“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I stuck the pamphlet in my pocket and thought no more about it. Then that night as usual I sat down to check my dream records. As soon as I reread the dream for January 3, I saw the obvious connection with the pamphlet and ran to retrieve it. I was so surprised that I called Rob, and together we compared the pamphlet with the dream notes.

With growing excitement, we checked my records. “Almost every sign’s message was carried out in action,” Rob said. “You were running through the radioactive rain to avoid contamination, running for your life, really, and the pamphlet refers to survival several times and ‘Maintain top speed.’”

“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.”

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.

“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.