Events as Reflections of Dreams
“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.
In a manner of speaking, dream reality is closer to the true nature of events than your experience with physical events leads you to suppose.
Dreams often seem chaotic because your point of reference is too small to contain the added dimensions of actuality.
Events as you understand them are only intrusions of multidimensional activities into space and time.
Events are reflections of your dreams even as your dreams reflect the events you know; those you experienced, and those you anticipate in one way or another.
Some of this is most difficult to explain, yet it is true to say that no event has a beginning or ending.
This is true of a life. It is true of a dream.
The information is not practical in your terms, because it denies your direct experience.
Upon request, however, and with some practice, you can suggest in the middle of a dream that it expand to its larger proportions.
You would then experience one dream wrapped in another, or several occurring at one time – all involving aspects of a particular theme or probability, with each connected to the others, although to you the connections might not be apparent.”1
Dreams as Play
“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.
In one respect dreams are a kind of structured unconscious play.
Your mind dreams in joyful pleasure at using itself, freed from the concerns of practical living.
Dreams are the mind’s free play.
The spontaneous activity, however, is at the same time training in the art of forming practical events.
The playfulness and creativity of dreams are vastly underrated in most dream studies.
When you try to explore the psyche in deadly seriousness, it will always escape you.
Your dreams can be interpreted as dramas, perhaps, but never as diagrams.
Do not try to bring “dream interpretation” down to your level, but instead try to playfully enter that reality imaginatively, and allow your own waking consciousness to rise into a freer kind of interpretation of events, in which energy is not bounded by space, time, or limitations.
One of the main purposes of dreaming, therefore, is to increase man’s pleasure, which means to increase the quality of living itself.
Dreams are mental work and play combined, psychic and emotional rich creative dramas.
They also involve you in the most productive of enterprises as you begin to play with versions of events that are being considered for physical actualization, as on a personal level you “view” the probable events which your family, tribe, organization, community and country will actualize.”2
Dreams as Art
“Creativity connects waking and dreaming reality, and is in itself a shareholder in which the waking and dreaming selves merge to form constructs that belong equally to each reality.
Dreaming is an art of the highest nature, in which all are proficient.
There are structured dreams as there are structured games in waking life.
There are mass dreams “attended by many.”
There are themes, both mass and private, that serve as a basis or framework.
Yet overall, the mind’s spontaneous activity continues because it enjoys its own activities.”3
Dreams as Variations of the Theme of Your Life
“Your physical events happen to you as you.
In dreams you may experience an event seemingly as someone else, or you may find yourself in the past or future instead of the present.
In waking life you have the family that you recognize, or group of friends, or profession, or what have you.
In dreams you may find yourself married to someone else, or living an entirely different kind of life.
In a way dreams are like variations of the theme of your life, though in reality your life is the theme you have chosen from those possible versions.
This larger experience from which your dreams are finally formed, involves you in a kind of journey.
Using an analogy, it is as if you joyfully leave the normal paraphernalia of usual life behind, and ride aboard your own greater psyche into vaster seas of experience.”4
Dreams Involved in the Learning Processes
“In a fashion dreams allow for a curious mixture of learning processes, while at the same time serving to introduce surprising developments.
That is, dreams promote the conservation of knowledge.
They are an aid in the development of skills.
They conserve available information by weaving it through the other structures of your experience.
Dreaming on the part of animals – and men in particular – involves not only information processing, but information gathering.
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.
Basically information is experience.
In dreams you attain the necessary information to form your lives.
That state of sleep, therefore, is not simply the other side of your consciousness, but makes your waking life and culture possible.
Your own personalities are to some extent the result of your waking experience.
But they are also formed equally by your dreaming experience, by the learning and knowledge and encounters that occur when many would tell you that you are beyond legitimate perception.
Dreams, then, are deeply involved with the learning processes.”5
Dreams as Preventative Medicine
“On some occasions long-term illnesses, for instance, are resolved suddenly through a dream.
However, in most cases dreams prevent such chronic illnesses, providing through small therapeutics a constant series of minor but important personal revelations.
That is, dreams are the best preventative medicine.
Some psychological difficulties need clear conscious light and understanding.
Others, however, operate even without conscious participation, and those are often solved, or remedied, at the same level without interfering with the conscious mind.
