“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Dream events “come together” in the same way that the universe does. [...] You share, then, a mass dream experience as you share a mass waking world. [...] The same applies to the dream state.

[...] The same kind of activity occurs in the child’s dream state as it learns to handle events before they are physically encountered. Intense dream activity is involved. Some dream events are more real to the child than some waking events are — not because the child does not understand the nature of experience, but because he or she is still so close to the emotional basis behind events. [...]

[...] This state of dreaming provides an inner network of communication, that in its way far surpasses your technological communications. [...] In the dream state, however, a rose can be an orange, a song, a grave, or a child as well, and be each equally.

Your dreams are also uniquely yours, yet they happen within a shared context, an environment in which the dreams of the world occur. [...]

Ruburt’s dreams will be part of this evening’s discussion, as they apply directly to him and as they represent the beautiful, even exquisite imagery of the dreaming self in general. The art dream (of June 3), as I call it, has its opening scene in an art gallery, which represents a conventionalized view of art. Ruburt used painting as an art in the dream rather than writing (pause), because it symbolized your joint ideas of art—to some extent, now—and allowed him to have you in his mind as he viewed the dream events.

[...] Now we went over her recent dream activity, in the event Seth chose to offer material on that. Jane’s dreams have been vivid and positive for the most part, concerning physical improvements, etc. Attached is her record of her dreams from June 1-3. Seth opened the session by discussing her June 3 dream. [...]

His other dreams, of the walking series (pause), are giving him practical physical education, for the muscles remember their proper motions, and these dreams help counteract his waking belief that it is difficult to walk. Messages are also going out to other people, who are aware at dream levels of Ruburt’s intent. [...] The dreams themselves have contributed to Ruburt’s relative compliance with growing bodily relaxation, and with his growing trust in his own impulses.

[...] As Ruburt wakens, he realizes that nowhere in the dream did he have any reason to hide. [...]

First, problems are worked out within the dream framework. [...] No dream is meaningless. No dream lacks purpose. Each dream has meaning to all levels of the personality, and one dream object is a symbol which is translated by all layers of the self, in a mathematics which is more complicated than any dealt with by your physical computers.

[...] In the dream state the outer senses are to a large degree restrained in their activity. Therefore the dream state more clearly represents the actual nature of time. Intense emotions within the dream state are experienced as present time, and the personality moves easily through these emotional intensities without experiencing the sense of passing time, although any given dream may contain within it its own time element.

[...] Our friend, the Jesuit, will do well to read our dream material, for dreams are a reflection of the needs of a personality and of the abilities. The focus of attention and concentration are magnified a thousandfold in the dream state, and dreams form the basis for your physical environment.

[...] The personality also operates within the dream state in ways that would not be considered normal in the waking state. [...] He sees parents who have died in physical ways, and in his dreams he knows, on many occasions, what other characters think within the dream context.

[...] There are also root dreams shared by the race as a whole. [...] For that matter, as you know, flying dreams need not be symbolic of anything. They can be valid experiences, though often intermixed with other dream elements. Falling dreams are also simple experience in many instances, representing downward motion, or a loss of form-control during projection.

We mentioned that the dreaming self has its own memories. It has memory of all dream experience. [...] To the dreaming self, however, past, present and future do not exist. [...]

If you would have some idea of what the probable universe is like, then examine your own dreams, looking for those events which do not have any strong resemblance to the physical events of waking existence. Look for dream individuals with whom you are not acquainted in normally conscious life. [...] They do not exist in the space that you know but neither are they nonexistent, mere imaginative toys of the dreaming mind, without substance.

So far, we’ve experienced two main types of dreams that seem to involve probabilities. Sue’s, given earlier, represent the personally-oriented dream in which we seem to perceive probable events that could have happened or could happen in the future in our normal environment. Other kinds of dreams involve the “bizarre environments” Seth mentioned and show societies or civilizations quite alien to us, but built up around elements at least recognizable.

[...] Jane feels subjectively that this refers to the four specific dreams, furnished by four specific people, that she discusses in chapter five of her dream book. These are represented on the object itself by the chapter heading, “Recurring Dreams..?” among others. Movement is especially prominent in the dreams discussed, and in three out of the four can be violent or strong: Flying, swinging, running as fast as one can. The fourth dream concerns driving at an average rate of speed. [...]

(There follows from her dream notebook Jane’s account of one of the dreams she had on Tuesday, May 10,1966: “This whole dream was in images. [...] It was a revelation type dream, except that now I can’t remember anymore about it. [...]

