“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As the Seth sessions continued, our activities fell generally into three main divisions. First of all, the emphasis was on the delivery of the Seth Material itself, as in the twice-weekly sessions Seth continued to explain the nature of nonphysical reality. Second, we became involved in trying to obtain “evidential” material, some definite instances of extrasensory perception on Seth’s part. Along these lines, we embarked on long-distance tests with a psychologist and a year’s series of envelope tests in which Seth was asked to identify the contents of doubly-sealed envelopes. At the same time, Seth began to send me on out-of-body journeys during some sessions and to offer, on his own, other instances of “paranormal” activity.

Third, we were involved in vigorous subjective activity as we began to experiment with Seth’s psy-time regularly and to follow his suggestions concerning dream investigation, recall and utilization. When we began, neither Rob nor I really suspected that there was a separate dream dimension in which dreams happened. Though Seth told us that the experiments in dream recall would automatically make our consciousness more flexible, his real meaning didn’t come through to me until I found myself manipulating dreams and later having out-of-body experiences from the dream state.

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.”

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.

At first she insisted that I was wrong. Then she added dubiously, “I only recalled nightmares in the past. I suppose I could be afraid.”

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.

Seth was smiling broadly again. “I’ve just been wondering why your basic gestures are different than Ruburt’s,” Bill said.

My dear Jesuit. Do I not try to explain things clearly, and am I not grossly misunderstood? (This was pure banter, between the two of them.) I have said all along that I am myself, and Ruburt is someone else. It follows that our gestures would be different. Wouldn’t you say so?

“I was just curious as to what you’d say,” Bill said.

Of course, though the face does not fully adopt my own expression. First of all, as far as the hands are concerned, to be left-handed or right-handed has to do with inner mechanisms and brain patterns that come before the motion of the hands. Characteristically, I operated in ways that resulted often in the primary use of my left hand when I was focused in physical matter.

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.

For this series of sessions, we had also moved into the quieter bedroom. Seth usually devoted the first hour or so to his discussion on dreams and the last part of the sessions were given over to the experiments mentioned earlier with the envelopes and the long-distance tests with the psychologist. Compared to the large living room, our bedroom was quite small, and it was quite warm during these summer months of 1965.

I was fascinated with Seth’s material on the dream universe. “A fantastic theory,” I said to Rob.

“I have the impression that it’s a lot more than just theory,” Rob said, and I had to agree with him. The material on dream locations particularly intrigued me. Seth had told us to leave room in our dream records to note the locations and advised us to examine them carefully. I was quite surprised at the different kinds of dream locations in my own dreams and made up the following list of them. Look for these when you examine your own dreams:

3. Dream locations that represent definite places that appear as they were in the past. If you dream of your childhood home as it was, not as it is now, then the location would belong in this category.

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.

In fact, the bulk of my dream locations in this study was equally divided between completely unfamiliar places and locations too indistinct to recall. Only seven dreams found me abroad. Most interesting of all, however, I found that most of my precognitive dreams happened in locations that were unfamiliar at the time of the dream. For this reason, I suggest that you pay particular attention to unfamiliar dream places.

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!

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.

And this was Seth’s answer,