“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1
Dreams, Creativity and the Unconscious

Three particular dream-events highlighted my psychic initiation and led, indirectly, to this book. The first was a comparatively minor dream that was surprising to me when it happened, but it could easily have been forgotten. The second was an amazing experience resulting from a dream that I could not remember. The third was a dream that gave me a startling glimpse into another kind of reality.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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

“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.

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.

I didn’t know what to say because I was still so startled. Her eyes were very red and sore-looking, as they had been in my dream. I stayed with her for a short time, trying to be as comforting as I could. Finally I returned to my own apartment, distressed both because of her condition and the connection with my dream of the night before.

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.”

“Well, it has to be something like that,” I said. “I admit that the whole thing is … evocative, but it irritates me, too. I mean, think of how much more difficult life could be if we could see the future in dreams? I’ve got enough to handle as it is.”

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.

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.

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.