“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Sometime after I came home from college in 1967, I first noticed that my right shoulder hurt when I lifted it up — classic bursitus symptoms, I’ve since learned. After a while, the condition cleared up gradually. Then in April, 1968, the symptoms returned and lasted for about three months, disappeared slowly and came back for a while in December, 1968. In February, 1969, I had a real bout that lasted off and on until my son’s birth in October. Since then, the condition got worse until for the last month or so I haven’t been able to get my right hand in my jean pockets, or comb my hair, or anything without severe pain in my right shoulder blade and right hand to the fingers.

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:

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.”

(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.)

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.

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.

Three days later, Rob walked into the bathroom, suddenly blacked out by the bathroom sink and fell unconscious to the floor. If I had heeded the dream and told Rob, could the incident have been prevented? Had I told Rob, I now think that through dream therapy or in a light trance state he could have discovered the reason behind the symptoms and saved himself a difficult time.

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.