“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You have trained your consciousness to follow certain patterns that are not necessarily natural for it, and these patterns increase the sense of alienation between the waking and dreaming self. To some extent you drug the body with suggestion, so that it believes it must sleep away a certain amount of hours in one block. Animals sleep when they are tired, and awaken in a much more natural fashion.

You would retain a far greater memory of your subjective experiences, and your body would be healthier, if these sleeping patterns were changed. Six to eight hours of sleep in all would be sufficient with the nap patterns outlined. And even those who think they now need more sleep than this would find that they did not, if all the time was not spent in one block. The entire system, physical, mental, and psychic, would benefit.

Now: I bring up these matters here because such changes in habitual patterns would definitely result in greater understanding of the nature of the self. The inner dreaming portions of the personality seem strange to you not only because of a basic difference of focus, but because you clearly devote opposite portions of a twenty-four hour cycle to these areas of the self.

Your food should be divided within the twenty-four hour period, and not just during the times of wakefulness — that is, if the sleep patterns were changed as I suggest, you would also be eating during some night hours. You would eat far less at any given “mealtime,” however. Small amounts of food much more frequently taken would be much more beneficial than your present practice in physical, mental, and psychic terms.

Changing the sleep patterns would automatically change the eating patterns. You would find you were a much more united identity. You would become aware of your clairvoyant and telepathic abilities, for example, to a far greater degree, and you would not feel the deep separation that you now feel between the dreaming and waking self. To a large degree this sense of alienation would vanish.

(Now, for the second time recently, Seth and I enjoyed a chat without my taking notes. He explained in more detail how an altered sleep pattern would considerably improve my painting. After it was over I wished I had recorded the conversation, since it contained much information that could be applied generally. Jane ended the evening by saying she “wasn’t even in a session mood tonight.”

(Since this session — it is June 1 as I type this — Jane and I have been experimenting somewhat with altered sleep patterns, and we can say that Seth’s ideas seem eminently workable. After a shorter nighttime sleep period, we have no difficulty waking up easily, alert and ready to go. We supplement this pattern with one or two rest periods during the daylight hours. The system adds an unaccustomed sharpness of appreciation to all of our activities.)