“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In my book, The Seth Material, I explained some of these episodes. They convinced us that valid instances of ESP were being demonstrated. In the out-of-body experiences, Seth correctly described events that happened across the country and in Puerto Rico. Our own envelope tests not only demonstrated ESP but also offered evocative glimpses into the methods by which such information is received.

Yet, even when we admit the inspirational and supportive nature of dreams, even when we learn to recall dreams and apply them to daily life, we still only begin to glimpse their multidimensional reality. Dream interpretation is important to our three-dimensional mentalities, for example. We believe in utilization; if dreams can’t be useful, then what good are they? Dreams can give us consistent, valid information about our motives, needs and decisions. They can be utilized as very practical aids to daily life. But this is only a portion of any real exploration of dream reality.

Dream investigation or manipulation as an aesthetic pursuit — as an art, embarked upon for its own sake — this is something else again and is sometimes suspect because of its solitary nature. Yet the fact remains that there is a dream reality with a “structure,” “landscape” and images that appear to be made of matter — but matter that obeys different rules than those with which we are familiar.

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.

This method is really easy and workable — but it can be sabotaged. One of my students, Gloria, had great difficulty remembering her dreams until I discovered that she was using a clock radio to awaken her in the morning and the news happened to be on. The dreams must be recalled before you become mentally involved with the world’s activities.

If you have remembered only unpleasant dreams in the past, you may have built up a block against recalling any dreams at all. Mrs. Taylor, another student, had this problem. She gave herself the proper suggestions each night but had the greatest difficulty in remembering even one dream. “Maybe you really don’t want to remember any,” I said.

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.

The unseen self is not a dungeon of repressed ideas and feelings, dangerous to behold, but the fountainhead of individual existence, upon which our present physical survival is dependent. Beyond this, it is our pathway to creative expression, inspiration and wisdom — a doorway to our own greater identity. This does not mean that we do not repress fears and desires beneath consciousness. It means that we must allow ourselves greater flexibility, look into ourselves, admit the fears and release the energy used in repression. As you will see later in this book, dreams can often release such repressed material for your conscious examination.

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.

You may try two different wordings for a start, and now I am speaking of precise wording. The first: ‘I will wake up after each of my first five dreams and record each one immediately.’ The second alternative wording would be the same as the one I have just given, but the ‘wake up’ would be omitted. That is, it is possible for you to record the dreams, speaking into the microphone without awakening in your terms.

This is not only possible but by far the most convenient. You should try both methods and discover which one works the best for you. If at all possible, the recorder should be in the bedroom (not in another part of the house.) It is the immediate dream recall we are after. We want you to record the dream at the instant of awakening or at the instant that the dream is about to dissolve.

Now, mankind uses but a portion of its capabilities. When you are well along in these experiments, you will find that you handle them very well, with no draining of energies. Your sleeping hours are already productive. We shall also use them to give you training in the utilization of various stages of consciousness. Added to this, the training will give you valuable insight into the nature of dreams in general, the stages of the subconscious and the inner life of the personality when it is dissociated from its physical environment to some considerable extent.

Much later, there will be other suggestions for you in which you will direct your sleeping self to perform certain activities, visit certain locations and bring back information. This is obviously still very much in the future, but it is well within the abilities of the inner self.

In your sleep, you may have greeted friends who are strangers to your waking self. But consider the other side of the coin. For when you are asleep, you usually cannot find the street upon which you live your waking hours, and when you are asleep, you do not know your waking self. The sleeping self is your identity.

If you are thinking in terms of secondary personalities, you can prove nothing one way or another. A secondary personality would also use different gestures. Either way, this would be no proof of my independent nature, but I’m glad to see you’ve been thinking about it.

Now and then with Ruburt, to a greater or lesser degree, my own habits therefore show through, for I use his muscles in a different way than he does. But scientifically, this would not be proof of my existence as an independent personality who has survived death. Not that this concerns me, for it does not.

Bill laughed, and shortly later, the session ended. By now I sat down during sessions, and changes had taken place in my trance state so that the personality change was very marked. Rob was used to this, but Bill and Peg attended sessions only infrequently, and to Bill it was a constant source of amazement. Peg took it for granted.

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.

I was also interested in what I did in dreams — not just generally, but for any given night. During one period of four nights, I recorded twenty-one dreams. In these I was involved in four exciting episodes in which I ran from danger, used my wits to overcome it or faced it directly. I ran through radioactive rain (in a dream that, oddly enough, proved precognitive!), wandered through lovely gardens, explored several unfamiliar houses, and spoke with a well-known author whom I’ve never met. Not bad, I thought, for someone who hadn’t left the bed all night!

People who have always remembered many of their dreams may be less than impressed with the idea of recording dream activities, but others for whom sleep means oblivion will find dream recall a fascinating endeavor and the variety of dream acts almost astonishing. Even those with good dream-memories will find that persistant dream recall experiments are invaluable. As we discovered later, it is the effort required to remember dreams, and the resulting stretching of consciousness that finally opens up dream reality.

But if all this is so important, why can’t we do it more easily and naturally? Why do we need experiments? According to Seth, the way we use the ego and its idea of reality stand in our way. When he was still outlining these experiments for us, Seth explained this in some detail.

The ego itself cannot directly experience certain intuitions and psychological experiences, but it can experience them insofar as it can become aware of them on an intellectual basis. When training forces the ego to become too rigid and to limit its perceptions of other realities, then the intuitions will not be accepted by the ego because intuitional experience will not fit into the framework of reality that it accepts as valid.

The ego in that case will therefore fight against what it then considers an unknown threat to survival. Struggles are initiated then that are entirely unnecessary. We want to bring intuitional comprehension to a point where the ego will accept it. In our dream experiments, this is one of the purposes we hope to achieve. The ego is not equipped to delve directly into nonphysical realities, but if it is trained to be flexible, it will accept such knowledge from other wider horizons of the self.

This will then allow us to procede into the relationship between the waking and sleeping personality and discover the many ways in which the personality’s aims and goals are not only reflected but sometimes achieved in and through the dream condition.

Usually the dream state is considered from a negative standpoint and compared unfavorably with the waking condition. Emphasis is laid upon those conditions present in the waking state but absent from the dreaming experience. We shall consider those aspects of consciousness which are present in the dream environment and absent in the physical one. No study of human personality can pretend to be thorough that does not take the importance of dream reality into consideration.

As mentioned previously, we will also deal with the nature of space, time and distance, as they appear in the dream environment. Some of our experiments along these lines will be most illuminating. Here the ego cannot go, but it can benefit from the information, and perhaps in time, even a shadow of the ego may pass through that strange land and feel in some small way at home.