“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.

What is the point of it all? For one thing, records of your own precognitive dreams will convince you that you can perceive segments of the future. This personal knowing is far more vital than a bland intellectual acceptance that precognition may exist or is generally possible.

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.

Dream One
January 4, 1965

I’ve mentioned both of these dreams because each was involved with a near-accident. They were the only such dreams I recorded that year and the only such incidents in waking life. For a while, I wondered why I would pick up such an unimportant episode as a man veering on a motorcycle. What connection could there be? No one we knew even owned a cycle, and neither my father-in-law or myself had the slightest idea who the driver was. I hadn’t been on a cycle in years. Neither had he. We had never even talked about cycles together. Then, I remembered that when he was a young man, Rob’s father did have motorcycles. There were family pictures in an old album showing him proudly standing next to one when he was courting Rob’s mother. And years ago, I rode on a cycle from New York to California. So the connection became clear: There was a hidden association in Rob’s father’s mind and my own, an emotional shared experience that “predisposed” us toward an interest in cycles.

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.

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.

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.

Next I am standing on spacious, landscaped grounds with gravel paths neatly laid out, divided by trees and shrubs. There are several buildings, rather separated from each other, and lovely green grass. The buildings are stately, such as those in a public park. One building looks something like a church, though I don’t think it is. All the buildings are of white or gray stone. There is a sign that says we can go no further, as the area is closed to the public. I notice a few elderly women sitting on the park benches. They are residents or patients here.

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.

The pamphlet was entitled: Highway Signs For Survival. Pictures of various road signs were shown. One read: DECONTAMINATION CENTER; another, MAINTAIN TOP SPEED. This was followed by the legend: “Used On Highways Where Radiological Contamination Is Such As To Limit Permissible Exposure Time.” Another sign read AREA CLOSED, and carried the legend: “Used To Close Roadway Entering An Area From Which All Traffic Is Excluded Because Of Dangerous Radiological Or Biological Contamination.”

Looking over my shoulder now, Rob pointed at the sketch I’d done with the dream. “That layout is identical to the one at the License Bureau!” And it was. The Motor Vehicles Bureau is an extension of the county building, as the decontamination center was an extension of another building in the dream. Incidentally, I’d been in the License Bureau only once several years earlier.

I felt as triumphant figuring out that dream as if I’d climbed some new mountain. Then I told Rob about another idea I had about it, one that I couldn’t possibly prove.

In the next case, interpretation was simple — and amusing. One night I had a confused dream about a celebration. Rob and I were with a group of people, all laughing and calling out shouts and responses. I had a megaphone. We shouted one word over and over again: “Kangaroo.”

This seemed like a pointless nonsense dream. A few weeks later I received a letter from a friend in California. Something about it struck a familiar chord: The whole bottom of one page was given over to a sketch of a kangaroo. In the letter, my friend also wrote a page about a family celebration.