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.[3]

As a result of more frequent, briefer sleep periods, there would also be higher peaks of conscious focus, and a more steady renewal of both physical and psychic activity. There would not be such a definite division between the various areas or levels of the self.[4]

The inner dreaming portions of the personality seem strange to you not only because of a basic difference of focus, but because you clearly devote opposite portions of a twenty-four hour cycle to these areas of the self. 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.[5]

If such experiments are carried on consistently over a period of years, then the results could lead to excellent evidence for the various layers of the subconscious and inner self.[7]

• Characters, with special attention to characters unknown to us in our daily life, and the roles that they play
• Settings, especially those that we know well in the dream state but that do not exist in waking reality
• The main color scheme of the dream
• Comparison to physical reality (what is out of place and what is consistent with everyday possibilities)
• Period of history in which the dream action occurs
• Timing — current reality, childhood or other past times, the future, or mixtures. For example, a mixture might include a house you lived in as a child, with people from current reality.

In your sleep, you may have greeted friends who are strangers to your waking self. But consider the other side of the coin. For when you are asleep, you usually cannot find the street upon which you live in your waking hours, and when you are asleep, you do not know your waking self. The sleeping self is your identity.

There are connections between the two conditions, and there are definite realities that exist in both states, and these are what you are looking for. Only by finding these can you discover the nature of human personality and the nature of reality within which it operates.[9]

This will then allow us to proceed into the relationship between waking and sleeping personality and discover the many ways in which the personality's aims and goals are not only reflected but sometimes achieved in and through the dream condition. ... ways in which conscious goals can be achieved with the help of the dreaming self.[11]

Acting Within the Dream

In order to take action within our dreams, we must first find a way to become conscious in dreams. This is done by giving ourselves suggestions before going to sleep that we will "come awake" within a dream and know that we are dreaming.

What do we do once we know that we are dreaming? What dream-actions can we suggest to ourselves before falling asleep? Whatever we decide upon, it's a good idea to have a plan.

In Carlos Castaneda's The Art of Dreaming, Don Juan suggests that Carlos simply look at his hands when he becomes lucid in a dream. Seth's suggestions are a bit more interesting, for he basically says that we should start to explore the multidimensionality of the dreamscape.

We can, for example, try to follow a street as far as it goes, or walk through all the rooms of a dream house. We might attempt to go backward in time — back to "before" the beginning of our dream.

Or if we seem to be in an out-of-body state — for example, we are in our bedroom, but we are asleep — we might explore our house, or even go outside and explore the neighborhood. Alternatively, we might decide to instantly project ourselves to the home of a friend, or anywhere we might like to visit.[12]

Useful Suggestions for Dreaming

As a hypnotherapist, I have found that suggestions about dreaming are the most universally accepted. Perhaps because the critical mind is the only real source of doubt and is not active during the dream state, we do not need any kind of preparation, such as induction or progressive relaxation, in order for suggestions about dreaming to be effective. The simply stated intent that something will occur in the dream state seems to be sufficient.

And although any given suggestion may need to be repeated — perhaps several times — eventually (not necessarily on the night the suggestion was given) we will achieve the desired result.

As Seth recommends throughout his material on dreaming, the two basic suggestions we need to make in order to "do dreaming" is that we will wake up from our dreams in time to remember and record them, and that we will become lucid dreamers — that we will become conscious in the dream state and recognize that we are dreaming. Seth also notes in several sessions that we can suggest solutions to specific problems or the working out of difficult relationships through dreaming.

And — as Seth also points out more than once — we can make suggestions about how to handle frightening situations that may occur in the dream state. In one early Seth session, he suggests that nightmare characters be dismissed with the phrase, "Go in peace."[13] Some of the most amazing and miraculous-seeming dream stories seem to arise out of using this technique — a hint at what we might achieve if we could do the same thing in waking life.

Dream Interpretations

Unlike most teachers of dreaming, Seth does not focus on making interpretations. He does not see dream imagery in terms of symbols with esoteric meanings — metaphors that stand in for other things that are "real" in physical terms.

Seth always stresses that everything is real. Our main goal in dreaming, then, is to explore dream reality itself, to become aware of it as part of the totality of the Self. (For more about this exploration, see Becoming a Dream-Art Scientist).

In making this exploration, there are no hard-and-fast rules about meaning. Instead, we find our own meaning through becoming as conversant with dream reality as we are with waking reality. This process of learning and exploration provides its own teachings and guidelines.

Our dreams themselves will tell us all we need to know.


Footnotes:

1. The Coming of Seth by Jane Roberts, originally How to Develop Your ESP Power. It's out of print, but you can obtain copies through some of the online bookstores, including Amazon.com and Borders.com. Originally published in 1966.
2. Later, Jane Roberts threw aside her Ouija board and simply spoke Seth's dictations, going into a trance from which she would emerge with little memory of the content. And until Jane's death in 1984, her husband, Robert F. Butts, carefully transcribed each and every word by hand. The resulting Seth material, from thousands of Seth sessions conducted over two decades, now comprises many volumes. Within this material are predictions of scientific discoveries that lay far in the future when they were given — and that actually occurred. In fact, Seth's explanations of the nature of reality made practical sense, for the first time, of the discoveries of quantum physics, and many scientists, mathematicians, and well-known artists derived inspiration from Seth's insights.
3. Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul by Jane Roberts. There are several editions with different publishers. The book was originally published in 1972.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Seth, Dreams, and Projections of Consciousness by Jane Roberts (Stillpoint Publishing, 1986).
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. The Unknown Reality, Volume II by Jane Roberts, 1979.
13. Seth Speaks.

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