“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your scientists would learn more about the nature of dreams if they would train themselves in dream recall. Again, the very attempt to deprive an individual of sleep will automatically set into mechanism subconscious dream activity. The tampering will then change the conditions. The direct experience of the developing dream is what you should be concerned with.

This could be studied if proper suggestions were given to an individual that he would awaken at the exact point of a dream’s end [as in our own experiments]. The dream state and conditions could also be studied legitimately using hypnosis. Here, you are working with the mind itself and merely suggesting that it operate in a certain fashion. You are not tampering with the mechanics of its operation and automatically altering the conditions.

I have said often that any action changes that which acts and that which is acted upon; and so in the sort of experiments that are currently being carried on to study dreams, the acts of the investigators are changing the conditions in such a way that it is easy for them to find what they are looking for. The investigator himself, through his actions, inadvertantly brings about those results for which he looks. The particular experiment may seem, then, to suggest conditions which are by no means general, but may appear to be. Under hypnosis a subject is not as much on guard, as is the subject of an experiment who knows in advance that he will be awakened by experimenters, that electrodes will be attached to his skull and that laboratory conditions are substituted for his nightly environment.