“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the hallway, I was surprised to run into Anna Taylor. She lived in an apartment right at the corner of Walnut and Water Streets, but she was not a close friend — barely an acquaintance — and we saw her rarely. I knew she was a teacher, but hadn’t the foggiest idea in what school. When she saw me, she burst out laughing, and said, “What? What?” in tones of great mock disbelief — as the woman had used in the dream. She didn’t know I was teaching and had just been transferred to this school.

Immediately she told me that her husband had called her two days previously to tell her that they must move. He was out of town and had just learned that he was to be transferred to another area. Anna said that she was terribly embarrassed since they had to move quickly, and she wouldn’t have time to give the proper notice.

We met at lunch in the teachers’ room where we ate with a group of women, including one lovely, black girl who was particularly intelligent. Here Anna told me that she and her husband were househunting around Albany, New York. Later, in a free period, she showed me her first-grade classroom, specifically pointing out the closet and mentioning the difficulty involved in helping the children hang up their clothes.

After school I went home and sat down for a cup of coffee when the phone rang. It was Anna, calling to tell me that her husband had just called to say he had definitely rented a house in Albany. This was the first time in four months I had seen Anna, and the only time we ever spoke together on the phone.

I wrote the list down and stared at it. Why hadn’t I known Anna in the dream? And why the episode in which I saw her hang out clothes in the yard? I’d never dreamed of Anna before. Why now? Then suddenly the answers came to me. Anna herself wasn’t really important to me. The information was really that the apartment in the house next door, on the corner, would be vacant. The clothing sequence was wrong in that no one really hung out clothes. Yet it was valid, symbolically. In the dream the women hang out clothes in the yard … and Anna showed me the children’s closet at school, commenting on clothes. Anna’s last name was Taylor. A tailor is someone involved with clothes. I think I’d known the name all the while and in the dream translated it into action; the clothes episode would, then, really identify Anna and forsee the event in which she showed me the clothes closet.