“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The first dream occurred in July 1963, before I knew anything at all about psychic phenomena. The third occurred in February 1964, shortly after the Seth sessions had begun. Between these two dates, I found myself propelled into a dimension of experience that had been completely unknown to me before.

These small facts were all we knew of her, and we never became close friends. Yet my first precognitive dream involved her, and, in a strange way, my psychic experience became bound up with her life. I seemed to keep track of her in my dreams. As her world became physically smaller, she seemed to reach out into mine.

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.”

“No,” I muttered, “But I had the strangest feeling, as if recording the dream would give it some kind of undue importance. Anyway, I’d rather just forget it,” I said. “I wish that I hadn’t remembered it at all.” But I got sleepily out of bed, wrote the dream down and dated it.

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.”

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.

Summer passed and autumn had begun before the next experience, one that was to change my life. I awakened one September morning with the feeling that I’d had a most unusual dream during the night, one that would affect me deeply. Yet I had no memory of the dream at all, and as the day went on, the feeling vanished. That night I sat down to write poetry for an hour as usual, and, suddenly, the small rift that had opened so slightly with the first dream now yawned wide open.

One moment I sat at my desk with my paper and pen beside me. The next instant, my consciousness rushed out of my body, yet it was itself bodiless, taking up no space at all; it seemed to be merging with the air outside the window, plunging through the treetops, resting, curled within a single leaf. Exultation and comprehension, new ideas, sensations, novel groupings of images and words rushed through me so quickly there was no time to call out. There was no present, past or future: I knew this, suddenly, irrevocably.

But then, as I returned, the intensity of the experience began to fade. The miracle began to withdraw. Three hours in all had passed. I was left with a pile of scribbled notes, written and titled automatically: “The Physical Universe As Idea Construction” — all that was physically salvaged from that remarkable experience. And I knew beyond all doubt that those ideas had been given to me initially in the forgotten dream of the night before.

Each entity perceives only his own constructions on a physical level. Because all constructions are more or less faithful reproductions in matter of the same basic ideas (since all individuals are, generally speaking, on the same level in this plane), then they agree sufficiently in space, time and degree so that the world of appearances has coherence and relative predictability.

All physical matter is idea construction. We only see our own constructions. So-called empty space is full of constructions not our own that we cannot perceive. Our skin connects us to other physical constructions, and through it we are involved in the complicated fabric of continuous matter. The action of each one of the most minute of these particles affects each other one. The slight motion of one grain of sand causes a corresponding alteration in the distribution of the stars and in all matter’s fabric, from an atom in a man’s skull down to the slightest variation in a microbe’s action.

All matter is idea construction, woven together; each construction is individual and yet cohesive to the whole. The smallest particle is necessary to the whole, forming part of matter’s design.

Entities with still broader range need more complicated structure. The scope of their receptivity is so large that the simple autonomic nervous system is not enough. The amoeba constructs each idea it receives, because it is able to receive so few. All must be constructed to ensure survival. With man, the opposite becomes true. He has such a range of receptivity that it is impossible for him to construct all of his ideas physically. As his scope widened, a mechanism was necessary that would allow him to choose. Self-consciousness and reason were the answers.

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.