“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth on Therapeutic Dreams
Seth Has a Dream Talk with a Friend
How to Use Dreams to Promote Health

I came into Rob and Jane’s apartment and walked into a Seth session. I sat next to Rob, who was transcribing notes, as usual. Seth (as Jane) turned toward me at once. His voice was almost angry, but not without compassion. ‘Now then, I will tell you what to do,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be communicating with the part of you that uses words.’

Seth then sat in front of my dream self, feeding it something that looked like cereal. My critical self became upset then, almost feeling that the dream was worthless. Then Seth said to the critical self, ‘This is symbolism … food for thought … far more complicated than you know and beyond any part of you that you understand.’ At once the dream self became soothed, almost hypnotically. The critical self kept thinking that this couldn’t happen in a dream.

Seth began to lecture again, and my critical self began to fade out. As it did, I asked, ‘Seth, will I ever understand this?’ The answer was lost except that I felt that the ‘new knowledge’ received in the lecture I could not hear was healing me and that as a wife and mother I was freer than I ever was before.

Whether or not Seth actually spoke to Sue in the dream is beside the point here. What is important is that symptoms disappeared as a result of a dream. She had worried about the condition and had requested help from her inner self; the dream was her answer. It’s possible, of course, that Sue’s unconscious adapted an authority figure to get the information about aggression through with greater impact, using Seth as a figurehead. (If you want to believe that Seth is an unconscious production of mine, then you must admit he lends himself rather well to the unconscious purposes of others and possesses a reality to them quite independent of his relationship to me. Later examples will make this clear.)

Seth would call Sue’s dream a therapeutic one, and he has devoted many sessions to dreams and health and the relationship between them. Before we go into therapeutic dreams, however, it’s necessary to understand the reasons why we adopt symptoms. Are there definite reasons for illnesses? According to Seth, the answer is “yes.”

(And here Seth explains something that many people often wonder about: If illness is detrimental and we know it, then why does poor health linger at times?)

(This has serious implications. Obviously, the easiest time to cure an illness is before it is accepted as a part of the self-image. Seth goes on in this session to explain some of the other deeper reasons for the continuance of symptoms and our acceptance of them.)

(Seth continues to describe the ways in which various kinds of consciousness react to painful stimuli, ending up with a statement that at deepest cellular levels, all sensations and stimuli are instantly, automatically and joyfully accepted, regardless of their nature. At this level, no knowledge of threat exists. The “I” differentiation is not definite enough to fear destruction.)

(But can an illness ever serve a good purpose? Yes, according to Seth:)

In this particular session, Seth is describing illness as a part of action, but, as he makes clear, this is not meant to imply any negation of psychological or psychic values. The nature of action, however, is important, for Seth states,

Let’s consider Sue’s symptoms, caused by explosive and repressed aggression, in relation to Seth’s statements. Sue had been taught as a child to repress emotions, but the time had come when expression was imperative. She wanted to strike out but didn’t feel that she should, and the denied actions then inhibited the function of the right arm that would ordinarily do the striking. According to Seth, even the calcium deposits were accumulations of repressed energy stored up in the body.

After six days of the treatment, all soreness disappeared, as did the calcium lumps. Since then, Sue was bothered by the shoulder during a few stressful periods, but she learned that a simple reading of the original Seth dream immediately returned the shoulder to normal once again. These experiences were highly valuable and produced undeniable physical results which last as long as Sue allows for normal release and expression of emotional energy.

According to Seth, poor health is caused mainly by destructive mental and feeling patterns that directly affect the body because of the particular range within the electromagnetic system in which they fall. Bad health, for example, does not happen first, resulting in unhealthy thoughts. It is the other way around. Seth states,

Again, it makes little difference whether Sue’s voices belonged to definite incorporal spirits or whether they were therapeutic hallucinations adapted to impress her conscious mind. The directions and instructions that they gave her worked. We were discussing this in a recent class session when Seth came through and said that he had communicated with Sue during the dream episode.

Seth first spoke of therapeutic dreams in the 198th session for October 13, 1965 — though he insisted from the beginning that the inner self had the ability to cure the body. In this session, he explained exactly how such a dream acted upon the physical system.

Seth also mentioned that dreams could completely reverse moods of depression and that such mood-changing dreams could also be manufactured through the use of suggestion. One rainy March morning, I decided to follow his instructions. I realized I’d been blue and depressed for a week or more — upset because I had not heard from a publisher and also because I was encountering difficulties at the art gallery.

Though it was still raining when I got up, I felt great. All I remembered at first was the second part of the experience, and only when this was written down did I recall the frightening earlier episode. I felt so vibrantly alive that there was no doubt in my mind of the “dream’s” therapeutic nature. But how could the first, unpleasant portion be therapeutic? What did it mean? As you’ll see, Seth explained this in the next session and used the opportunity to explain more about health and dreams.

I won’t go into the out-of-body implications of that experience until later in this book; here, I’d like to emphasize, instead, the mood-changing elements of the “dream” and what it meant to me. In the next session, Seth explained it and showed how reincarnational background, present problems and personal symbolism were all used in the dream drama. Portions of the experience were dreams. Others were valid subjective events of a different kind, and the entire production was in response to my suggestions for a mood-changing dream.

This is what Seth said in Session 199 for October 18, 1965:

He tries again, discovering another radio on your bookcase, Joseph, where our manuscripts are kept. The connection is obvious, for he knows that the Seth Material comes from the same system as the voices. Here he reaches out to turn the radio off and gets a shock; the shock is his realization that the Material itself would cease were he to shut off his abilities. The connection with you is also obvious, since your room is involved. Were he to shut off his abilities as one can turn off a radio, then you would also be deprived.

Seth’s interpretation was continued in the next (200th) session. He said that the green jacket represented a new ability that had been mine in a past life but which I misused, this new ability was now waiting for me to claim. The people were all persons with who I’d had past life connections. This caused the feelings of rediscovery and joy. Seth said,

Not all dreams of ill health should be taken literally. Often they are symbolic interpretations of your state of mind. You can request another dream that will make clear to you the symbols in the first one. In Session 173, Seth said,