THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE.
GROUP DREAMS AND VALUE FULFILLMENT

Last month, in the opening notes for Session 931, in Chapter 9, I recorded that on July 8 Jane spontaneously wrote “a complete outline for a book on Seth’s magical approach to reality.” Actually, we’ve been quite aware of the potential of such an idea ever since Seth began that material a year ago.³ After supper this evening we went over the loose-leaf notebook of information Jane has accumulated for The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book, and discussed how she could follow her outline in putting all of that material—on our dreams, psychic events and insights, her poetry and our essays—together with Seth’s private sessions on the magical approach. She’d had trouble doing that at various times in the past year. Such a book would involve the publication of much Seth material that could either lie in our files for a long time, or never be published. I now feel that many of those sessions aren’t so private after all, and can help others. The more I talked about the idea the better I liked it. Jane seemed to pick up on my own enthusiasm.

Jane’s idea tonight was to have a session on Dreams only: “I don’t want more private stuff that’ll just make me feel more stupid,” she said. I reminded her that when I refer to her sinful self, I only mean certain groups of ideas that we’ve personified for convenience’s sake.)

Next chapter heading (10), to be called: “The Pleasure Principle. Group Dreams and Value Fulfillment.”

Earlier, I also spoke about the importance of dreams in man’s early background, and their importance to you as a species. Here, I want to stress the social aspects of dreams, and to point out the fact that dreams also show you some of the processes that are involved in the actual formation of physical events: You actually come into an event, therefore, long before the event physically happens, at other levels of consciousness, and a good deal of this prior activity takes place in the state of dreaming.

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. (Pause.) As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.

Group dreaming was at one time taken for granted as a natural human characteristic—in a tribe, for example, when new locations were being sought, perhaps in time of drought. The various tribal members would have dreams in which the problem was considered, each dreamer tackling whatever aspect of the problem that best suited his or her abilities and personal intents. The dreamers would travel out-of-body in various directions to see the extent of drought conditions, and to ascertain the best direction for the tribe to take in any needed migration.

(Pause at 8:43.) Their dreams would then be shared by the tribe in the morning, or at special meetings, when each dreamer would give a rendition of the dream or dreams that seemed to be involved. In the same way, other dreamers would simply check with the dreamers of other villages or tribes—perhaps a hundred or even more miles distant. Some such dreams were extremely direct, others were clothed in symbolism according to the style of the dreamer, but in any case the dream was understood to have a public significance as well as a private one.

The same still applies, though often dreams themselves are forgotten. Instead, for example, for news or for advice you watch your morning television news, which provides you with a kind of manufactured dream that to some extent technologically serves the same purpose. Instead of sending cameramen and newspaper people to the farthest corners of the earth, early man sent out aspects of himself to gather the news and to form it into dream dramas. Oftentimes much of the material did not need to become conscious: It was “unconsciously” acted upon, turned directly into action. Now such dreams simply act as backup systems, rising to the fore whenever they are needed. Their purpose was and is to increase the value fulfillment of the species and of the individual.

(Long pause at 9:00.) 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.

3. In Chapter 9 of Dreams, see the opening notes for Session 920 at superscript number 5.

“In the case of our book (Dreams), however, Ruburt himself was worried about your attitude. His overall concerns of course to some extent blocked his creative processes, which further alarmed him. The main issue here is that feeling of responsibility again, so that he writes or whatever because he loves to do it, not because he should or must, and that involves my book as well as his own.

End at 9:25 P.M. The “crisis point” Seth referred to revolved around the continuous efforts Jane and I had been making to help her; see the opening notes for the session. I hadn’t realized she was concerned that I thought she should let her work go on Dreams and concentrate instead upon our private material, but I was quickly able to convince her that I didn’t feel that way.)