“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Each recaptured dream is not only a highly personal document but a clue into the nature of dream existence. Precognitive dreams are most evocative from this standpoint. The dreamer is baffled at his own ability to forsee a future event, and this makes him more than ordinarily curious about the nature of dream life in particular.

For those of you who want to conduct your own experiments, remember: A precognitive dream is one in which you receive future information that you could receive in no normal manner. The dream should be recorded and dated. Write everything down, no matter how trivial. If you remember only dreaming about a person or name, record that. When you awaken, do not make intellectual judgments concerning the relative importance of a dream or decide it is not pertinent enough to record. We often forsee very trivial events that seem to have no particular meaning to us. But as you’ll see from a later Seth excerpt, association can be at work, relating such experience in an intuitive rather than logical manner.

Next, I floated above a car, which was driven by another me. (Actually, I do not drive because of poor eyesight.) The car approached our corner, at Walnut and Water Streets. Others were also in the car. As I watched from my floating position, the “driving me” made an error at the light, and suddenly we ended up in the middle of a line of traffic. Cars came from all directions. I was terrified — certain that an accident would result. But none occurred.

I dreamed that it had been raining. I saw a motorcycle on a wet road. The driver lost his balance, the vehicle veered, but the driver regained his balance just in time and continued on. I said to Rob, “Motorcycles are dangerous on a wet road.”

There is no need here to diagram the similarities. In both the dream and physical events, the road is wet from rain. A motorcyclist momentarily loses control of his cycle, and the vehicle veers but goes on. The identical remark is made. Here, however, I think the precognitive event was actually the discussion with my father-in-law, rather than the incident itself.

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.

The next dream was far more bizarre and rather frightening, but it taught me even more about the nature of dreaming and illustrated many points that Seth had made earlier. Here are my original dream notes:

COMMENTS: On January 10, six days after the dream, Rob and I made an unexpected visit to the Motor Vehicles Bureau to check on the renewal of our car license. It had been ordered by mail several weeks earlier but had not arrived, though the deadline was approaching. As we stood in line, I picked up one of the pamphlets that were piled on the counters.

“I don’t know if you can really count that,” Rob said, “Though you’re probably right. But the clear words ‘decontamination center’ in the dream records are terrific. You couldn’t have hit it closer.”

We went on to read the last portion of the dream and I called out excitedly, “But look! The county building that houses the License Office is gray white stone with a steeple that definitely makes it look like a church. And there are other buildings nearby with gravel walks and grass and benches.”

“No, but I’m sure there must be an emotional connection someplace.” I shook my head, but then suddenly the answer came to me. “Bundu,” I said. “My science fiction novel that came out in Fantasy and Science Fiction years ago. It was on events after a world destruction. And I did another story and some of my early poetry on the same theme.”

To me, there is great excitement in learning how the unconscious works, not just generally but specifically — in personal instances. In the same way that I acted out the original forseen event — the pamphlet — I’m convinced that other extrasensory data is picked up and woven into our daydreams, fantasies and creative works.

“No. I’m sure I would have remembered,” I replied. But I checked my dream records. Sure enough, on December 24, I dreamed that Mike was “gone” and Mary could not find him. This was the only reference to Mike in any of my records, but I’d forgotten the dream entirely.

But there are precognitive dreams that tell me precisely what I want to know when I want to know it — if I’m deeply motivated enough to request them through suggestion. These are fascinating, not only because they are practical, but because they suggest the awesome abilities of the inner self to solve problems for us and to obtain information that we consider vital.