Dreamlike Worlds: The Early Stages of Human Consciousness in a Forming Universe
Book highlights from Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment by Jane Roberts
These grids of perception “do not exist forever” in your dimension of time, for your dimension of time cannot hold anything that is outside it. Once a world exists, however, it becomes imprinted or stamped upon eternity, so that it exists in time and out of it “at once.
So in the beginning of [your] world, consciousness fluctuated greatly, focusing gently at the start, but not quite as willing to be as fully independent as its first intent might seem. You had the sleepwalkers, early members of your species, whose main concentration was still veiled in that earlier subjectivity, and they were your true ancestors, in those terms.
For what would seem to you to be eons, according to your time scale, men were in the dreaming state far more than they were in the waking one. They slept long hours, as did the animals — awakening, so to speak, to exercise their bodies, obtain sustenance, and, later, to mate. It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imagining the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories — building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.
What was needed was a highly focused, precisely tuned physical self that could operate efficiently in a space and time scheme that was being formed along with physical creatures — a self, however, that in one way or another must be supported by realms of information and knowledge of a kind that was basically independent of time and space.
Your dreaming self possesses psychological dimensions that escape you, and they serve to connect genetic and reincarnational systems. You must, again, realize that the self that you know is only a part of your larger identity — an identity that is [also] historically actualized in other times than your own. You must also understand that mental activity is of the utmost potency. You experience your dreams from your own perspective, as a rule. (Long pause.) I am simply trying to give you a picture of one kind of dream occurrence, or to show you one picture of dream activity of which you are not usually aware.
Life is to be pursued at all costs — not because it is innately meaningful, but because it is the only game going, and it is a game of chance at best. One life is all you have, and that one is everywhere beset by the threat of illness, disaster, and war — and if you escape such drastic circumstances, then you are still left with a life that is the result of no more than lifeless elements briefly coming into a consciousness and vitality that is bound to end.
An alchemical dream about Coagulatio
Dream, Wednesday, December 7, 2022
I am on a pilgrimage, wading through shallow waters, trying to find something I lost.
A half-buried plane from long ago.
Something that came down from the spirit and wanted to be concretized. A thought, an idea, an inspiration.
I know it’s from my childhood. I know it is a piece of my soul. I stare at the marvel of it all.
Spirit to matter. Crashed and buried. Things lost can always be found.
Related: An alchemical dream about Calcinatio
The waterless seal
Dream, October 24, 2022
I found myself regressed in an apartment belonging to my mother and ex-stepdad. The water bill was past due and I was told I could not bathe myself in their home. As I was packing my stuff to leave in search of a shower, I discovered a very dry mama seal floundering in the bathtub. I said, “I don’t care how much it costs, this beautiful creature needs a lot of water,” and I turned on the shower full blast.
The seal is a creature that can exist both in water and land — symbolizing perfect harmony between our inner world and the external world. As a totem a seal represents our creative and imaginative faculties. This dream felt impoverished and imbalanced but I could not let my seal spirit friend sit in an empty bathtub.
Spare no expense for your soul or your imagination or your dreams.
Noticient (v.) language of the angels
Noticient, they angels said, is a sentient noticing.
It begins with noticing, then becoming conscious of the senses or intuitive sensations.
It is a state of being.
And when you let that guide you as your intelligence or a compass, then you are acting as a noticient being.
This is a doorway to connect to the angel realm.
The sad girl & the island
On a ferry floating across a body of water, I meet a young girl on her way back home. She is sad. Her eyes well up with tears.
She had lived her whole life on an island she thought was paradise. Before this voyage, she never knew what it was like to leave. Now, as her island comes into view, it begins to feel too small for her. She had caught a glimpse of a whole new world, and because of that she now had to answer to a new mind and a new heart that made her want more and more for herself.
The girl mourned her past perspective which had kept her satisfied and safe. She now understood she could never go back home. She was being pushed toward the unknown, and even though the guiding force is divine, and every new discovery would be life-expanding and destined for her, she was still sad and she cried and I cried with her.
