“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Rob and I had read an article on scientific dream investigation.)

The reality of dreams can be investigated only through direct contact. … REM sleep or no REM sleep, your dreams exist constantly beneath consciousness, even in the waking state. The personality is constantly affected by them. It is impossible to deprive a person of dreams even though you deprive him of sleep [as in certain dream laboratory experiments]. This function will be carried on subconsciously. …

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.