Expanding Perceptions Through Dreams

Since the first time I picked up a Seth book by Jane Roberts, I felt as if I entered into a back and forth teaching relationship. My life seemed to move synchronistically with the books, sometimes my life pre-empting what I read and sometimes what I read seeming to influence or inform the way I lived my life. 

In the beginning I was quite shocked by the process, but now it feels so natural. I am currently reading ‘The Nature of Personal Reality,’ which I am taking my time over. It instinctively was a book that I was not going to whizz through, notes taken and then put down. I feel that I am really living this book. I work with it and it works with me.

It was no surprise that after a while of not having read it, I picked it up and started reading a section on dreams and our division of what we think to be conscious (i.e. waking) and unconscious (i.e. dreaming/sleep) reality. I saw how over nearly the past year I have been putting a great deal of what was written into effect seemingly very naturally.

In ‘Seth Speaks’ (Jane Roberts) it introduces us to considering our current sleep patterns, suggesting that through their adoption, we are not maximising our potential. It is suggested that we would be more efficient were we to sleep less and more frequently.  In this book it is gone into in more detail. 

The basic gist is that we would do better to use the whole twenty-four hour period as opposed to the half and half (more or less) current division. We would benefit our waking hours by having more naps and sleeping less in the night, a maximum of six hours. 

Currently we have a very long stretch of awake time whether we are productive or not. In my case I have found that around 3pm I am inexplicably tired. I used to fight this and would be able to, but now I try to lie down where I can. If it’s waiting to pick up my children then I close my eyes for 10 minutes in the back seat and it is re-energising. 

In part it gives my body a rest allowing it to regenerate, it gets me off the wheel of what I think I should be doing, usually a list of speeding up things, at times with little perspective, and it reconnects me with another part of myself that I find very comforting. I am then able to draw on images, senses and feelings that would not be available to me if I just kept running. 

The dreaming state also benefits from a greater closeness with our awake consciousness, which is then able to take a more active role in the dreaming world.

Our current sleeping patterns cut us off from a synthesis of the two states in which we could begin to see how each actually informs, inspires and creates the other. In ‘Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment’ (Jane Roberts), it is stated that our reality springs from the dream world, the origin of everything we experience, think and create is within the dream state. Our entire world sprang and does spring first from dreams.

Previously our focus, the point of our consciousness resided within the dream world and flicked in and out of what we consider physical reality. At some point, however, our point of consciousness became more fixed in physical reality and so concretely that we no longer begin to consider consciously moving it into the dream world. What happens if we do?

The first thing that happens for me is that I begin to feel and realise that everything is connected. As I become aware of my dreams I begin to see that my life does not stop and start between sleeping and waking. There is a continuum, a flow between the two. What I deal with in waking reality, I deal with too in my dreams and vice versa. 

When I type up my dreams, usually months after having them, I am able to read them in one and track the changes and see how they worked in tandem with my waking life. I see how elements of my life were working together, there was no real separation and it gives me the sense of how much guidance is available and that makes me feel very connected. It makes me feel that all is One and this is incredibly uplifting. 

As I practice awaking to this through working with my dreams I become more able to attune into this feeling in other instances in my life. It is the Law of Attraction. Once I am able to start resonating with this feeling, more is drawn to me that expands upon it.

The more I become familiar with the language of dreams and accept what would seem to be contradictory to the perceptions of waking reality, I get to open to the idea that there are more ways of “seeing” things. Later it occurs to me that perhaps I can bring these into my waking consciousness. 

One example is that of spatial awareness. In the dream state I can dream of a street for example. I can see the street as if I were at street level, as in the usual waking spatial perception, but simultaneously I will see it as a map and simultaneously from an aerial perspective, a bird’s eye view. In the dream this will be completely normal, I will be perceiving the street from all three perspectives all at the same time without differentiating them until I awaken and write it down. 

Within the dream the main action continues undisturbed, sometimes one perception is loosened or favoured over another. Perhaps there will come a day in which I can consciously pick the means of perceiving within the dream state, perhaps not! 

It is common in my dreams to be in one place that looks a certain way, I know it by a certain name and yet I know with a deep feeling sense that it is another place entirely. This is part of the language of dreams, they overlay in order to inform. Also, I feel, to loosen the concreteness we are overly used to adopting. This affects my waking life and it does so seamlessly. 

A year ago I realised that when listening to someone talking on the phone I was able to hear the words they were speaking, following the story they were imparting, but I was able to lift off and open up to the feeling states that were being touched upon. It was as though there were a series of currents, one was the words, the other the feelings, what was generating the words, the history behind it. I have become more able to tune into this perception. 