[...] Chapter five of the dream book contains suggested experiments for the reader to try, involving waking and dreaming states and their interchange, etc. On the object itself, the word try is used twice in Jane’s notes, having to do with the reader’s attempt to manipulate dreams. [...]

[...] Games and playgrounds figure prominently in chapter five of Jane’s dream book; the envelope object is the first page from chapter five. Jane’s childhood playground in Saratoga Springs, NY, is described in chapter five, as well as a vivid recurring dream which had this playground for a setting. In both waking life and the recurring dream, games such as Jungle Gyms played a leading role.

This realization made the following dream, the second dream, possible. But the following dream would not have been possible without the first. The second dream is a dream of expansion. [...] The most meaningful level was one in which the many rooms represented psychic areas of development, endless possibilities that continually opened; but possibilities which were based on previous life experiences, and there are many aspects of reincarnational data in this dream, all reinforcing the healthy aspects of Ruburt’s personality.

[...] I remarked that it was going to be a busy session, what with the material on the Gallaghers and Dr. Instream, a possible envelope test, and the chance that Seth might discuss two very long, vivid, and complicated dreams Jane had while taking a short nap last Friday morning. [...] She believes that at least one of these dreams is a therapeutic dream, resulting from suggestions she gave herself following Seth’s material on therapeutic dreams in the last session.

Indeed, Ruburt is correct in one respect at least, for the first dream, concerning the voices, was meant to be a therapeutic dream. However his own doubts changed the action within the dream, and he reacted to his doubts and ignored the earlier portion of the dream entirely.

The second dream is an excellent example of a therapeutic dream that results from self-suggestion. Ruburt requested a therapeutic dream from his inner self, and he received one.

[...] Most people are not this proficient in dream manipulation, but surely some of my readers will be able to remember what I am saying, while they are dreaming. To those people I say: “Look around you in the dream state. [...] You can walk out of that dream house into another environment; and theoretically at least you can explore that world, and the space within it will expand. There will be no spot in the dream where the environment will cease.”

[...] They are connected with your personal creativity, so dream books will not help you in deciphering those meanings if they attach a specific significance to any given symbol. [...] If you had before you your entire dream history and could read — as in a book — the story of all of your dreams from birth, you would discover that you changed the meaning of your symbols as you went along, or as it suited your purposes. The content of a dream itself has much to do with the way you employ any given symbol.

[...] In deeper terms, however, in the dream state each person will be working out his or her own problems or challenges. Dreaming, a person can cure himself or herself of a disease, working through the problems that caused it. Dreaming, the hungry individual can discover ways to find food, or to procure the money to buy it. Dreaming is a practical activity. [...]

Animals also dream, for example, and whole herds of starving animals will be led by their dreams to find better feeding grounds. In the same way, the dreams of starving people point toward the solution of the problem. [...] (With emphasis:) In the dream state any individual can find the solution to whatever challenge exists.

False Awakening or Awake-Seeming Dream: Now I had a false awakening. In the back of my mind all night was the resolution to make sure I recorded my dreams. [...] I wrote the dreams down in my notebook which was on the bedside table, and then, to make sure, I awakened Rob and told him the dreams also. Rob pointed out that the first dream and one of the others were definitely related. [...]

[...] It serves no purpose to include all of the many dreams of this nature that I recorded — dreams in which I managed to regain my critical senses, sometimes only to fall back into normal dreaming and sometimes to embark upon conscious experiments. [...]

Then the suspicion struck me that perhaps this was an awake-seeming dream, that I was still dreaming and that none of the dreams had been written down at all. [...]

Without moving my physical body and with my physical eyes closed, I reached over and checked my dream book, finding that the page was blank. Really angry at this self-deception, I decided to get out of bed entirely, go into the living room, turn the light on and make sure that I really wrote the dreams down this time. (When I got out of bed here, I believe that I was in my dream body, without realizing it.)

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. (Pause.) As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.

(Pause at 8:43.) Their dreams would then be shared by the tribe in the morning, or at special meetings, when each dreamer would give a rendition of the dream or dreams that seemed to be involved. [...] Some such dreams were extremely direct, others were clothed in symbolism according to the style of the dreamer, but in any case the dream was understood to have a public significance as well as a private one.

Earlier, I also spoke about the importance of dreams in man’s early background, and their importance to you as a species. Here, I want to stress the social aspects of dreams, and to point out the fact that dreams also show you some of the processes that are involved in the actual formation of physical events: You actually come into an event, therefore, long before the event physically happens, at other levels of consciousness, and a good deal of this prior activity takes place in the state of dreaming.

