“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One night I had a frightening dream that seemed very real. I found myself in our bedroom, out of my body, and suddenly I realized that someone or something was directly above me. The next minute I was pushed down to the foot of the bed, off into the air, and then down to the dark corner of the bedroom floor. Above me was what I can only describe as a big black thing like a bloated, blurred human form, but larger and very solid.

Now Seth said: “Our friend [meaning me] attempted to choose a different battlefield last night. He decided to think of all negative feelings as enemies, and to give them form in another plane of reality where he could do battle with them. This was not an astral plane, but a lower one.

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. They can improve our health or help deepen a mood of depression. 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.

“On one level the personality attempts to solve problems through dream constructions … and often gives freedom to actions that cannot be adequately expressed within the confines of waking life. If the attempt fails, then the problem or action [as we’ve seen before] may materialize as an illness.

“So when you consider the dream world, you have the same sort of universe, only one constructed within a field that you cannot physically perceive. But it has more continuity than the world you know, and there are similarities within it that are amazing to behold. …

“For one thing … those who know existence on the physical level now, have, because of certain cycles, lived before at approximately the same historical periods. They possess an inner familiarity, a cohesiveness that belonged to a more or less specific period and to periods before, where they inhabited the same sort of reality. Their dream experiences, then, are not so diverse as you might suppose. Certain symbols are constructed into realities in the dream system, then, in much the same manner that ideas are constructed into matter in the physical system.

“The same sort of psychic agreement holds the dream system together as holds the physical system together. If a man could actually focus upon those unrecognized elements in the physical universe upon which no agreements can be reached, if he could focus upon the dissimilarities rather than the similarities, then he would wonder what gave anyone the idea that there was even one physical object upon which man could agree.

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. I was dying of cancer and knew it, but wasn’t a bit frightened. An old man beside me was also about to die. I told him not to worry, that I would be there to help him. Then I died, but there seemed to be no break in consciousness. I helped the old man out of his body and kept telling him that everything was all right.

I stated my case, while they listened politely. Their spokesman told me that their dead leader had promised them that on his return he would perform one particular feat for which he was known to prove his identity. He asked me, then, to show by my actions that I was this personality, ready to take over his rightful position. Rob and I both smiled, having anticipated the test.

Early in our sessions, Seth said that he once had a Turkish existence, but we have no information on one for us. We have all kinds of gaps to be filled in on our own past lives, however, because as long as I refused to accept reincarnation, I asked Rob not to ask for reincarnational material. Also, I became so upset when Seth gave such data that he probably thought it best to discontinue it for a while. When Seth is involved with a block of sessions on one subject, we hate to upset the continuity of the material by asking him to go into something else, and besides, we’ve learned that Seth eventually answers as many of our questions as possible.

“The locations that you visit while dreaming are as real to you then as physical locations are to you now. Let us speak no more of a conscious or unconscious self. There is one self and it focuses its attention in various dimensions. In the waking state it focuses in physical reality. In the dream state it is focused within a different dimension.

“The Crucifixion was one of the realities that enriched both the universe of dreams and the universe of matter, and it originated in the universe of dreams. It was a main contribution of that system to your own, and could be physically compared to the emergence of a new planet within the physical universe.”

Look at this projection from the dream state, for example. One morning after breakfast I lay down to try a dream projection. This simply means that I can sometimes recognize when I am dreaming, bring my normal “waking consciousness” into the dream situation, and then use it to project my consciousness elsewhere. When I got to this point that morning, I felt myself leave my body, knowing all the while that it was safe and comfortable in bed, with the door locked.

I traveled through the air so quickly that everything was a blur. Then I found myself on a strange city street. I was determined to find out where I was, so I walked around the block looking for street signs. The area was one of hotels and large shops. I saw two street names and finally decided to enter the lobby of one of the hotels. Here I found a bookshop and walked over to the shelves to look around. There were three books by Jane Roberts on ESP, and at the time of the experience (1967), I’d written only one.

Startled, I looked around again. Everything seemed normal enough. Wherever I was, it was a physical place. Something made me look up. A young man was looking at me with a pleased, cat-caught-the-canary grin. He was one of the clerks, and I saw now that most of the clerks were quite young, and they were watching me.

“You just aren’t that good at it yet,” one of them said. And I really got angry. Whether I was astral-traveling or whatever, these people were really having a good laugh at my expense.

In this session Seth also mentioned John F. Kennedy, and had some comments to make connecting racial problems with dreams. “As you know, many people dreamed of Jack Kennedy’s death in advance. On one level the knowledge was available to the man himself. This does not mean that the death had to occur. It was a vivid possibility. It was also one of many solutions to several problems. While it was not the most suitable solution, it was the closest man could come at that particular time in physical reality. …”