“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If small families kept track of their own family dreams, for example, they could discover unsuspected correlations and sense the interplay of subjective and objective drama with which they are always psychologically involved. Notice what kind of information you seek out from the newspapers, for example. Do you read the front page and ignore sports, or vice versa? Do you read the gossip column? The obituary? 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.

In the dreaming state, then, the needs and desires of families, communities and countries are well known. The dream state serves as a rich source for the world’s knowledge, and is also therefore responsible for the outgrowth of its technology. This is a highly important point, for “the technological world out there” was at one time the world of dreams. The discoveries and inventions that made the industrial world possible were always latent in man’s mind, and represented an inner glittering landscape of probability that he brought into actualization through the use of dreams—the intuitive and the conscious manipulation of material that was at one time latent.

(9:23. See Note 1 for an excerpt from the few short paragraphs of personal material Seth gave us before saying good night at 9:35 P.M. Then see Note 2 for what is surely a pretty wild idea of mine.)

1. “The entire idea of the magical approach,” Seth told us, “is of itself sustaining.

This material very nicely supplements information I’d quoted from the second session Seth gave in his series on the magical approach to reality. Jane delivered that session just a year ago, on August 11, 1980. In Chapter 9 of Dreams, see the third part of Note 7 for Session 920.

2. I couldn’t help feeling sad and frustrated as I took down Seth’s words on dreaming, and Jane reacted in the same way when I read them to her after the session. I’d been especially impressed by this passage (and still am): “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.”

We talked about how people could be helped to consciously realize their participation in this worldwide dream organization. Why, I wondered, couldn’t the nations of the world set up cooperative studies to verify its existence? At once, I told Jane, I thought that science and religion would be violently opposed to the idea, at least in the beginning, for it would challenge many rigid beliefs held by each of those disciplines. In deeper terms, of course, such a study would actually validate the sources of science and religion [just as it would confirm Seth’s material on dreams, incidentally!]. The experiment has the potential for significantly broadening our conscious understanding of the world we’re creating.

Setting up such a global organization to study dreams, I told Jane, with some amusement, would probably require a decade of arguing among nations. Would governments gather the information, or independent agencies? How would all of this be paid for, administered and analyzed? How long would it take to acquire statistically significant data? Would the peoples of the world cooperate? I said they most enthusiastically would, for if Seth is right the dream research would have a sound intuitive basis: It would uncover and reinforce many deeper aspects of our individual and collective beings—and I know of few things more important than that consciously we understand ourselves as well as we can in order to meet the great challenges we’re creating. But, I said, imagine trying to win the cooperation of the nations of the world for such an undertaking! Actually, it would be quite an advance if we could even agree to begin talking about such a study.

As for myself, I think I’ve had some good results keeping informed through the dream state about people and events in my home town of Sayre, which lies just across the New York State border in Pennsylvania, and is only 18 miles from the hill house in Elmira. We have seldom visited Sayre in recent years. I dream about it often, however—sometimes with results that have been verified in unexpected ways. Jane plans to use some of those dreams in the book she’s planning on Seth’s concept of the magical approach to reality.