“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He has worked with human beings and cats. The very attempt to deprive an individual of sleep, however, will automatically set into mechanism subconscious dream activity. The tampering will then change the conditions. The direct experience of the developing dream is what they should be concerned with.

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.

I have said often that any action changes that which acts, and that which is acted upon; and so in the sort of experiments that are now being carried on to study dreams. The acts of the investigators are changing the conditions in such a way it is easy to find that which you are looking for.

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.