“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There are many variations, in fact, that would be better than your present system. Ideally, sleeping five hours at a time, you gain the maximum benefit, and anything else over this time is not nearly as helpful. Those who require more sleep would then take, say, a two-hour nap. For others a four-hour block sleep session and two naps would be highly beneficial. With suggestion properly given, the body can recuperate in half the time now given to sleep. In any case it is much more bracing and efficient to have the physical body active rather than inactive for, say, eight to ten hours.

You separate them as much as possible. In doing so you divide your intuitive, creative, and psychic abilities quite neatly from your physical, manipulative, objective abilities. It makes no difference how many hours of sleep you think you need. You would be much better off sleeping in several shorter periods, and you would actually then require less time. The largest sleep unit should be at night. But again, the efficiency of sleep is lessened and disadvantages set in after six to eight hours of physical inactivity.

Persons vary in the amount of sleep they need, and no pill will ever allow them to dispense with sleep entirely, for too much work is done in that state. However, this could be done far more effectively with two, rather than one, sleep periods of lesser duration.

You would retain a far greater memory of your subjective experiences, and your body would be healthier, if these sleeping patterns were changed. Six to eight hours of sleep in all would be sufficient with the nap patterns outlined. And even those who think they now need more sleep than this would find that they did not, if all the time was not spent in one block. The entire system, physical, mental, and psychic, would benefit.

Now: This extended period, given to waking consciousness without rest periods, builds up chemicals in the blood that are discharged in sleep. [...] The long sleep period to which you are accustomed then does become necessary. [...] The ego feels threatened by the extended “leave of absence” it must take, becomes wary of sleep, and sets up barriers against the dream state. [...]

Rest or sleep cures — very extended sleep periods — have been helpful for therapy in some cases, not because extended sleep is in itself beneficial, but because so many toxins had built up that such extended periods were required. [...]

Now: It is well known that fluctuations of consciousness and alertness exist in the sleep state. [...]

Some waking states, of course, come very close to sleep states. [...]

(Long pause at 10:24.) You did not simply come upon your sleep patterns. [...] In natural circumstances the animals, while sleeping at night, are still partially alert against predators and danger. There is within the innate characteristics of the mammalian brain, then, a great balance in which complete physical relaxation can occur in sleep, while consciousness is maintained in a “partially suspended, passive-yet-alert” manner. [...]

There are many other natural and spontaneous kinds of comprehension that can also result from the waking and sleeping rhythms that I have suggested. [...] But changed wake-sleep habits can, again, bring about a transformation in which it is obvious that dreams contain great wisdom and creativity, that the unconscious is indeed quite conscious, and that in fact the individual sense of identity can be retained in the dream state. [...]

Animals follow their own natural waking-sleeping schedules, and in their way derive far greater benefits from both states than you, and use them with greater effectiveness — particularly along the lines of the body’s built-in system of therapy. They know exactly when to alter their patterns to longer or shorter sleep periods, therefore adjusting the adrenaline output and regulating all of the bodily hormones.

In the natural body-mind relationship the sleep state operates as a great connector, an interpreter, allowing the free flow of conscious and unconscious material. In the kind of sleep patterns suggested, optimum conditions are set up. [...]

[...] The alternate waking and sleeping patterns—that is, one portion of the species sleeping while the other portion wakes—allows a clear division between waking and sleeping information. [...] It may be raining in a dream but your sleeping body remains dry. [...]

The preparation of the bridges, again, is an unconscious process, done in sleeping, though some “maintenance” is also carried on beneath usual consciousness, even in the waking members of the species. [...] The sleeping-waking division then is not only a human one. It is as if, figuratively speaking, in sleep you build a constant foundation for waking life.

Deeper communications than you realize happen between the waking and sleeping members of the species, and in such a manner the formation of physical events is to some extent timed, or paced. The planning stages for events, and the inner communications necessary, occur on the part of the sleeping members, while the waking doers are involved in objective events.

Sleeping provides not only a rest from usual activity, but a recharge of energy. [...] This kind of foundation is continually laid with great diligence by the sleeping portion of the species. [...]

You have hypnotized yourselves so that it seems to you that there are great divisions between your waking and your sleeping experience. Yet each of you will fall sleep tonight, and you will have experiences that you forget only because you have been told that you cannot remember them. Many of the other dimensions of your own reality appear clearly when you are sleeping, however. When you sleep, you forget all definitions that you have placed upon yourself and your own existence through training. In sleep you use images and languages in their pure form.

