“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

According to Seth, we do have shared dreams or mass dreams. [...] Are our dreams private? [...] In the 254th session Seth had this to say: “In certain areas of mass, shared dreams, collective mankind deals with problems of his political and social structure. The solutions he reaches within dream reality are not always the same as those he accepts in the physical world.

“The dream solutions are held as ideals, however. Without mass dreams, for example, your United Nations would not exist. [...] Shared dreams, then, are also usually well beneath awareness. [...]

“Many illnesses could largely be avoided through such dream therapy. Rather harmlessly, aggressive tendencies could be given freedom within the dream state. Suggestions would be given that the individual involved would experience, say, aggressiveness, within a dream. It would also be suggested to him that he learn to understand his aggressions by watching himself while he was dreaming [watching the dream as he would a play]. If I may indulge in a fantasy, theoretically you could imagine a massive experiment in dream therapy where wars were fought by sleeping, not waking, nations.”

“If you have little memory of dream locations when you are awake, you have little memory of ‘physical’ locations when you are in the dream state. When the physical body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell. But this distance has nothing to do with space, for the dream location can exist simultaneously with the room in which the body sleeps.

This episode was an out-of-body experience from the dream state, though, and it will serve to make one point: dream reality is as valid and real as waking reality. Dreams definitely affect daily life. [...] There are ways to use dreams purposefully, however, to improve our existence, even though I admit that the last instance was not a very good example.

Over and over Seth says that a dream or imaginative experience is as real as any waking event. If you have a period of depression, you are apt to have depressing dreams during the same period. But Seth suggests the following exercise as a dream therapy: before sleep, suggest to yourself that you will have a pleasant or joyful dream that will completely restore your good spirits and vitality. [...]

While all of this is of practical interest, Rob and I are even more intrigued by Seth’s explanation of dream reality. Since I’ve had many out-of-body experiences from the dream state, I was rather concerned about the reality of the environments in which I found myself. Seth began his discussions on the nature of dream reality very soon after the sessions began, and they still continue. Until I learned from Seth to “monitor” my own dreams, and awaken my critical faculties, I was simply astounded by some of his statements.

One reason, I think, that dreams seem so chaotic and meaningless at times is simply that we only remember dim fragments of them and forget the unifying factors. Another reason is that dreams have an intuitive, associative “logic” that has to be interpreted, and in which time, as we know it, has little meaning. According to Seth, some dreams are simple enough, dealing with unresolved present problems or events. Even in these, however, the dream event may also represent events from past lives.

Each dream object is actually double- or triple-decked, a symbol for other, deeper data. A dream involving reincarnational information, for example, may also serve to help us face a present-day problem by reminding us of other unused abilities inherent in our personalities. I’ve had two particularly vivid reincarnational dreams. One, occurring shortly after our sessions began, really frightened me because I was afraid that it might be precognitive, I dreamed that I was an old woman in a very poor hospital ward of some kind. [...]

Some Seth sessions tell us precisely how we form dreams, what chemicals are built up during waking consciousness and then released in dream-making, and others deal with the electromagnetic composition of dream reality. But all through is the insistence upon what we would call, I suppose, the “objectivity” of dream life.