“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.’

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.

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.

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.)

In this case, the illness could not be called an impeding action unless it persisted long after its purpose was served. … Even then, without knowing all the facts you could not make a judgment, for the illness could still serve by giving the personality a sense of security, being kept on hand as an ever-present emergency device in case the new unifying principle should fail.

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.”

I dozed for ten minutes. When I woke up, the pain was gone. I’ve been doing the yoga exercise and using the tea bags and the pain hasn’t returned.

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.

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.

The sky was very dark, a light rain fell and a storm threatened. After sitting at my desk disconsolately for an hour, trying to get my mind on my book, I decided to take a nap. I went into the bedroom. It was 10:30 A.M. by the clock. I set the alarm for 11:00 and lay down. Just before going to sleep, I gave myself the suggestion to have a dream that would raise my spirits and restore my native enthusiasm.

I lay there, aware of a growing disquiet. Suddenly I realized that I was hearing voices, but they seemed to come from inside my head. They grew steadily louder and louder. I was certain that I was still awake. The voices rose. I felt as if a radio was turned on full volume in my head, but with stations scrambled — for I could make no sense out of what was said. Instead, I seemed to hear fragments of conversations. Really frightened, I shook my head and looked about the room.

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.

Now I was too frightened to touch the radio again or to pull the plug from the socket and disconnect it. (This radio again, had no physical existence.) Instead, I ran through the bedroom and bath, out into the living room.

Here I stopped, dead still. The storm had come. It was pouring outside. Everything inside was strangely silent. The voices suddenly ceased. The whole room seemed to be in a state of waiting — but for what? Completely puzzled, I looked around, trying to get my bearings. And it took some doing. There was no denying the fact that a door had replaced our middle bay window. Curious, I approached and finally threw it open.

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.”

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.

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.

With no transition at all, I sprang up to a sitting position in bed. Immediately, I checked the clock. The alarm had not rung because I had not pushed the little button down far enough. It was not quite 11 A.M., in any case. Only half an hour of physical time had passed.

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.

I am happy to see that Ruburt tried out the material on therapeutic dreams. The basic action of the first dream involved his reception of several voices. Though he does not remember this, they spoke words of encouragement. They presented excellent evidence of his own abilities, for initially they were crystal-clear and without distortion. There were four in all — all male. They belonged to personalities no longer within the physical system, but who were closely allied with Ruburt in past lives. The fourth voice was mine. This was an attempt to build Ruburt’s confidence — to show how clear reception can be if his abilities are fully utilized.

The above portions therefore were actually not dreams but experiences happening while he was dissociated. They shocked him; hence, the shock later on when he turned this into a dream. When he heard the voices, instead of becoming confident, he fell into a dream state. He did not want to accept the responsibility that he felt his abilities put upon him, and so in the dream, he looked for an outside source for the voices and dreamed the radio sequences. In the dream, however, the voices continue [after he switched the radio off] because he knows he is picking them up from a channel that is not physical.

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.

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,

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.

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.

Upon proper suggestion, the personality then will work out specific problems in the dream state, but if the solution is not clear to the [conscious] ego, this does not necessarily mean that the solution was not found. There will be cases where it is not only unnecessary but undesirable that the ego be familiar with the solution. The suggestions will be followed by the sleeping self in its own fashion. The solutions may not appear to the conscious self in the way it expects. The conscious self may not even recognize it has been given a solution, and yet it may act upon it. …