As mentioned in Seth Speaks, my earlier book, great distinctions are made between your waking and sleeping states. [...] Many of you will not find it practical to alter your sleeping hours because of work commitments. Some of you will be able to do so, however, and those of you who are really interested in this endeavor can at least achieve some variation, on occasion, that will allow you to connect your sleeping and waking activities with far greater effectiveness.

(11:37.) There is a give-and-take chemical reaction, or rather chemical rhythms of reactions, that are far more effective in the shorter sleep periods. Many of you sleep through periods that should be those of your greatest creativity and alertness, in which the conscious and unconscious are most beautifully focused and at one. The conscious mind is often drugged with sleep just when it could be deriving its greatest benefits from the unconscious, and be able to poise most meaningfully in the reality that you know. [...]

(We usually sleep six hours at night, then supplement this with a half-hour nap late in the afternoon. Rather often, too, Jane will break up her nighttime sleep period by spontaneously waking and getting up for an hour or so.)

[...] I suggest a six-hour sleeping block of time at one session, and no more. [...]

(We have been reading the article on sleep in the September 18th issue of the New Yorker. Called “A Third Stage of Existence”, it deals with REM sleep, or the rapid eye movements that have been shown to occur during dreaming. Since Seth has dealt with dreams to some extent Jane and I have a somewhat different slant on sleep and dreaming, and what is involved.

[...] REM sleep or no REM sleep, your dreams exist constantly, beneath consciousness, even in the waking state. [...] It is impossible to deprive a human being of dreams, for even though you deprive him of sleep, this necessary mental function will be carried on subconsciously.

[...] You can suggest ordinary sleep, and then suggest that the subject, in his sleep and without waking, give a verbal description of his dream or dreams.

The eye movements noted in the beginning of REM sleep are only indications of dream activity that is closely connected to the physical layers of the self. [...]

In sleep your ordinary brain waves as you understand them register a chaotic jungle of experience not normally processed. [...] The normal waking consciousness, with its characteristic patterns, can indeed follow [into sleep]. [...] You would follow your own pattern of continuity and understanding, weaving this into the sleep and dream states, forming a “new” pattern that triumphantly combines all, as to some extent this occurs in our sessions.

[...] In normal sleep, the “conscious” wave rides beneath the others, with the face of consciousness turned inward, so to speak. [...] In sleep the beta waves are not turned off — the “conscious” part of you, with its beta rhythms, is elsewhere.

[...] Very simply, delta brain waves are connected with dreamless sleep, theta with creativity and dreams, alpha with a relaxed alertness and changing consciousness; beta — the fastest — with concentration, and with an intense focus upon all of the challenges [and anxieties and stresses, many would say] faced in the ordinary daily world.

[...] You would go to sleep to solve certain problems … There is an overall general difference, nationally speaking — that is, people of various nations do differ to some extent in their prevalent brain frequencies … All in all, however, the beta has predominated, and has been expected to solve many problems unsuited to its own characteristics.

You usually glide from wakefulness through to sleep without ever noticing the various conditions of consciousness through which you pass, yet there are several. [...] Then there is an undifferentiated level between wakefulness and sleep where you act as a receiver — passive but open, in which telepathic and clairvoyant messages come to you quite easily.

Somewhere during this time he will go into a deeply protected area of sleep, where he is at the threshold to other layers of reality and probabilities. [...] He will then return toward physical reality in an area marked as REM sleep by your scientists, where physically oriented dream productions will be created, putting the knowledge he has gained into use.

[...] In the most protected areas of sleep, the apparent barriers between many layers of reality vanish. [...]

[...] You can prepare questions or problems, suggesting that they be solved for you in the sleep state. [...]

I am going to close our session—far be it from me to keep you from your sleep! I would also like to see you do some work while you are sleeping, however. I work while I am sleeping, why should you not? [...]

Incidentally, I spoke humorously, because for your information, we do not sleep, in your terms. We rest when we wish to, but we do not sleep, and so we are not huddled up with blankets over our heads for eight hours at a time. [...]

[...] You have been told that you cannot know what happens to you when your body sleeps, but you can, indeed. [...]

Now, I would sincerely like to see some action on your part, and I will give you instructions in the sleep state when you are ready for them, so you have a standing invitation out, and I will promise you it will not be a pompous [sic] week. [...]

The interrelationship between the waking state and the sleeping state has never been clearly understood. One of the main differences between the waking and sleeping states is merely the almost complete change of focus that is involved. [...]

[...] You do not have to sleep to dream. [...]

In this sort of an investigation instructions then can be given before sleeping, and a portion of the self will indeed continue to work for you in this manner. [...]

