“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.)

They were of great aid, of course, in human politics, so that through dreams the intents of tribal leaders, say, were known to the others. Some people within the tribe specialized in such dreams, and again, dream content was and is directed by the individual intents, purposes and interests of the dreamer. In a certain manner dreaming, then, helped sharpen such individual tendencies while still directing them toward the public value fulfillment. The person interested most in herbs and plant life would also find that nightly dreams mirrored that daytime preoccupation, so that nightly dream excursions might find the dreamer examining strange herbs in another location than the native one. Or he might be given knowledge as to how the herbs could best be used for healing purposes. People are natural mimics, as are some animals and birds, so when tribal members related their dreams, they did not just tell them but acted them out with great mobility, carefully mimicking whatever animals or people or elements of land they may have encountered.

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.