The same still applies, though often dreams themselves are forgotten. Instead, for example, for news or for advice you watch your morning television news, which provides you with a kind of manufactured dream that to some extent technologically serves the same purpose. [...] dream dramas. [...] Now such dreams simply act as backup systems, rising to the fore whenever they are needed. [...]

(In color as usual: An odd dream that I want to note, even though I can’t recall much of it. I dreamed that I was a woman of indeterminate age, perhaps around 50, and that in some way I was trying to improve, or wanted others to improve with me. [...] My father was in the dream with me as I knew him in “real” life, and oddly enough he was about the same age as I was in the dream. [...] Anyhow, he used a phrase that I remembered when I woke up: “I live in a brown-paper-bag part of town,” meaning a lower middle-class neighborhood; he implied that that was his station in life, and that he had no idea of trying to change it, or felt that he couldn’t. In the dream I wore a brown faded coat and perhaps a small matching hat. [...] My shoes seemed to be low-heeled, at least in memory of the dream. [...]

ROB’S DREAM

You begin to manipulate the dream state, or rather you begin to manipulate yourself within dream reality, which is something different. [...] In ordinary dreaming, without the awareness of usual waking consciousness, perception of dream reality is limited and instinctive. [...] When you learn to take waking awareness into the dream condition, you are reaching adolescence, so to speak.

For example, Mr. Fox’s dream meetings were quite valid. [...] Those who agree on such a meeting within dream reality must have certain abilities developed. They must be capable of taking waking consciousness into the dream state. [...] Each of them therefore constructs, you see, the dream location at which they have agreed to meet, a point not thought of by Ruburt’s Mr. Fox.

When you reach adulthood, following our analogy, then you will learn to be successful in manipulating dream reality as you now manipulate objective reality. For if you create your dreams, you also create your objective environment. The dream reality is as real and actual as physical reality, but it can be changed you see by you, as physical reality can be changed.

[...] In certain levels of dream reality forms that you do not as yet perceive as physical, do exist. [...] In certain dreams you do perceive them. Within dream reality you can come in contact with many other kinds of reality with which you do not ordinarily have to deal.

If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. [...] When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell. But this, dear friends, has nothing to do with space, for the dream location exists simultaneously with the room in which the body sleeps.

Following Seth’s instructions, my husband and I first learned to recall and record our dreams. Through later experiments, we discovered that we could bring our normal waking consciousness into the dream state and “come awake” while dreaming. [...]

Dreams, then, are not just imaginative indigestion or psychic chaos. We are not temporarily insane when we dream, as some theorists maintain. To the contrary, we may be far more sane and alert during some dream states than we are ordinarily. [...]

While the main emphasis of this book will be on Seth’s dream concepts, the reader is invited to test them out for himself or herself. Seth told us early in the game that many dreams were precognitive, for example, but personal experience is a great convincer, and we discovered this ourselves as we followed his instructions — recalled, dated and recorded dreams and then checked them against events.

[...] For what would seem to you to be eons, according to your time scale, men were in the dreaming state far more than they were in the waking one. [...] It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imagining the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories—building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.

(8:58.) During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge [man] gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, its constant inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the CU’s translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into the physical form.

Man dreamed his languages. He dreamed how to use his tongue to form the words. In his dreams he practiced stringing the words together to form their meanings, so that finally he could consciously begin a sentence without actually knowing how it was begun, yet in the faith that he could and would complete it.

These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.

[...] We discuss a dream which I have just experienced (within the major dream). [...] They slowed the car down, laughingly, to twenty-five or so (in this inner dream) and I jumped out, also laughing and unharmed. In the living room we discuss this dream. [...] I tell them of my interest in dreams and that records are important. We are strangers, incidentally, meeting in the dream.

[...] Just about the whole dream takes place in this location. [...]

I think the following is beginning of dream: Mrs. Mahaar calls me to go downstairs. [...]

I have told you that dream reality is more cohesive than you may have supposed. Such characteristics as shared dreams go a long way to stabilize dream reality. When you dream of others they know it. When they dream of you, you know this. [...]

Dreams you see are also imprinted within the cells electromagnetically. [...] They dream individually and collectively of changing the situation. They act out in their dreams the various ways in which such a changeabout could occur. These dreams actually bring about the resulting change that will then happen in a historic manner. The very energy and direction you see of the dreams themselves will help change the situation.

