“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth gave us our first instructions in 1964. The whole idea of deliberate dream recall was new to us. The methods are not new, though we had never heard of them at the time. I’ll paraphrase them here: Simply buy a notebook to be used exclusively for dreams. Keep it with a pencil or pen by your bed. Before you fall to sleep at night, give yourself this suggestion: “I can remember my dreams and write them down in the morning.”

It wasn’t until 1965 that Seth began to suggest variations of the early dream recall instructions and to add other techniques for more advanced dream investigation. Here are a few excerpts from that material.

There are many ways in which you can approach these newer dream experiments. You may, if you prefer, begin by suggesting that you will waken after each of the first five dreams … If possible, we want to get the dreams in order here. …

The present within which you seem to experience the dream is not, however, the present in physical time — the present in which your body lies upon the bed. There is a fine distinction here and one that you will learn through experience as you go on, so I will not discuss it now.

It should be obvious also that within your dreams a special location that belongs to the present physical time can be experienced in the past or in the future within the dream framework, and again, there is much more here also than meets the eye; so watch out so that you can catch these developments.

Surely you can arrange a spotlight and we could set it here … so you could get a better look.

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.

Once my interest was aroused, I was really determined to find out where I went and what I did in my dreams. In one study of eight hundred of my own dreams, I was really surprised to find that only seventy of them took place in my old hometown, and even here, as a rule, the action involved the present rather than the past. Previously I’d taken it for granted that a much larger percentage of my dreaming involved childhood places.

And the ego must have its feet upon solid earth. It is naked and out of its element outside of the normal environment of physical existence. To some extent, its distrust of the dream experience is necessary for the overall balance of the personality. Physical reality is, after all, a rock to which the ego must cling; from it, the ego achieves its prestige and reason for existence. … This provides necessary balance and control, and results in the sturdy anchorage of the personality in the environment in which it must presently survive. You have here one of the main reasons why you must request the subconscious to enable you to recall dreams. The ego would see no reason for such a memory and on general principles attempts to repress them.

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.