“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.

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.

“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.”

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.

Since those notes were born so directly from that event, and since they represent the first strong intrusions from the interior universe into my own life, I still find them intriguing. I am looking at them now, as I work on this chapter some five years later. They seemed charged with a fierce vitality that leads me to consider the ambiguous nature of creativity, for if those ideas and the experience itself initiated a new kind of consciousness in me, they also possessed an explosive force powerful enough to considerably dismantle the previous frameworks of my thoughts and ideas. The ordinary surface of my world literally quaked open, and I had no conception then of what was still to emerge.

The individual is the part of the entity or whole self of which we are conscious in daily life. It is that part of the whole self which we are able to express or make “real” through our idea constructions on a physical level.

I was involved with the “pure” experience behind the diagram and words with which I was left. The revelation was that there were no real boundaries to the self; skin did not separate us from others but connected us in a webwork of energy; what we thought of as Self and Not-Self were interrelated; and that, in this life at least, ideas were constantly being transformed into matter.