As the body handles many physical manipulations without your own conscious knowledge of what is being done, or how, so the workings of your own psychological systems often automatically solve “their own problems” through dreams of which you are not aware.”6
Dreams to Connect You to Loved Ones & Hometowns
“In some areas, with the acceleration of physical travel, certain kinds of dreams have become more highly pertinent.
Families in your society are often broken up, parents and children living quite apart in other portions of the country or in different countries entirely, so dreams that connect you with such relatives have risen to the fore, so to speak.
People often keep track of changes in hometowns that they may not have visited for twenty years except in the dream state, when they familiarize themselves with the alterations that have happened, visit beloved streets and houses, or view old classmates.
Very few people make any attempt to check out such information in physical terms.
There is an entire global dream network in other words, that goes quite unrecognized – one of spectacular organization in which exchanges of information occur that give you the basis for the formation of recognized physical events.”7
Deep Dreams
“In the very deep reaches of sleep experience — those, incidentally, not yet touched upon by scientists in so-called dream laboratories — you are in communication with other portions of your own identity, and with the other realities in which they exist.
In this state you also pursue works and endeavors that may or may not be connected with your interests as you know of them.
You are learning, studying, playing; you are anything but asleep.
You are highly active.
You are involved in the underground work, in the real nitty-gritty of existence.
Now let me emphasize here that you are simply not unconscious.
It only seems that you are, because as a rule you remember none of this in the morning.
To some extent, however, some people are aware of such activities, and there are also methods that will enable you to recall them to some degree.”8
Dreams & Families
“Notice what kind of information you seek out from the newspapers or other forms of media.
Do you read the front page and ignore sports, or vice versa? Do you read the gossip column? The obituaries? Do you seek out stories of lurid crime, or look for further incidents of political chicanery?
The answers will show you the kind of material you look for most often.
You will to some extent specialize in the same kind of information when you dream.
You will organize the contents of your mind and the information available to you according to your own intents and purposes.
One person’s dreams, therefore, while his or her own, will still fit into an important notch in the dreams of a given family.
One person might, because of his or her own interests, seek largely from dreams warnings of difficulty or trouble, and therefore be the family’s dream watchguard – the one who has the nightmares for everyone else.
That person will also serve a somewhat similar role in the waking state, as a member of a family.
The question in such instances is the reason for such a person’s over-concern and alarm in the first place – why the intense interest in such possible catastrophes, or in crime or whatever?
And the answer lies in an examination for the personal feelings and beliefs about the nature of existence itself.
As far as group dreaming is concerned, there are still some people who have always served as watchdogs in that regard, while others even in the dream state operate as healers or teachers or explorers or whatever.
There is no craft that was not first conceived of by an individual dreamer, who later transferred it to the social world of activity.”9
Infants & Dreams for Learning
“There are key dreams in infancy that serve to trigger necessary hormonal functioning.
The child crawls and walks in dreams before those acts are physically executed – the dreams serving as impetus for muscular coordination and development.
Language is practiced by infants in the dream state, and it is indeed that mental practice that results in children speaking sentences far more quickly than otherwise would seem possible.
The dream world, then, develops faster than physical experience.
For some time the child is more secure there.
Without dreaming there would be no learning, nor would there be memory.”10
Dreams as Natural Therapy
“The dream’s happening affects your entire physical condition, and so has this constant therapeutic effect.
This result stems from the psychic situation set up within any dream drama and in it the problems or challenges of your existence are worked out.
Many probable actions are taken; these are then projected in other probable futures.
As you come to understand the nature of your own beliefs, you can learn to use the dream state more effectively for your conscious purposes.
It is one of the most efficient natural therapies, and the inner framework in which much of your physical body building actually takes place.”11
Dreams as Hormone Therapy
“The living art of your body is intimately connected with the dream state.
If there are chemical imbalances they are often corrected quite automatically in the dream state, as you act out situations calling up the production of hormones, say, that would be summoned in a like waking situation.
The role-playing in the dream drama, would be one in which you creatively worked out the problems that caused the imbalances to begin with.
Dreams of strongly aggressive nature in this context may be very beneficial to a given individual, allowing the release of usually inhibited feelings and freeing the body from tension.
By such constant dream therapy, both body and mind regulate themselves to a large degree.
So your flesh is affected by your dreams.
Your dreams and the physical events of your lives constantly alter the chemical balances within your body.
A dream may be purposely experienced to provide an outlet of a kind that is missing in your daily life.