The dream solutions are held as the ideals, however. Without for example mass dreams, your United Nations would never exist. This type of mass dream is one of several varieties. It is true indeed that all dreams to some extent are shared, for the privacy that you imagine exists within them is, as Ruburt correctly supposed, an illusion.

(As to why Jane hasn’t dreamed of Seth himself, although she has dreamed of the sessions, etc. Seth states he doesn’t dream of Jane, either.)

In periods of play the child actually often continues some games initiated quite naturally in the dream state. [...] In dreams the mind is free to play with events, and with their formation. [...] In play the children try out events initiated in the dream state, and “judge” these against the practical conditions. [...] Basically (underlined twice) in dreaming the brain is not limited to physically encountered experience.

Children’s dreams are more intense than those of adults because the brain is practicing its event-forming activities. [...] Infants play in their dreams, performing physical actions beyond their present physical capacities. While external stimuli are highly important, the inner stimuli of dream play are even more so.

[...] In the dream state adults and children alike do the same thing, and many dreams are indeed a kind of play. [...]

When children dream, they utilize these inner senses as adults do, and then through dreaming they learn to translate such material into the precise framework of the exterior senses. [...]

Many people, however, remembering a dark dream, become frightened. You even structure your dreams, of course. For that matter, your dream world is as varied as the physical one. [...] The same applies to the dream state. You have all kinds of dreams. You can take what you want, so to speak, from dream reality, as basically you take what you want from waking life. For that reason, your dream snapshots will show you the kind of experience that you are choosing from inner reality.

5. All in Volume 1: Note 1 for Session 698 contains quotations from the dream material Seth gave in the 92nd session for September 28, 1964. Then see the equally interesting information on dreams in Session 699; I especially like Seth’s statement that “In a way, one remembered dream can be compared to a psychological photograph….” Jane’s poem, My Dreaming Self, is presented in the notes following that session, along with references to other dream material.

[...] You dream when you are out of your body, even as you dream inside it. You may therefore form dream stories about your own out-of-body travel, while your physical image rests soundly in bed. [...]

(11:16.) In dream travel it is quite possible to journey to other civilizations — those in your past or future, or even to worlds whose reality exists in other probable systems. [...] There are no closed realities, only apparent boundaries that seem to separate them.⁶ The more parochial your own world view, however, the less you will recall of their dreams or their activities, or the more distorted your “dream snapshots” will be.

(See my dream of September 17 in my dream notebook. [...] The setting of the dream was the same—my studio—as the dream of August 20, mentioned on page 69. In the first dream I had found myself outside the studio windows, but not falling. In the second dream I had refused to leave the safety of the studio, which is on the second floor, for fear of falling. [...]

(See my dream notebook for the very vivid dream-projection experience of August 20,1966.)

[...] I should also note that if coffee does not prevent or inhibit sleep, it will stimulate dream projections, and also aid you in bringing the critical faculties into the dream state. [...]

In that dream, and in several others which you have forgotten. [...] The dream itself showed your attitude, and you have already begun to change it.

You construct the dream universe, again, on a subconscious basis. The dream universe is as permanent in its way as the physical universe. You construct dreams whether you wake or you sleep. You are only familiar with your dreams when you sleep, for then your perception and your energy is focused in that direction.

As you create physical matter constantly without knowing that you do so, so also you create constantly a dream universe, and this dream universe is as individual as your environment in the physical world. There is also a chemical reaction here, for without dreaming the physical organism could not exist.

[...] In the dream universe you are however free, and familiar, with both space and time in a manner which is denied you in the waking state. Where indeed are your dream locations? Where in space is the street upon which you walk in a dream?

[...] Why then do you find it difficult to believe that you are more than the ego, for in dreams you meet portions of yourself. You construct realities, and you are indeed familiar with the dream universe that consciously you ignore. And your experience within the dream universe is as vivid and as valid and as real, in every respect, as your waking experience.

In our dream experiments then, we will allow you to bring such messages to the ego. [...] We shall map this dream state from various perspectives, until you know it very well.

Usually the dream state is considered from a negative standpoint, and compared unfavorably with waking reality. Emphasis is laid upon those conditions present in the waking condition, and absent in the dream state.

We shall however consider those aspects of consciousness which are present within the dream environment, and absent in the physical environment. No study of human personality can pretend to be thorough that does not take into consideration the importance of the dream reality.

In our dream experiments therefore, this is one of the purposes that we hope to achieve. [...]