“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As the creation of any art is intimately connected with the dream state, so is the living art of your body. Its breathing form is influenced by the great therapy of dreams. If there are chemical imbalances they are often corrected quite automatically in the dream state, as you act out situations calling up the production of hormones, say, that would be summoned in a like waking situation. (See the footnote about hormones in the 621st session in Chapter Four.)

The role-playing in the dream drama would be one in which you creatively worked out the problems that caused the imbalances to begin with. Dreams of a strongly aggressive nature in this context may be very beneficial to a given individual, allowing the release of usually inhibited feelings and freeing the body from tension. By such constant dream therapy, both body and mind regulate themselves to a large degree. So your flesh is affected by your dreams.

In them of course one object may be a symbol, but there is no such thing as an overall statement of dream symbolism, in which a given symbol will have a general meaning. There are too many variations in personal experience. It is true that in dreams you do reach some of the deepest sources of your being at times, but even there, the expression of that being is far too individualistic to assign the same kind of “unconscious” meaning to overall symbols.

With dreams the same is true. No one really knows their meaning but yourself. If you read books in which you are told that a certain object always represents such and such, then you are like the artist who accepts the critic’s idea of the symbols in his own work. You will feel alienated from your dreams since you are trying to make them follow a pattern that is not yours.

In any case, interpretation involves but one part of the task as you try to consciously assess a dream’s meaning. The real work of the dream is done during the event itself, on deep psychic and biological levels.

The dream’s happening affects your entire physical condition, and so has this constant therapeutic effect. This result stems from the psychic situation set up within any dream drama (pause), and in it the problems or challenges of your existence are worked out. Many probable actions are taken; these are then projected into the probable future.

As you come to understand the nature of your own beliefs, you can learn to use the dream state more effectively for your conscious purposes. It is one of the most efficient natural therapies, and the inner framework in which much of your physical body building actually takes place.

Now: There is one point here that I would like to make. Some of the drugs given to “mental” patients impede the natural flow of dream therapy to varying degrees.

The new balance signals the organism that an inner problem has been resolved. The body, mind and psyche are then more or less operating together. When new psychic challenges arise, another round of natural therapy begins in rhythmic pattern. When imbalances of a physical nature are removed by the introduction of drugs, however, the body signals say that the inner dilemma must have been taken care of also — while this may not be the case at all (very positively).

(10:49.) The same applies to mental conditions, which have a way, sometimes, of working themselves out better without your professional therapies than with them — often cures happen in spite of your best-intentioned treatment. One of the latest ideas is that certain mental conditions are caused by chemical imbalances. Supplying these does result in some improvement, but such inequalities do not cause any disease. Your beliefs about the nature of your own reality do. If medication of that sort improves the immediate situation, the inner problem of beliefs must still be worked out. Otherwise other illnesses will be substituted.

Natural therapy, therefore, is difficult to achieve to its fullest benefit in your society, because it is constantly interfered with from the time of your birth. Yet it operates regardless of interference, and is always at your command to give health and vitality to the living sculpture in which you have your present experience.

Even with so-called mental disorders, however, orientation with the body is very important, as are the individual’s beliefs about his own form and its relationship with others and with time and space. (Pause.) There will often be chemical imbalances in such a situation, unconsciously produced by the individual, sometimes in order to allow him to work out a series of hallucinatory events. Such sustained “objectified dreaming” necessitates a change, chemically, from the normal state of waking consciousness. It is important to note that regardless of the mental or physical illness adopted, it is chosen for a reason, and is a natural method that the individual himself knows he is physically and mentally equipped to handle.