[...] We will make you investigators even in your sleep; and you can see now how your very investigations are bound to change the nature of your dreams themselves. [...]

In the sleeping state, you have memory of everyone you have ever met in your dreams, though you may or may not have met some of these people in your daytime existence. In the sleeping state you may have constant experience through the years with close associates who may live in another portion of the world entirely, and be strangers to you in the waking state.

In sleep and dream states you are involved in the same dimension of existence in which you will have your after-death experiences. [...]

You do exist consciously in a coherent, purposeful creative state while the physical body sleeps, however, and you carry on many of the activities that I told you would be encountered after death. [...]

[...] As there is continuity to your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life.

However, the sleeping portion of the species represents the brain’s unconscious activities in the body — particularly when you think of the motion of all of the species’ actions en masse in a given day. [...] If you think of a mass world brain — one entity — then it must wake and sleep in patterns. [...]

Diverse cultures are thus able to communicate as the cultural knowledge of various parts of the world is given to the sleeping portion of the entire organism. When they sleep, the waking nations add the day’s events to the world memory, and work out future probabilities.

(10:40.) Now, briefly: The overall stance of the species is largely maintained by the waking-sleeping patterns that you mentioned recently. [...]

(Our cat, Willy Two — or Billy — had been sleeping beside me on the couch. [...]

[...] It will help you if before you sleep you remind yourself gently that you can indeed be free of worry during the night, and then indeed you can sleep peacefully, knowing that Ruburt is being healed even as you sleep. [...]

[...] Sleep well, Sweetheart.)

This intuitional alertness carries over into daily life and into the sleeping state. [...] You can leave your body safely sleeping, for a projection of consciousness. [...]

[...] You can become fully awake while the body sleeps. [...]

[...] This state can occur whether you are normally awake, “awake” in the sleep condition, or in a trance. [...]

[...] … REM sleep or no REM sleep, your dreams exist constantly beneath consciousness, even in the waking state. [...] It is impossible to deprive a person of dreams even though you deprive him of sleep [as in certain dream laboratory experiments]. [...]

[...] In sleeping, however, you focus your awareness in altered form into another world that is every bit as valid as your physical one. Only a small amount of energy is focused into the physical system during sleep, enough simply to maintain the body within the environment.

However, with the ego at rest in sleep, the individual often allows communications and dream constructions through — past the ego barrier. [...]

I have said before that the dream world is composed of molecular structure, and that it is a continuing reality, even though your own awareness of it is usually limited to the hours of your own sleep. [...]

[...] Then tried to sleep, thinking that it might be easier for her if I were in a dream state. [...] Instead fell to sleep at once to have the following strange dream. [...]

(As she often has following recent sessions, after the 685th session Jane discovered herself delivering Seth material in the sleep state. [...]

[...] Since the first session on Seth’s book (the 679th) was held — and before we knew it was a book — I’ve been getting material on it in my sleep after each session. [...]

[...] As I opened my eyes, I realized that the material hadn’t been given yet in ‘Unknown’ Reality — though in the sleep state I was sure it had been.

[...] At Rob’s request this morning I wrote a statement about my experience in the sleep state last night. [...]

All layers of the personality are ‘conscious.’ They simply operate like compartments, so that often one portion of the self is not aware of other portions. As a rule, when you are awake you do not know your sleeping self; you know your neighbor far better, so your sleeping self seems mysterious indeed. [...]

In your sleep, you may have greeted friends who are strangers to your waking self. [...] The sleeping self is your identity.

[...] I considered sleep a small death in which all sense of continuity vanished. [...]

[...] Before you fall to sleep at night, give yourself this suggestion: “I can remember my dreams and write them down in the morning.”

[...] The greatest biological creativity takes place while you sleep, for example, and certain cellular functions¹⁰ are accelerated. [...] Sleeping is not a by-product of waking life.

10. Perhaps I should have asked Seth to be more specific about those “certain cellular functions” that are accelerated in the sleep state, but I didn’t; I was tiring. It’s well known that parts of the brain are much more active when we sleep than when we’re awake, for instance, but I doubt that Seth was referring to such phenomena here.

The brain itself never sleeps, of course, since it’s endlessly involved in running the vastly complicated physiological functions of the body. Sleep for the conscious mind results when neural activity in the reticular activating system (the RAS), which screens the sensory information reaching consciousness, falls below a minimum level.

[...] (Pause.) In sleep, in fact, it is not at all necessary that the main consciousness be alert in the body. [...]