“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You will find that your dreams actually are in your mind when you awaken. Write them down at once, before getting out of bed. If you have a tendency to scribble, then use loose sheets of paper and later transcribe them in the notebook. Don’t worry about neatness, but concentrate on capturing as much of the dream content as possible. If you recall several dreams, jot down a quick sentence about each, then add the details. Leave space after each entry for future notes.

But the problem ran deeper than this, as we discovered in class discussion. Like many people, Mrs. Taylor was brought up on a combined emotional porridge of orthodox religion and Freud. In her mind, Freud’s ideas of repressed subconscious material merged with religious teachings of hell and the origin of sin. Actually, she was afraid that dreams would reveal her “lower” instincts. I personally think that these distorted ideas about the nature of the inner self represent the main impediments to dream recall or to any real study of the subjective personality.

A recorder may also be used, of course. You must still play back the tape and transfer the dreams into a notebook, however, so that the records are easily accessible. This actually takes more time, but many people prefer to speak their dream recollections into a recorder at once, rather than to write them down.

Until we actually tried the dream experiments, we didn’t really have too clear an idea of what to expect. This series of sessions in which Seth explained dream reality and gave us instructions about exploring it, always struck me as highly evocative, yet oddly ambiguous. In a way, Seth was as nebulous as dreams are, but we already had over two thousand pages of manuscript he had dictated through me in trance; and surely he had changed our lives. Now here he was, telling us how to travel through a territory more naturally his, I thought, than ours.