Whilst hearing the spoken word, I am able to access at times a feeling sense for the array of images, information at times that is really being imparted using the words more as openers, pointers to other realities rather than the thing in itself. Becoming more aware and familiar with the dreaming state has allowed me to become more relaxed, comfortable and open to this in waking.

I believe that dreams allow us to get a little bit nearer to the reality of our multidimensionality and they do this in a number of ways. One is the feeling, and now belief, that what happens in my dreams are really lived events.

I mentally refer to my dreams as real happenings. They provide me with alternate and various reference points. They are as real and as important as what happens to me in waking reality and they are not cut off from it. 

One night I found myself sitting next to someone at a dinner and it was someone I tended to find the comic side in. I remembered a dream I had a few months before in which someone was making fun of a person and I made the conscious choice not to do the same and got to connect them in a more beautiful way. 

As I began speaking at the dinner the feeling of the dream and the recollection of it came back. I then made a choice to follow what I had learnt in the dream rather than my usual attitude to this person. By doing so the conversation utterly shifted. He began expressing what he was seeking, what his perceptions were of the limits of the society of which he was a part, the values they had that he didn’t share. 

In short we were able to go beyond the surfaces and connect on a deeper level. I was able to share part of my experience with him without feeling threatened in myself either. Had I not had the initial dream I would not have had the information available to me to make the conscious choice to respond differently.

The more I am able to recall more dreams, the more I become aware that there are some that are far away, that I get a vague feeling sense of, some are very deep and I am aware that I am up to things that I cannot remember. I am being taught, I am teaching at times. I get to understand that the work I do within the dream state is no less relevant than the work I do in my waking state. 

But what about the great part that I do not remember, what happens then? The question that arises is who am I and where do I go? I am more comfortable with the idea that I am up to things that I cannot hold within my conscious mind. In the beginning this terrified me.

Part of the concept of Self was what I could hold onto, that I could mentally tabulate and thus ultimately control. To get to the point where I am willing to accept that I do not know what I am doing at times is very deep and can make me feel quite dizzy. 

But I am comfortable now with the idea that who I am is greater than where my consciousness as translated through my physical form rests. I get to connect with this in the dream state, I get closer to the multidimensional reality of my being, though what I tend to bring back is more a sense, a feeling state than any concrete memories.

I’m sure they inform me, but on a level that I cannot draw into my waking consciousness immediately on awakening. Perhaps those fuzzy remembrances are the roots  from which my daily reality will spring, the seeds to start birthing new experiences.

Another aspect of the multidimensionality in dreams is the relaxing of the perception of time. In dreams I can experience multiple events overlaying each other simultaneously. As I write I start to put a sequence to them, but I am becoming more aware that within the dream state they sometimes seem to be happening at once. 

We are told that all time is simultaneous, that it is neither linear nor sequential, yet we perceive it in the latter mode as part of our human experience and our need to survive in the world as we know it. 

In the dreams I can follow the main narrative so to speak and can also follow all the events, characters, histories that make it up. I can follow each thought whilst not getting in any way distracted from the main narrative. The amount of following I can do does not seem limited. 

The dream experiences then can serve as an analogy for the ability we have to try different things out, to experience probabilities before we call them into physical being and this ability is constantly unfolding from a single moment. It shows me in visual form how consciousness in exploring itself can go off and off spiralling in myriad forms whilst still maintaining its wholeness.

Working with my dreams helps to expand my beliefs, perceptions and thus experience within my waking reality. As I begin to accept the dream language and the world or worlds to which I enter into, I get to explore the possibility that those perceptions may be available to me here as well. 

I am experimenting more consciously, since reading the pages in ‘The Nature of Personal Reality,’ with a more relaxed sleep pattern. I am sleeping less, which works well for me (up till now, it’s only been a few days!) and trying to close my eyes for short pauses throughout my day where I can get it. 

The sleep I get in the day is not how I traditionally understand sleep. Through my breath I enter into deep relaxation and then at some time is as though I rejoin myself, I reawaken into consciousness and it is this reawakening that makes me realise that I slept. 

Long sleeps have a more comatose feel to them. I feel very closely, though not always remembered, that in these coming to's there were worlds, dimensions thinly veiled from the waking one that were accessed or accessible in the dreaming state. A couple of times I have awoken and been shocked at what I remember because I felt as if I had experienced an entire lifetime in the consciousness shift of sleep and perhaps I had…