“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.”

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.”

For one thing, while pain is unpleasant, it is also a method of familiarizing the self against the edges of quickened consciousness. Any hightened sensation, pleasant or unpleasant, has a stimulating effect upon consciousness to some degree. It is a strong awareness of activity and life. Even when the stimulus may be extremely annoying or humiliatingly unpleasant, certain portions of the psychological framework accept it undiscriminatingly because it is a vivid sensation. This acquiescence to even painful stimuli is a basic part of the nature of consciousness and a necessary one.

An illness can be rejected. The habit of illness can be rejected. When action is allowed to flow freely, then neurotic rejections of action will not occur. … An illness is almost always the result of another action that cannot be carried through. When the lines to the repressed action are released and the channels to it opened, such an illness will vanish. However, the thwarted action may be one with disastrous consequences, which the illness may prevent.

‘Lower. Underneath is the problem. The top is only an outcropping,’ the voice said. So I turned over, moved the bags down and suddenly tuned in to a dialogue going on in my head. There were two voices, one slightly louder than the other, discussing this.

‘One half hour,’ answered the first voice.

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.

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.

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.”

I looked up, really confused this time. He definitely was not our present newspaper boy, but the one who had delivered papers to us in another town, several years earlier. He couldn’t possibly be the same age and delivering papers in Elmira! Besides, we got only the evening paper, and it was still morning.

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.

The second dream is one of expansion. The most meaningful level was one in which the many rooms and apartments represented psychic areas of development, endless possibilities that continually open, but possibilities that were based on previous life experiences. There are many aspects of reincarnational data in the dream, all reinforcing the healthy elements of Ruburt’s personality.

When he leaped from the bannister, I was the one who extended an arm to help him. I appeared as the young man with olive skin. All of us tried to instill confidence and joy, and the responses were emotional. The dream generated sufficient energy to lift Ruburt’s spirits and allow his normal enthusiasm to return in full force. It cut short his poor mood by several weeks.

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.

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,

Both psychological and physical illnesses could largely be avoided through dream therapy. Rather harmlessly, aggressive tendencies could also be given freedom in the dream condition. Through such therapy, actions would be allowed greater spontaneity. In the case of the release of aggressiveness, the individual involved would experience this within the dream state and hurt no one. Suggestions could also be given so that he learned to understand the aggressiveness through watching himself while in the dream state.

We are not attempting to substitute dream action for physical action, generally speaking. Here we are speaking of potentially dangerous situations in which an individual shows signs of being unable to cope with these psychological actions through ordinary methods of adaption. No one can deny that a war fought by dreaming men at specified times would be less harmful than a physical war — to return to my flight of fancy. There would be reprecussions, however, that would be unavoidable, [for again, basically, the personality does not differentiate between sleeping and waking events].