“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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. Unless the depression is very deep-seated, it will be broken or greatly weakened when you awaken.

Consider this early passage from session 92, which I now accept as basic: “Each dream begins with psychic energy which the individual transforms not into physical matter, but into a reality every bit as functional and real. He forms the idea into a dream object or event with amazing discrimination, so that the dream object itself gains existence and exists in numerous dimensions. …

“Although the dreamer creates his dreams for his own purposes, selecting only those symbols which have meaning to him, he projects them outward in a value fulfillment and psychic expansion. The expansion occurs as the dream is acted out. A contraction occurs as the dreamer is finished with the dream events, but energy cannot be taken back.”

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.

“I mentioned the Crucifixion, saying once that it was an actuality and a reality, although it did not take place in your [physical] time. It took place in the same sort of time in which a dream occurs and its reality was felt by generations. Not being a physical reality, it influenced the world of physical matter in a way that no purely physical event could.

Seth is not saying here that the Crucifixion was “just a dream.” He is saying that though it did not occur historically, it did happen within another reality and emerged into history as an idea rather than a physical event—an idea that changed civilization. (According to Seth, of course, an idea is an event, whether physically materialized or not.)