“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Records of individual dreams are not enough, nor are studies of the physiological effect of dreaming. Most psychologists would not admit the existence of a definite structured universe in which dream acts, rather than physical acts, happen. Therefore, at this time, they will not consider dreams in this larger context. Seth maintains that we will understand ourselves as dreamers only if we are also aware of the larger environment in which dreams take place, that we interact in the dream state as we do in the waking one and that we form mass dream events as we form physical events on a mass basis.

Now, there is something else to be considered. The very self-suggestions that will enable you to recall dreams will also change their nature to some extent. This is all right, and the effect will be minimized when the newness has worn off. Again, we want the dreams in the sequence in which they occur. If you do not want to wake up after each dream of the evening, then the suggestion should always include ‘I will recall the first three dreams … or the first five dreams, or whatever.’

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.

The nature of reality can be approached only by an investigation of it as it is directly experienced in all levels of awareness: reality as it appears under dream conditions, under other conditions of dissociation and as it appears in the waking state. Even studies dealing with the conscious state are usually superficial, dealing only with ‘upper’ levels of egotistical awareness. …

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.

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.

Seth had set us some task and fulfilling it will be a lifetime proposition. There is a rhythm, even now, to my own experiments in dream reality. Some methods, to be given later, allowed us to come awake while dreaming, to take our conscious selves into the dream state, manipulate it and have deliberate out-of-body experiences while sleeping. (In some of these, what I saw later checked out against physical reality.) Sometimes I do very well and feel that I am learning to manipulate in two levels of reality at once, to be aware both in waking and dream states. And then for months at a time, I am plunked down in physical reality again, dumb and blind to my dream experiences. My students have noticed the same rhythms; so has Rob.