“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One of my students, Sue Watkins, is very gifted psychically and quite expert in her use of dreams. She and her husband Carl were living in a nearby town when she sent me this note, along with a copy of a dream that beautifully illustrates the close connection between dreams and health. She titled the note, humorously, “A Short History of the Shoulder, or Carrie Nation was Right About Bad Joints.”

He began a long lecture on the methods of handling aggression and expressing it in acceptable ways. At this point, my critical self separated from my dream self who was receiving the lecture. [In other words, Sue became aware of herself and the dream self.] My critical self instantly felt put off, since it could not understand or translate the lecture. It seemed to have a definite function, though, perhaps in connection with the physical body. Both selves were equally aware.

In closing, Sue added: “Of course, the dream itself was only the impetus. My inner self knew what to do all along. Maybe it had just forgotten how to keep a neat file!”

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.”

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.

In her dream, Sue was given information that told her how to release and use this energy creatively. While she remembered the dream clearly and saw its instant results, the information was not given to the conscious self (not even in the dream drama) but to other layers more intimately concerned with body-mind mechanisms. Complete mobility of the arm and shoulder resulted, but there was still some soreness from the calcium deposits that remained.

A few weeks after the dream, on May 12, 1970, Sue had another therapeutic experience that straddled dreaming and waking reality. She was reading a book on the life of Edgar Cayce when her shoulder began to ache. Suddenly she had the urge to leaf through the book to a paragraph she’d noticed earlier on yoga exercises for bursitic shoulders. As she read this, she heard a loud voice say: ‘Put wet tea bags on it.”

Startled, Sue looked up. The voice almost sounded as if it came from a radio. Again it said, “Put wet tea bags on it.” Sue noted,

Two weeks later, Sue was awakened in the middle of the night by the same two voices. “How is the condition now?” asked the first voice.

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.

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.

Dreams can not only eliminate symptoms (as in Sue’s case) or completely alter moods (as in my dream) but they can give us warning of incipient health difficulties — as happened to me several years ago. One night, in the early days of our psychic experience, I dreamed I saw Rob standing by the kitchen sink. He buckled over and fell to the floor. The dream frightened me so much that as I awakened, I caught myself saying, “That dream scares me. I don’t want to remember it.” In other words, I found myself in the act of trying to censor the dream. This alone told me that it must be important, so I forced myself to write it down at once. I didn’t even tell the dream to Rob.