“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

15
Precognitive Dreams

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.

You don’t have to take precognition on faith. If you keep careful dream records, sooner or later you’ll find your own evidence of it. Each of my own precognitive dreams made a significant impression on me at the time and represented proof that I was moving in the right direction. Now I am much more interested in how precognition works, what triggers it and what translates into dream experience.

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.

If possible, read your dream records at night, checking them against the day’s happenings. Once a week, check the whole series. Remember that symbolism is important. 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. Some precognitive information will be in symbolic form. 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.

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:

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 bedroom was so chilly that I finally finished my notes in the warmer living room. 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. I could still feel myself running through the radioactive rain, yet the whole thing was so unbelievable that I could hardly see how it could be precognitive. I had some cookies and milk and read my notes over. Even if it was symbolic, I didn’t like it a bit.

My notes contain many records of plain precognitive dreams which are relatively clear, and which often concern very mundane situations. Oddly enough, I don’t find these as “meaty” as some others, in which the information seems to give hints of its source or is “caught” in the process of being formed into dream material.

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.