It will mobilize your resources and fill your body with a rush of needed hormones, creating a dream state of stress that will bring the organism’s healing abilities into combat and result in an end to particular physical symptoms.
Another dream might provide a ‘dreaming” peaceful interlude in which all stress is minimized, with the overactive output of certain hormones and chemicals quieted as a result.
Such dreams will be greatly effective, but only for a short period of time unless the conscious mind faces the beliefs that have been causing the imbalance.”12
Nightmare Therapy
“In normal daily life, considerable natural therapy often takes place in the dream state, even when nightmares of such frightening degree arise that the sleeper is shocked into awakening.
The individual’s conscious mind is then forced to face the charged situation – but after the event, in retrospect.
The nightmare itself can be like a shock treatment given by one portion of the self to another.
The self is its own best therapist.
It knows precisely how many such “shocks” the psyche can take to advantage, which associations to animate through such intense experience and imagery, and which ones to leave alone.
Nightmares in series are often inner-regulated shock therapy.
They may frighten the conscious self considerably, but after all it comes awake in its normal world, shaken perhaps but secure in the framework of the day.
Other dream events, though forgotten, may also cushion the individual to withstand the effects of such “nightmare therapy.”
A period of such nightmares often leads quite naturally to dreams in which the self finally makes new and greater connections with the source of its own being.”13
Dreams for Inspiration
“Dreams have their startling qualities, promoting the insertion of unexpected developments, in which case they appear to deal with the breaking down of conserving principles.
In this fashion they also mirror your more exterior behavior, conserving what you know already, and yet introducing new patterns, new spontaneous orders that would sometimes seem to run against conservative issues.
They reinforce the past, for example, when you dream of past situations.
They also seem to undermine the integrity of the past by showing it to you in an unfamiliar light, mixing it with present and future tints.
Dreams often serve as the framework in which sudden remarkable insights appear that later enable a man or a woman to envision the world in a way that was not earlier predictable.
The world’s activities always include the insertion of surprising events.
This is true at all levels of nature, from microscopic to macroscopic.
All systems are open.”14
Dreams Useful for Solving Problems
“You do not realize the main physical problems that are solved for you, and by you, in your dreams.
This happens very frequently when you consciously set the problem before yourself, state it clearly, and then drift into sleep.
The same thing happens, however, even without such a conscious set.
Dreams give you all kinds of information concerning the state of your body, the world at large, and the probable exterior conditions that your present beliefs will bring about.
The dream state provides you with a trial framework in which you explore probable actions and decide upon the ones you want to physically materialize.
Not only nightmares, but many other dreams follow rhythms of a therapeutic nature far more effectively than any that are drug-induced.”15
Reconciliations in the Dream State
“If you want to clear up an argument, tell yourself that you will do so in the dream state.
There you can speak freely to those who may avoid you otherwise.
Many reconciliations take place at that level.
Request the answer to any problem and it will be given, but you must trust yourself and learn to interpret your own dreams.
There is no other way to do this except by beginning with yourself and working with your own dreams, for this will awaken your intuitive abilities and give you the knowledge that you need.
Your belief in the value of dreams can, therefore, increase their practical effectiveness.”16
Sleeping Pills & Medications
“Sleeping pills can interfere with the natural activity of dream therapy.
The heavy doses of chemicals introduced from the outside give you an entirely different kind of situation and add new stresses.
Certain chemicals may affect dreaming by altering the cells’ reality.
Many sleeping pills are detrimental, in that they inhibit the body’s natural response to its environment while an individual is sleeping, and deaden the intimate relationship between the dreaming mind and the sleeping body.
Because you have very limited ideas of what logic is, it seems to you that the dreaming self is not critical, or “logical”; yet it works with amazing discrimination, sifting data, sending some to certain portions of the body, and structuring memory.
Sleeping pills also impede the critical functions of dreams that are so often overlooked.
The facts are that dreams involve high acts of creativity.
These are not only intuitively based, but formed with a logic far surpassing your ideas of that quality.
These creative acts are then fitted together through associative processes that come together most precisely to form the dream events.”17
Sleep & Dream Deprivation
“As is known, anyone deprived of sufficient dreaming will most likely begin to hallucinate while in the waking state, for too much experience has built up that needs processing.
There are many secondary hormonal activities that take place in the dream state and at no other time.
Even cellular growth and revitalization are accelerated while the body sleeps.”18
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
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