“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many concepts, advancements and practical inventions simply wait in abeyance in the world of dreams until some man accepts them as possibilities within his frame of reality. Imagination is waking man’s connection with the world of dreams. Imagination often restates dream data and applies it to particular circumstances or problems within the physical system. Its effects may appear within matter, but it is of itself not physical. Often the dream world possesses concepts which will one day completely transform the history of your field, but a denial of such concepts as actualities or possibilities within reality hold these back and put off breakthroughs that are sorely needed.

The impact of any dream has physical, chemical, electromagnetic, psychological and psychic repercussions that are actual and continuing. The type of dream or the types of dreams experienced by any given individual are determined by many different factors. I am speaking now of the dream experience as it occurs and not of the remnant of it that his ego allows him to recall.

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.

In many respects, actions within the dream world are more direct than your own. It is because you remember only vague glimmerings and disconnected episodes that dreams appear often chaotic or meaningless, particularly to the ego which censors much of the information that the subconscious retains. For most people, this censoring process is valuable, since it prevents the personality from being snowed under by data that it is not equipped to handle. The ability to retain experience gained within other fields is the trend of further developments. … Nevertheless, every man intuitively knows his involvement here. …

I used the term, pass out of the dream world purposely, for here we see a mobility of action easily and often accomplished — a passing in and out that involves an action without movement in space. The dreamer has, at his fingertips, a memory of his ‘previous’ dream experiences and carries within him the many inner purposes which are behind his dream actions. On leaving the dream state, he becomes more aware of the ego and creates, then, those activities that are meaningful to it. As mentioned earlier, however, dream symbols have meaning to all portions of the personality.

Using hypnosis, you can get good dream recall with a good operator. You can suggest ordinary sleep and dreaming and then suggest that without awakening, the subject give a verbal description of his dreams as he experiences them. … Another alternative is to suggest that the subject under hypnosis repeat the dreams of the night before.

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.

It is impossible to study dreams when an attempt is made to isolate the dreamer from his own personality, to treat dreams as if they were physical or mechanical. The only laboratory for a study of dreams is the laboratory of the personality. …

Our interest in dreams spilled over into my own creative work also. The following poems were all written in 1964, when Rob and I first began our own experiments in dream recall and when Seth first started his sessions on the dream world.