“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.

In the beginning, Rob and I only saw her face to face in the dark apartment house hallway, usually at the mailbox. She was fiercely independent, tall and slim, with neatly coiffeured hair and tailored clothes. Her English was flawless. She had an excellent reputation as a teacher, and now and then she was visited by former students to whom she served tea. During the holidays, her mailbox was stuffed with cards.

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.

“Maybe you should write the dream down and date it,” Rob said.

“Well, it won’t hurt to write the dream down, will it?” Rob asked.

Yet, later in the day, I managed to convince myself that only coincidence was involved. “After all,” I said to Rob, “she wasn’t wearing black. And we weren’t in a hospital. Maybe I just noticed subconsciously that her eyes were failing and then made up the dream.”

“Maybe. We haven’t seen her in nearly a month, though,” Rob said.

It’s impossible to describe the impression that this manuscript made on me, much less to verbalize the experience that accompanied it. All of these ideas were completely new to me and quite contrary to my own beliefs. I had never written anything like this before. Rob was painting in his studio at the time. When he came out, I was so excited and amazed that I could hardly speak.

We stayed up late that night, talking. I tried to explain what had happened, realizing for the first time the vast gulf between words and subjective feelings. So I showed Rob the manuscript. Without it, incidentally, I would have been left without any tangible evidence at all. Yet when it was all over, my intellect was on its own again. What did the whole thing mean? I knew beyond all doubt that the ideas I’d received were true, yet, intellectually, they shocked me completely.