“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The initial dream involved a neighbor, Miss Cunningham, who lived in this apartment house long before we knew it existed. When Rob and I moved here in 1960, she had already spent a quarter of a century in her three small rooms, surrounded by books of poetry and drama. As we came up the front steps, we often saw her sitting in the upstairs window, watching the traffic below. But the year we arrived, her life began to shrink. She retired from her position as a high school drama teacher and spent more and more time in her little apartment.

That summer, Rob and I vacationed in Maine. We hadn’t communicated with Miss Cunningham at all. But on the night of our return to Elmira, I awakened suddenly with the memory of a disquieting dream which bothered me so much that I awakened Rob. He sat up, astonished. Neither of us remembered dreams at all.

“I saw Miss Cunningham, of all people,” I said. “We were in a hospital. She wore a black suit, and her eyes were terribly red and sore. She was crying, saying over and over, ‘Oh dear, I have to go away, and I don’t want to go.’ There was a glassed-in area to the left in the hospital lobby, where you could buy gifts for the patients. It was all so real.”

This upset me further. “Why? You don’t think that it’s symbolic or something? Or that it might come true? And why should I even dream of Miss Cunningham? We hardly know her.”

In the morning, I was still upset. Our television set hadn’t worked the night before. We didn’t have a phone then, so I decided to ask Miss Cunningham if I could use hers to call a repairman. Actually, I thought that if I saw her, hale and hearty as always, I’d feel better. Then, I reasoned, I could just dismiss my dream and forget the whole thing.

The minute I knocked on the door, Miss Cunningham opened it. Her hands reached out for mine, supplicatingly. Usually she was primly polite and rather distant. The change in her manner instantly alarmed me. Startled, I drew back for just a moment before asking what was wrong. “Oh, I’m so glad to see someone,” she said. “I’m so upset. I’ve just learned that I have cataracts, and I’ll need operations on both of my eyes. It’s so depressing.” Her voice wavered. With a gesture of despair, she waved at the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and at the magazines piled on the coffee table. “I read so much … so much. What would I ever do if I lost my sight?”

As the days passed, the dream was more or less forgotten. Only now and then did it nag at me with its disquieting connotations. I felt, uneasily, that a small but significant tear had been ripped in the nature of things. Looking back, I’m sure that I sniffed danger as surely as any animal who senses something strange and new in his environment — or as any adult when threatened by a change in the status quo. So for all general purposes, I put the dream out of my mind and went on my way. I later mentioned this dream in my first book in the field, How To Develop Your ESP Power. Even then, I had no idea that it would be only one of a series of psychic events involving Miss Cunningham, nor did I see its true significance in my own development.

I described that experience in The Seth Material, but because it rose from the world of dreams and is so connected with unconscious activity, I want to examine it from a different viewpoint here. The Miss Cunningham dream had startled me. This time, I was swept away by the most awe-inspiring event of my life to that date; yet, I was not afraid.