“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The reality of dreams themselves can only be investigated through direct contact. Their reality cannot be probed by scientific devices, for dreams in this respect are as nebulous as the spirit, or soul, or inner self. Dreams are directly experienced. They have no meaning outside of their relationship with the personality.

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.

The dreams of the mentally ill, using these methods, could also be studied if the affliction, of course, was not too severe. The dreams of children could be investigated in this manner without too much difficulty, and these could be compared, generally speaking, with the dreams of adults. Many differences between the two would be noted.

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.