action into our reality, into our physical world, and then ensures the official form of life. Only in this way can our lives survive. If atoms did not come in, how could life exist?
But they are not limited, because their other probable ways are also actualized.
It is not limited. It does not have only one materialized state; it has other materialized states. And as for us, we are no longer clear about those—those probable states of atoms, those probable states, we are not familiar with.
Then in different levels of the dream state, you also subjectively observe other probable realities.
In dreams you also see other probable realities.
Your conscious intent is carried into the dream state by the unconscious, and that intent helps you organize the data.
When you are dreaming, you can also subjectively perceive other realities, and your consciousness—when you observe within the dream, you are using your consciousness—is carried into your dream by the unconscious. Why? Because you are more interested in other unknown, probable realities, and precisely because of that interest, the subconscious brings your consciousness in. Then your intent begins to gather data, allowing you to consciously go in and collect data, organize it, and then you want to bring it out. But most of the time you cannot bring it out.
But that is all right. Even if you cannot bring it out, your body can, your cells can feel it. Your cells can obtain information at those unconscious levels that you may have no memory of.
From other streams of reality, you choose those you want to actualize, and you do this according to your beliefs about the nature of reality.
From other realities, you choose which things you want to have manifested, and you make this choice according to your beliefs about the nature of reality—the nature of reality is that beliefs create reality.
A photograph is taken, and before you there is a picture of an event that has already happened, in your terms.
If you treat your eyes as a camera, then every present moment of your life is a photograph.
In dreams you take many subjective photographs, deciding which of them you want to actualize in time.
In dreams you take many subjective photographs. So which one in reality do you actually want to actualize, to manifest? You have to make a choice—which one to actualize in time.
So to some extent, dreams are the blueprints for your later snapshots.
From a certain angle, dreams are the blueprint for the freeze-frame images of your future life. Your future life is like having those freeze-frame images, one freeze-frame image after another, and dreams guide you as you develop toward the future.
Rob's Two Questions
It now rests for a while, then tells Ruburt that he may be greatly surprised by the organization of this book -- by "greatly surprised" he means that he has decided to publish this book in two volumes, to publish it in two volumes. Then at 10:50, really this transmission was still quite good. At 11:17 Seth came through again and spoke at considerable length about another matter. At 11:43 he ended with the following line in answer to the question I had prepared to ask him: I wish you a good evening, and I know when it is appropriate to answer your questions.
Since I took his meaning to be that these questions would enter into the plan of this book at a later point, Rob listed these main, simple questions below. Rob had listed several questions before the session, but Seth did not answer him; Seth said I know when it is appropriate to answer your questions.
Rob's first question was this: after 9:27 in Session 697, Seth mentioned that our species is a conscious species, and he said it is difficult for me to imagine such a situation; at the time this was based on a line in that Covin material, and Seth did not explain it to him then. But Rob said in the notes that more than five months later, Seth did indeed answer this question in Session 718, in Part Five of Volume Two.
The second question he wanted to ask was: is there really a photograph taken in the summer of 1932 of Jane at age three with her parents, her biological parents4? And as far as I know, that was the only family photo that family kept. Rob expected that Seth would say something about the possible paths subsequently taken by the three main figures in the photo, just as he had analyzed them as children. Because this book began with the childhood photos of Rob and Jane, he hoped Seth would also say something based on this photo. In the first session of this book, when Seth discussed the separate childhood photos of Jane and me in the same way, I had this question in mind all along. Aside from whatever Seth could tell us about her parents, I was also curious: could the Jane at age three possibly be, or be destined to become, another probable Jane?
But you know, actually Rob's questions like these are rather -- really not all that interesting. Because Seth used the childhood photos of the two of them to open this book, and that purpose was already accomplished; his purpose was not to interpret every single photo. He has already told you the method of interpretation; Rob and Jane can both interpret them on their own. Why do you insist on having Seth interpret them for you? And what is your purpose in wanting an interpretation? What you want to interpret is what Jane's father did later on, what happened to her biological father later, and so on. Is this Jane the later Jane, or is she another Jane in a parallel world of probabilities? Do you think this question of his is rather naive? It is rather naive.
Because at that moment when the photo was taken, the subsequent life had not yet unfolded. Even if it had unfolded, it would still be within the probabilities of that moment; how can you say which Jane the later Jane is? So Rob still has his own fixation in his understanding of this question -- he is always distinguishing this one from that one, that one from this one; he has not yet fully grasped what Seth means here. I do not know whether you readers have grasped it: from the storyline perspective, they are different Janes, different probable space-times and different probabilities; but these different probabilities all shift along with the focus of your consciousness. In other words, whichever Jane you want to experience, you are that Jane. There is no distinction here between this Jane and that Jane. From your human perspective, from Rob's perspective, he thinks that way; but Seth thinks this way; you think that way, and that is fine. But in essence, all these Janes are one Jane; whichever one you want to experience, you experience that one. But Rob is still rather attached; he kept wanting to ask this kind of question.
