“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For a minute I was afraid to open my physical eyes. “Boy, if it’s still here, I’ve had it,” I thought. But it was gone. At least it was in another level of existence. I thought of waking Rob to tell him, but decided not to interrupt his sleep.

In a sort of backhanded compliment, Seth asked Rob to tell me that my abilities were improving—it was a well-made thought-form. Now, I don’t propose for a moment that any of my readers attempt such a foolhardy venture. But I do suggest that perhaps some of them have already done so without knowing it, waking only with the memory of a particularly bad nightmare.

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.

“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.”

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.

The other dream was even more vivid, and really enjoyable. I don’t know when I’ve had such a great time—certainly not in waking life. On Seth’s suggestion, I told myself before sleep that I would have a dream that would give me further information about my own reincarnational past. At this time I really didn’t believe in reincarnation, but I said to Rob, “Well, what have I got to lose? I’ll try it.” Then I gave myself the suggestion several times and fell asleep.

But what about that location, the Turkish hall? How real was it? How real are the places we seem to visit while we sleep? Here’s what Seth has to say: “You think that you are conscious only when you are awake. You assume yourselves to be unconscious when you sleep. The dice are indeed loaded on the side of the waking mind. But pretend for a moment that you are looking at this situation from the other side.

“Pretend that you are in the dream state and concerned with the problem of waking consciousness and existence. From that viewpoint, the picture is entirely different, for you are indeed conscious while you sleep.

“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.

“Dream locations are not superimposed upon, say, the bed and chest and chair. They exist composed of the very same atoms and molecules that in the waking state you perceive as bed and chest and chair. Objects, remember, are the results of your perception. From energy you form patterns which you then recognize as objects and use. But the objects are useless unless you are focused within the dimension for which they were specifically formed.

This does not mean that we do not sometimes leave our bodies and travel in our dream or astral bodies to other physical locations. According to Seth we do so often, whether or not we remember. Some of my students, for example, have frequent out-of-body experiences from both the waking and the dream states, and on several such occasions we seem to have met in my living room.

Seth told us that this was possible long before I had any such experiences on my own and before I had read about them. But his ideas of the interrelationship between waking and dream reality are fascinating.

“Many concepts and practical inventions simply wait in the dream system in abeyance until some man accepts them as possibilities within the physical frame of reality. … Imagination is waking man’s connection with the dream system. Imagination often reinstates dream data and applies it to particular circumstances or problems within daily life. …

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.

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.

“When you are manipulating within physical reality, you have a fairly simple set of rules to serve you. Within dream reality there is greater freedom. The ego is not present. The waking consciousness, dear friends, is not the ego. The ego is only that portion of waking consciousness that deals with physical manipulation.

“Waking consciousness can be taken into the dream state; the ego cannot, as it would falter and cause immediate failure. In your experiments you will meet with various conditions, and until you learn control it may be difficult to distinguish between them. Some you can manipulate, some you cannot. Some dream locations will be of your own making, and others will be strange to you. They will belong to other dimensions of reality, but you may blunder into them.

Through our dreams we change physical reality, and our physical daily experience alters our dream experience. There is constant interaction. Our consciousness is simply directed in a different kind of reality when we dream, a reality as vivid as waking life. We may forget our dreams, but they are always a part of us, even though we may not be aware of their entire reality.

According to Seth there are many other systems of reality in which we operate, all unknown to the waking ego. Not only are there universal systems composed of matter and antimatter, but there are an infinite variety of realities in between. Apparently there are also “probable realities,” in which we follow paths we may have taken, but did not, in physical life.