“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Man explored the physical world in the dreaming state long before he explored it physically. Such dreams gave him the assurance that other lands existed outside of his own, and spurred him onward into those physical expeditions in which the species has always taken a particular delight.

A man or woman might [be] while dreaming suddenly in strange territory, looking at the sky from a different viewpoint, with, say, a familiar river nowhere in sight, and with a mountain where ordinarily a plain might be. This was in a way as startling an experience as it would be to you to find yourselves on some distant planet. (You do, for that matter, explore space in the same fashion, and on at least some occasions your own “visitors from outer space” are dream travelers from other dimensions of reality. Period.)

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.

(9:05.) One person’s dreams, therefore, while his or her own, will still fit into an important notch in the dreams of a given family. One person might, because of his or her own interests, seek largely from dreams warnings of difficulty or trouble, and therefore be the family’s dream watchguard—the one who has, say, the nightmares for everyone else. That person will also serve a somewhat similar role in the waking state, as a member of a family. The question in such instances is the reason for such a person’s overconcern and alarm in the first place—why the intense interest in such possible catastrophes, or in crime or whatever?—and the answer lies in an examination of the person’s feelings and beliefs about the nature of existence itself.

“It should remind you of the true effortlessness that is in a fashion responsible for your very existence. When you become overly concerned or worried in any area, remember that you are thinking those thoughts while the process of thinking is utterly effortless. That realization alone can further remind you that the conscious mind does not have to have all (underlined) the information required. It only needs to have the faith that means are available—even if those means are beyond its own scope of activity.”

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.

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.