Seth and the Dream Department of Literary Production

I love first-hand stories of how writers are inspired and spurred to action by dreams. In an old journal, I found notes I made while reading Susan M. Watkins' account of the classes she took with Jane Roberts and Seth in the early 1970s. She reported that a dream pushed her to jettison her doubts about turning her journals into a book. She dreamed she saw a print shop growing out of her backyard garage, “literally growing, like a time-lapse garden film – out of the garage walls and floor”. She knew this print shop contained everything she needed to produce her book and get it circulating to an audience.
    She proceeded to put together and publish her book, Conversations with Seth, a treasury for those of us who are drawn to the Seth material and its wonderfully clear description of multidimensional reality and the multidimensional self and the vital importance of dreaming in all of this.

    Susan compared the mobilizing effect of this dream to the kind of experience described by Jane Roberts in Adventures in Consciousness, when a surge of creative energy is given to us by the psyche at exactly the right moment.
    As a writer myself, I assign such episodes (devoutly to be wished) to the Dream Department of Literary Production.

My rediscovery of the Watkins story made me open her book again, at random. I found precious thoughts from Seth on two very important themes: how absence of dream recall may be caused by fear of the inner self, and how the dream world s not only a real world but may be the source of events in the physical world.

    In a session of Jane Roberts class in June 1973 Seth had this to say to a participant who wanted to know why, if dreams are important, she could not remember hers:

    “You are still afraid of the inner self. You still do not trust your dreams, and you are afraid of them. You do not want to remember them. When you give yourselves the suggestion that you will remember your dreams…you do not mean it. You are afraid or what you might meet, and you are still afraid of one particular dream, and you know the one to which I am referring.

     “You can change the ending of the dream by understanding the nature of reality: that you form it….You must believe in the power and energy and strength and glory of your being, and know that problems are challenges for you to solve…Then face them joyfully [with] your entire self….

    “Stop cowering! Do not cower before your own belief that the inner self is frightening, or that you are a bad person, or that while you are good, there are bad things hidden down there. Tell yourself, and convince yourself, that since you area part of All That Is, you are in your own way, now, a unique expression of All That Is, and there is nothing in All That Is to be afraid of and there  is nothing in you to be afraid of.”

     Later in that session Seth comes to his favorite theme:

    “How real is a dream? What makes you think that there is any difference between what you think of as a dream and what you think of as reality? You assume that a dream is less real; yet through what you think of as your dreaming life, you make your physical life…You choose in the dream state the probable realities that you will then make physical.”