“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I suggest a brief break.

This could be studied to some degree if proper suggestions were given to the individual that he would awaken at the exact point when a dream ends. The dream state and dream conditions could also be studied quite legitimately, and to more purpose, using hypnosis. Here you are working with the mind itself as your material, and merely suggesting that it operate in a certain fashion. You are not tampering with the mechanics of its operation, and therefore automatically altering the conditions.

Dr. Instream might find such a study would bring him much satisfaction. Through hypnosis you can get complete dream recall, with a good operator. You can suggest ordinary sleep, and then suggest that the subject, in his sleep and without waking, give a verbal description of his dream or dreams.

This however would involve many a nightly vigil. A better procedure would be to hypnotize a subject, and you would need a good one, and suggest that under hypnosis he repeat the dreams of the night before. There are many opportunities for an investigation of dreams along these lines, and the results would yield more legitimate information.

I will suggest another brief break, as I am keeping the 10 o’clock hour in mind, and would like to start again shortly before the hour.

For the investigator himself, through his actions, inadvertently brings about, in specific instances, those results for which he looks. The particular experiment may then seem to suggest conditions which are by no means general ones, but which may appear so. In hypnosis the subject is not as much on guard as a subject of an experiment when the subject knows in advance that he will be awakened by the experimenter, when electrodes are attached to the physical organism, when the conditions of the sleep laboratory are substituted for his ordinary nightly environment. It is impossible to study dreams when an attempt is made to isolate the dreamer from his own personality, to treat dreams as if they were physical or mechanical. The only laboratory for a study of dreams is the laboratory of the personality.

This is not as difficult as it might sound, and I have indeed suggested experiments that would be most effective.

I suggest your break.

I cannot repeat this too strongly. He should dismiss the tests entirely from his mind. The tests in the sessions have not bothered him at all to any important degree, except for a natural initial nervousness, and all in all we have been coming along well enough. But at this stage he simply should leave the grading and so forth to you. Of course he may make suggestions as he reads the sessions, but that is all.

I suggest that you hold this question until our next session, as Ruburt is tired this evening because of his concentration upon the work which I have mentioned. There is nothing serious here, or I would discuss it this evening in any case, since you asked. I will answer specifically at our next session.