“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In following Seth’s dream recall instructions, we found ourselves collecting some excellent examples of precognitive dreams. [...] Still others were so interwoven with other dream material that we just marked them as indicative of precognition and let it go at that. Sometimes dreams that seemed nonsense contained one clear, important image that shortly — within a few days — would appear in a different context entirely. In several cases, two or more future events would be condensed into one dream.

If possible, read your dream records at night, checking them against the day’s happenings. [...] Often, you must learn your own way of handling dream symbolism to make sense of dream. Not every dream is precognitive, nor is there any reason to waste much time with interpretations that seem too nebulous. [...] However, as a few of my own dreams will clearly show, if you do not know the meaning of a symbol, give yourself the suggestion that it will be made clear to you intuitively — thus trust your answer.

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.

[...] My students and I both go through periods when we forget to remember and wake up for weeks at a time with only a few dream fragments. Often, months go by without a precognitive dream, and then there is that odd sense of discovery — always fresh — of an event forseen. Then the excitement hits again — of spying out the dreaming self and charting the strange environment in which it has its experience. Once more, I’m up at all hours, scribbling down my latest dream notes, checking them eagerly against daily happenings.

In such dreams, the physical future event is often perceived opaquely, distorted in at least some aspects, just as dream events are when seen from the viewpoint of waking life. I’m including here a few of my favorite precognitive dreams, choosing those which exemplify various degrees of clearness and distortion. Some of my original notes will be included so you can see the method we use in comparing dreams and later events.

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. [...] 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. [...]

The differences between the dream and physical events — the distortions, in other words — are also obvious. I wasn’t driving as in the dream, Peter was. The near-accident happened about three blocks away from the Water and Walnut dream location. The main elements involving the event were definitely given in the dream, however.

The following two dreams bewildered, confused and intrigued me. Each of them contains subconscious distortion, and strong precognitive elements interwound with other dream material. This type of dream may tell us more about the ways we interpret and receive precognitive information than dreams in which the forseen events and the physical ones are identical.

[...] Why hadn’t I known Anna in the dream? [...] I’d never dreamed of Anna before. [...] In the dream the women hang out clothes in the yard … and Anna showed me the children’s closet at school, commenting on 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.

There were also some other dream elements that are too involved to mention here. The last part of the dream as given above ended up, for example, with a sequence involving J. P. Priestley, author of Man and Time, an excellent book that I had just finished reading. I woke up at 3 A.M. and wrote the dreams down at once, using the small bedside table. [...] The dreams were still so vivid, particularly the first episode, that I also drew a quick sketch of the building with the decontamination center in it. [...]