from 'Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment'

“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: imaging 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.
“These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.
“The species – from your viewpoint – lived at a much slower pace in those terms. The blood, for example, did not need to course so quickly through the veins [and arteries], the heart did not need to beat as fast. And in an important fashion the coordination of the creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.
“In ways almost impossible to describe, the ground rules were not as yet firmly established. Gravity itself did not carry its all-pervasive sway, so that the air was more buoyant. Man was aware of its support in a luxurious, intimate fashion. He was aware of himself in a different way, so that, for example, his identification with the self did not stop where his skin stopped: He could follow it outward into the space about his form, and feel it merge with the atmosphere with a primal sense-experience that you have forgotten.
“During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge [man] gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, its constant, inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the CUs [consciousness units] translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into physical form.
“Then in your terms man began, with the other species, to waken more fully into the physical world, to develop the exterior senses, to intersect delicately and precisely with space and time. Yet man still sleeps and dreams, and that state is still a firm connective with his own origins, and with the origins of the universe as he knows it as well.
“... In a fashion those ancient dreamers, through their immense creativity, dreamed all of life’s creatures in all of their pasts, presents, and futures – that is, their dreams opened up the doors of space and time to entities that otherwise would not have been released into actualization, even as, for example, the units of consciousness were once released from the mind of All-That-Is.
“All possible entities that can ever be actualized always exist. They [have] always existed and they always will exist. All-That-Is must, by its characteristics, be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end to existence – and, in those terms, no beginning. But in terms of your world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces [waves] and as psychological entities [particles] of massive power, planted the seeds of your world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical form. In your terms those entities [particles] are your ancestors – and yet [they are] not yours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up your world."

Seth