Updated: Dreaming as a technology
Dream imagery: Mental Clouds
Dreaming is a technology. Every night I become more adept at translating the language (symbols) of dreams.
On March 8, I dreamed someone who loved me hired a skywriter to write my name in the night sky in neon light, but there was so much cloud coverage that I could barely see it.
When I woke up, I had a knowing that the clouds were my thoughts getting in the way. My mental body was building a wall between love and me. Suddenly, so many other dreams from before made sense!
From Symbolic and the Real by Ira Progoff:
If the dream goes unheeded, or if it is not understood, and if its subject matter remains important, the dream will usually be repeated, either with the same or with equivalent symbols. It seems that if an important part of the process taking place in the depths of the psyche is not recognized on the conscious level so that the person cannot cooperate with it and draw it forward in the acts of his life, the process of growth is stymied. The individual then remains in a condition of self-stalemate until he learns to recognize the tendency of his inner life and manages to bring his outer life into accord with it.
I thought about the other coded symbols I had unlocked (specific to me or universal):
Water/Waves/Ocean — subconscious, different levels of consciousness or what is repressed.
Landscapes/Cities — usually depicts the state/shape/territory of my heart.
Movement/Transportation/Airplanes/Buses — journeys, mental/subconscious/emotional or otherwise.
Spaces/Rooms/Furniture — usually calls for rearranging of mental structures. perspective shifting. mental baggage.
Clouds — my thoughts, a system of intelligence that differs from my intuition or emotional body.
Dream imagery does what self-help books cannot do.
How dream imagery works for me: First it is the image, then the understanding or knowing of what the image represents, followed by the emotion that’s anchored to the dream which makes it so meaningful and has the power to transform something inside of me.
UPDATE:
El Candado (the Spanish word for padlock) is a provoker-symbol in dreams. It show me doors I’ve neglected to lock or unlock. Sometimes there is an intruder, other times I’ve locked someone out when they needed to be let in.
Dream language will never be entirely translatable — but the energy from dreams is what we need to carry with us in our waking lives.
When I dream of El Candado and wake up, I ask myself throughout the day: who I am locking out or what I am letting in?
Every dream has a request, and when I dream of El Candado, it is asking me to pay attention to my emotional boundaries and physical space. So I do exactly that.
Landscapes and movements as symbols
Last night around 1AM, I woke up from a dream about Oakland. The cities and towns you live in have energies and histories and destinies, just like we do. I found myself there when I was at the lowest point in my consciousness. Oakland cradled me when no one else cared.
My apartments were shit holes. I was chased, cussed at or threatened everyday. I listened to a man get stabbed and bleed out right underneath my window. I heard my neighbor — a young mother and sex worker — get bargained down to a ten dollar blow job. My best friend’s car riddled with gun shots. My building raided by the FBI. West Oakland was a ring of Dante’s Inferno, but it was my lovely hell.
The ley lines of cities map your heart. I was poor. I was broken. I was depressed. There were no pretenses. I was sad and so was everyone else around me, and I found solace in that.
In last night’s dream, I parked my car at the top of the highest hill in Oakland, got out and set off on foot to search for my love. The town became the edge of a cliff. There was no railing, just a single-track trail. I almost slipped twice, and I was scared, but I kept going. Eventually, I hit a chain-link fence and remembered how I tore my wrist open climbing one just like it when I was 8, so I chickened-out and turn back toward my car. At that moment, I woke up.
A love note I wrote in 2010, while living in Oakland.
Some dream symbolism is so blatantly obvious it slaps you in the face. I still have chain-link fences posted up in my heart. It keeps me from loving the way I want to love. I need to tear those fuckers down.
Our personal journeys to evolve/ascend/bloom-then-wither-gracefully unfold like archetypes and legends and myths. The key to discovering what story you might be living, and obstacles you are to overcome, is to learn your symbols and patterns and rhythms. There has been movement since the beginning.