In note two, in this Appendix -- I am not sure what comes before this Appendix -- it says: Jane attempted in the dream state to sort out her own many multidimensional, probable materials, and spoke of how they are gathered in the side pools of experience. Jane said that while dreaming she went to collect those multidimensional materials; so how did she collect them? She said she placed these experiences in the side pools of experience -- experience has a side, that is, within this experience between the conscious and the unconscious there is a side, waiting to be organized, before flowing into the official stream of consciousness. That is, before this material enters your conscious knowledge, before it has entered, it is all multidimensional consciousness, all multidimensional information. If you want to obtain this multidimensional information in the conscious state, it must enter your stream of consciousness, the official stream of consciousness. So she said, suppose you imagine there is a pool, then beside that pool there is a side pool; beside the pool there is also a small pool, and that pool is not the official consciousness, but rather that kind of multidimensional-consciousness material.
She later said, by going beyond direct neurological activity -- she said you must go beyond, this is very important; you cannot use neurological activity, you must go beyond this neurological activity; once you use neurological activity, this material may no longer be obtainable -- and by using the still-unorganized reels or side pools of material. How to describe it? You have a pool of consciousness, and then the material you obtain from the depths of dreams is all multidimensional material. You can imagine that multidimensional material as another pool beside your normal conscious knowledge, and these two pools can be connected. When you want to organize this material and bring it out, you must bring it into your conscious knowledge, otherwise it cannot be brought out. But how do you bring it out? At this point you must go beyond direct neurological activity; you cannot use your thoughts, you cannot use your consciousness; you must first place it in that pool of the unconscious or subconscious beside your conscious knowledge, and then through an intuitive means -- rather than through brain logic -- go and retrieve it. You can receive several other such units of consciousness at the same time, although it may not be easy to retain them.
A Method for Remembering Dreams
At the end of this session, Seth gave everyone a method for remembering dreams. Actually, many people already use this method, and I will briefly explain it again: when you wake up, do not move, do not move your fingers or any part of your body at all, and then immediately think about the storyline of your dream. First think about the main thread; do not get carried away by the minor details at first. First get down the main storyline, the main story that the dream was telling, and record the main thread first. After you have recorded it, then go back and record the branches. During this process, do not use any thinking or judgment, and do not think about what this means or what the main thread represents. Do not—the moment you start thinking, or you say, "I will go get a drink of water first," or "I will get up and go to the bathroom first"—actions like these can often wash away your memory of the dream. This is called the ratchet effect of consciousness—you can call it the ratchet effect of consciousness. It is like RAM, something that has not yet been written to the hard drive. The memories in consciousness have all been written to the hard drive, but what has not yet been written to the hard drive is only in the RAM of your brain. If at this time you do something else, that other information comes in and washes away the dream material in the brain's RAM, and then you cannot find it anymore.
So at this time, you should first record it, do not do anything at all, just lie there, briefly recall it, and then immediately get up and write it down. Generally, the simplest way nowadays is to use the voice recording function on your phone, or you can also use writing. First write down the main storyline, and then, on the branches of the main thread, go back and carefully recall the branches in between, the details of the story, those subplots—just like writing a novel, you have to write the main thread first and then write the subplots, otherwise the main thread becomes blurred, and once the main thread is blurred, the subplots are gone too. Teacher Seth introduced all of this, and what he said here means the same thing, and what Jane herself said in the earlier part also means the same thing: when you want to go into the dream state to obtain something, you need certain methods and techniques.
Of course, when I was writing this note, I found that Seth's material tonight, as well as everything Jane said throughout the appendix, very much reminded me of what we call double dreams. Actually, this is not quite the same as a double dream; it just reminded him of double dreams. What is a double dream? It is two consciousnesses, two consciousnesses at the same time. And the characteristic here is that Jane was able to bring back that multidimensional material from within the dream. How did she retrieve it? She first placed it in a side pool, or you could call it a side pocket.
The fourth note was added in April 1975, after this book was completed. Although these questions are all very interesting, I never pursued them further, and Seth did not voluntarily provide material either. Seth did not add any further material on the questions that followed, on the second question, because Seth felt that this was no longer important. Imagine it: Seth had already done such detailed analysis and interpretation of their childhood photos in the previous few sessions, so analyzing another repetitive photo would not have much meaning. The method had already been taught to you, the principle had already been clearly explained, so going back and repeatedly analyzing these photos one by one no longer had much practical significance.
A Real Psychological Case
注释与核实
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Source: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, "The Niépce Heliograph" (https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/niepce-heliograph/?full=1) ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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Source: Zhuang Zhou, "Zhuangzi: The Adjustment of Controversies" (https://ctext.org/zhuangzi/adjustment-of-controversies/ens) ↩
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Source: Jane Roberts and Robert Butts, "The 'Unknown' Reality: Volume One" (https://www.nowdictation.com/q/book%3Aur1%2Bsession%3A699%2Bsnapshots/) ↩