“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We have been reading the article on sleep in the September 18th issue of the New Yorker. Called “A Third Stage of Existence”, it deals with REM sleep, or the rapid eye movements that have been shown to occur during dreaming. Since Seth has dealt with dreams to some extent Jane and I have a somewhat different slant on sleep and dreaming, and what is involved.

As far as your system is concerned, they cannot be suddenly made flesh, to dwell among you. REM sleep or no REM sleep, your dreams exist constantly, beneath consciousness, even in the waking state. The personality is constantly affected by them. Their existence has its own dimension which is connected to the physical organism. It is impossible to deprive a human being of dreams, for even though you deprive him of sleep, this necessary mental function will be carried on subconsciously.

The eye movements noted in the beginning of REM sleep are only indications of dream activity that is closely connected to the physical layers of the self. These periods mark not the onset of dreams, but the return of the personality from deeper layers of dream awareness to more surface areas.

The scientist of whom you have read, in his experiments attempts to deprive the individual of sleep.

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.

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.

Children dream more vividly and more often. They return more frequently however to periods of near wakefulness, in order to check their physical environment, since they are not as sure of it as adults are. In deep periods of sleep children range further away, as far as their dream activities are concerned.

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.