“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As an individual creates his physical image and environment according to his abilities and defects, and in line with his expectations and inner needs, so does he create his dreams; and these interact with the outer environment.

However, with the ego at rest in sleep, the individual often allows communications and dream constructions through — past the ego barrier. For example, if his present expectations are faulty, when the ego rests, he may recreate a time when expectations were high. The resulting dream will partially break the circle of poor expectations with their shoddy physical constructions and start such an individual along a constructive path. In other words, a dream may begin to transform the physical environment through lifting inner expectation.

We have seen that all experience is retained in electrically coded data within the cells and that the material of the cells forms about this coded experience. We have seen that the ego begins, sparked into being by the inner self, greatly influenced by heredity and physical environment; and that this ego, as it continues to exist, builds up an electrical reality of its own and forms its experiences … into the coded data within the cells.

Nor is the dream world a shadow image of your own. It carries on according to the possibilities inherent within it, as you carry on according to the possibilities in the physical system. In sleeping, however, you focus your awareness in altered form into another world that is every bit as valid as your physical one. Only a small amount of energy is focused into the physical system during sleep, enough simply to maintain the body within the environment.

The eye movements noted in the beginning of REM sleep are only indications of dream activity that is closely connected with the physical layers of the self. These periods mark not the onset of dreams but the return of the personality from deeper layers of dream awareness to more surface ones. The self is actually returning to more surface levels to check upon physical environment. There is a transference of main energy in deeper dream states from physical to mental concentration.

Using these methods, the dreams of the mentally ill could also be studied if the affliction was not too severe. The dreams of children could be investigated in this way and compared with those of adults. Children dream vividly and more often. They return more frequently, however, to periods of near wakefulness in order to check their physical environment, since they are not as sure of it as adults are. In deep periods of sleep, children range further away, as far as dream activities are concerned.

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.