“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In following Seth’s dream recall instructions, we found ourselves collecting some excellent examples of precognitive dreams. Some were clear-cut and almost exactly matched the foreseen future event. Others were partially disguised in symbolism. 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.

Over the last few years, we have spent many hours with our dream records, though the daily time spent in keeping them up to date is negligible. For our own benefit, we frequently kept simple journals of daily events also, so that it was easier to check dreams against daily and weekly happenings and to connect dreams with past, present and future events.

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.

Even this intense interest waxes and wanes, however, in the ordinary sequence of events. 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. 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.

I didn’t even connect the dream and the physical event until I checked my dream records as usual that night. Then the connections were clear. Close examination shows that a significant number of details agreed. This was the first incident of this type that happened to us — and we rarely ride with anyone else.

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.

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.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us. If the meaning or connection is not clear, it is only because we hide so much from ourselves. This holds true for normal perception as well as for extrasensory perception. We operate emotionally. Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic. The study of dreams, particularly of precognitive ones, can show us these inner workings that condition us toward the experience of certain kinds of events.

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.

In a dream so confused with definite precognitive elements and episodes that seem not to fit in, a simple diagram usually helps me to see the situation more clearly. So here is the listing of similarities between the physical and dream events that I prepared that afternoon as I tried to check out the dream:

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.

Right then and there I made up my list of similarities between dream and physical events and was astonished — precisely because the forseen event was apparently the reading of the pamphlet, which I’d then transformed into that strange dream drama. As I wrote out the list, I discovered points that I’d missed earlier — which is why it is a good idea to make such a list with any involved dream.

“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.