“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

I have said before that the dream world is composed of molecular structure, and that it is a continuing reality, even though your own awareness of it is usually limited to the hours of your own sleep. There is a give-and-take here. For if you give the dream world much of its energy, much of your own energy is derived from it. …

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.

“Dreams and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep, Dreams and Chemical Connections”

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. …

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.

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.

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.

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.

In midnight thickets
Dreamers plunge,
While the moon
Shines calmly on.
The town is sleeping,
Bodies lie
Neat and empty
Side by side.

My dreaming self
Looked in the window
And saw me on the bed.
Moonlight filled
My sleeping skull.
I lay nude and still.