“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The number of remembered dreams should be much higher than your present system allows. … I also suggest that the first recalled dream for any given evening be compared with the first recalled dream from other evenings, and that the second recalled dream from any one evening be compared with the second dream from other evenings, and so forth.

It is the dream we are after, the dream experience in all the vividness that we can capture, and if you are going to get a watered-down version in any case, then you may as well continue with your present method (of writing them down in the morning) and save your sleep.

There are several kinds of time that will appear within your dreams, and you must sort these out carefully. While sleeping in your present time, you may have a dream that concerns your past, with events that you know to have occurred years ago. Nevertheless, you may experience these events [within the dream] as happening within the present.

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.

1. Dream locations that represent places familiar to you in your present daily life.

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.

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.