“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The chemical excesses built up in the waking state are automatically changed as they are drained off, into electrical energy, which also helps to form and sustain dream images. Your scientists would learn more about the nature of dreams if they would but train themselves to recall their own dreams, and then study them in relation to their own normal activities and physical events.

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.

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.