“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.”

Yoga and psy-time helped reduce the symptoms temporarily, but by last week, the stiffness was so bad that my entire shoulder was grinding like jammed sandpaper. I even found myself yelling at the baby, which made me feel awful. Then, on April 25, 1970, I had the following dream:

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 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.)

Everything was normal. The morning was still dark and dismal, the gray light of outdoors visible through the blinds. But the voices were definitely booming now. Desperately I tried to find their source. Then I realized that a transistor radio was blaring from the bedside table. I turned it off. It didn’t occur to me that in reality, we had no such radio in the house. To my complete bewilderment, the voice continued. Then I “remembered” that there was another radio in Rob’s studio. Surely the voices were coming from there! I leaped out of bed and rushed to the studio. There was the radio. Quickly I reached to turn it off and received a bad electric shock. Not only that, but the voices had actually doubled in volume.

Here I found a table and chair set of fine dark wood, and beyond, another spacious apartment. Again I paused: Where had the apartment come from? Then it seemed to me that I had known about it in some dim past and forgotten. Indeed, as I hurried down the hallway I seemed to remember other such apartments also.

The hall opened into a large center area that was used as a clothing store. Preparations were being made for a sale. I recalled that the people here were friends of mine from that same remembered past and that I had visited them before in this same manner. The people saw me, recognized me at once and welcomed me with great joy.

As we chatted, I was filled with warm satisfaction and wondered how I could ever have forgotten our previous visits. A delightful conversation followed. At one point I remember coming down a stairway, while a handsome dark-haired young man took my arm and swung me around in an arc. I also noticed a lovely warm green jacket and realized that I had stored it away with my friends at my last visit.

I mentioned the other apartments and looked forward to exploring them. My friends thought it would be great fun and offered to go with me. A sense of adventure filled me. I couldn’t remember when I’d had such a good time! Then I remembered that I had to return by noon to get Rob’s lunch. Though I was very tempted to stay, I left my friends, promising to return that afternoon.

Next, I found myself running out in the back yard, through the rain. I dropped my cigarettes on the wet ground, picked them up, and discovered to my astonishment that they weren’t wet at all. At the same time I found another pack in my pocket. This really stopped me. I was so certain I only had one pack. As I stood there trying to figure this out, a newsboy came across the lawn and called out, “Hi.”

For the first time I wondered: Could this be some kind of dream? A rush of disappointment flooded through me. If I was dreaming then the apartments would disappear when I awakened. I would never get to explore them! I looked at the yard again. It was our yard. The environment was brilliantly clear. And then, out of nowhere it seemed, a sense of freedom and exhilaration flashed — I could explore the apartments if I wanted to! I was out of my body. My body was in bed.

With that realization, my senses became super-alert. The yard and everything within my vision was significant, alive, super-real — seemingly more real than at any other moment of my life. At the same time, it occured to me that I had lain down at 10:30, and, surely, it was past the half-hour I had given myself. For some reason the clock hadn’t awakened me. I would have to return. All the while, I stood fully conscious and alert out in the yard. Only then did I remember the suggestions I had given myself before lying down. I decided to return to my body at once.

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.

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,

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.

The inner self does know the state of our health. At one time, I had some symptoms for which I was using a combination of healing methods suggestion, self-analysis and dream therapy. I seemed to be improving but wanted an inner check. One night, I requested a dream that would let me know my state of progress.

That night, I dreamed that I was being examined by a doctor I know. He told me that the difficulty was just about cleared up. In this case, of course, I apparently used an authority figure to impress my conscious mind.