“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

While I’m writing this book in the three-dimensional world, for example, the source material for it comes from the other side of consciousness — that dimension that is revealed to us in dreams, inspiration, trance states and creativity. This book is about Seth, dreams and “astral projection” — all aspects of a different kind of consciousness than the objective one with which we are usually occupied.

Certainly my life has been vastly enriched by an odd subjective mobility. I write this book during the day in my study, looking out the wide bay windows at the street and at the mountains and river just beyond. But when I want new material for a particular chapter, I turn the focus of my attention from the exterior world to the interior one. Then my physical environment does not concern me, and my normal waking life is the dream.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that in dream life I’m writing a book about waking consciousness just as, with my waking consciousness, I’m writing about the reality of dreams. It wouldn’t astonish me either to learn that Seth in an entirely different dimension speaks for a personality called Jane. In fact, I sometimes amuse myself by imagining a situation in which Seth wonders if Jane is a secondary personality with an obsessive belief in some improbable physical reality. Seth, however, is far more knowledgeable than I am, so if he were speaking for me, then I’m afraid he would get the lesser end of the bargain.

I have been speaking for Seth in twice-weekly sessions since late 1963. At the very least, this has given me personal experience with altered states of consciousness and glimpses into subjective areas largely unexplored. Certainly, it was because of Seth that I found myself studying the dream reality that comes into focus while the body sleeps.

Following Seth’s instructions, my husband and I first learned to recall and record our dreams. Through later experiments, we discovered that we could bring our normal waking consciousness into the dream state and “come awake” while dreaming. Later we began to take bolder steps into these inner areas, learning to manipulate consciousness in what was for us an entirely new way.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, I suspect that our relationship is far more complex. One thing I know: Seth does not have his present basic existence in the three-dimensional world, and I do. He has given us instructions that allow Rob, my students and myself to take our own sometimes faltering steps out of our usual physical reality. He initiated our exploration into the universe of dreams, for example, and is therefore largely responsible for this book. But we must return to our normal daily dimension of actuality. And Seth returns to his.

Here I will stress subjective experience itself as it is turned toward the dreaming state in particular, and deal with Seth’s conceptions of the dream universe through excerpts from his continuing manuscript. This book will also serve as a journal of our own subjective excursions as first Rob and I, and then my students, used Seth’s ideas as maps into that strange inner landscape. We have become involved in the keenest of adventures in which ordinary obstructions do not exist while the usual suppositions of physical life do not apply.

According to Seth, dreaming is a creative state of consciousness, a threshold of psychic activity in which we throw off usual restrictions to use our most basic abilities and realize our true independence from three-dimensional form. In dreams, Seth says, we write the script for our daily lives and perceive other levels of existence that our physical focus usually obscures.

Seth maintains that the dream universe has its own basic laws or “root assumptions” — mental equivalents to our laws of gravity, space and time. In other worlds, dream reality only seems discordant or meaningless because we judge it according to physical laws rather than by the rules that apply within it.

Dreams, then, are not just imaginative indigestion or psychic chaos. We are not temporarily insane when we dream, as some theorists maintain. To the contrary, we may be far more sane and alert during some dream states than we are ordinarily. Certainly we are more creative. We may even be more “alive,” as you will see from some of our own experiences.

While the main emphasis of this book will be on Seth’s dream concepts, the reader is invited to test them out for himself or herself. Seth told us early in the game that many dreams were precognitive, for example, but personal experience is a great convincer, and we discovered this ourselves as we followed his instructions — recalled, dated and recorded dreams and then checked them against events.

Many of Seth’s concepts, on probabilities or on, say, the nature of radio stars, cannot be checked out except by specialists. Most of the data on dreams, however, can be proven by anyone with enough curiosity, determination and sense of adventure to follow the guidelines that The Seth Material provides. In one of his early statements on dreams, Seth said:

You think that you are only conscious while you are awake. You assume yourselves unconscious when you sleep. In Freud’s terminology, the dice are indeed loaded on the side of the conscious mind. But pretend for a moment that you are looking at this situation from the other side. Pretend that while you are in the dream state you are concerned with the problem of physical consciousness and existence. From that viewpoint, the picture is entirely different, for you are indeed conscious when you sleep.

The locations that you visit while dreaming are as real to you then as physical locations are to you in the waking state. What you have is this: In the waking state, the whole self is focused toward physical reality, but in the dreaming state, it is focused in a different dimension. It is every bit as conscious and aware.

If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell. But this, dear friends, has nothing to do with space, for the dream location exists simultaneously with the room in which the body sleeps.

There is, of course, an apparent contradiction here, but it is only apparent, your dilemma being this: If you have another self-conscious self, then why aren’t you aware of it? Pretend that you are some weird creature with two faces. One face looks out upon one world [the dream reality] and one face looks out upon another world [the physical one].

Actually, this is a simple analogy and only carries us so far, but in the beginning Seth used it as a way of giving us some idea of man’s current (and artificial) relationship to dream reality. Later, by following the material and Seth’s instructions, we discovered that we could dissolve these barriers to some extent. We have been able to prove, to ourselves at least, that dream events are quite real. Flying dreams are not all disguised sexual fantasies, as Freud maintained, for example. In many of them we are flying, and the destinations we reach are quite physical. Our records show clearly that what we saw in some such episodes were not imaginary places, but locations we visited while the body slept. Some are described in this book.

In other words, while most books are written about events that occur in waking reality, this one will be mainly concerned with events that happen precisely when consciousness is turned away from normal objective life. Much more is involved than even the nature of the dream state and man’s fascinating ability to withdraw consciousness from the body. These phenomena are only evidences of the greater creative consciousness that is inherent and active in each of us — the interior universe of which we know so little.

We all have access to this creative consciousness, particularly in dreams and dissociated states when we are not so obsessed with physical sense data. Often, evidence of it emerges into consciousness in the guise of sudden hunches or creative inspiration.

This is most obvious in dreaming, of course. Dreams may well represent us at our most creative, for not only do we process the past day’s activities, but we also choose tomorrow’s events from the limitless probable actions that are presented to us while the waking self is still.