“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper Jane had read the two dreams quoted previously involving my father. My dream notebook lay open on the table. As session time approached Jane no longer felt nervous. I could tell however that she was somewhat tired, and when she began delivery I thought her voice had a peculiar, flat, expressionless quality that could be the result of fatigue. She spoke very deliberately, in measured phrases, in a voice somewhat lower than usual, but not loudly, and as though she were giving a lecture before a number of people. Again her glasses were off, her eyes very dark. Her pacing was also quite slow.)

A woman with your brother you did not recognize. The three of you communicated before your birth. The woman was your brother Loren as he appeared before. You then planned or decided to be born when the meeting was carried out. You also however intended to become intimately associated with the man who is now your father.

But though you met both the present Dick and Loren, neither of you knew what your relationship would be in this life. You intended a brother lifelong relationship with the man who is, instead, your father. Hence he passes you by, the bicycle being a symbol of youth. That is, because you imagined that he would be a contemporary in age, you saw him on a bicycle, a child’s method of transportation, but because he was born earlier the vehicle carries him past.

You stretch, a symbol of the relatively sleepy, unrealized period of youth, early youth, in which you were caught, hence the stiffish arm that was not able therefore to keep the man who is your father with you in time. He smiles and nods, yet you do not speak because communication between you was always difficult.

The other sons are present. On the childlike area of the subconscious you believe your mother mainly responsible for family difficulties. However her defense, which you recognize basically as insincere but superficially correct in this particular instance, was that your father hit her in the chest. You identified with your father, and could not permit, in this dream at any rate, an identification of this kind, since at this childish level you did not blame him and would have wished as a child, to have the power to do the same thing.

So, even in the dream you misinterpreted and distorted the violence. Instead of having your mother say “He hit me in the chest,” and in order to punish yourself through your identification with your father, instead you translated the words to “He has a spot on his lungs,” therefore punishing symbolically both your father and yourself for the violence.

You were aware incidentally of your own misinterpretation, and the appearance of your father in both the dreams was opposed by the female vessel symbol, as the opposition between both parents has been an important element in your subconscious life.

You will find such sequences often, and this should be expected. The dream also allowed you to see ahead of time beyond the surface of the situation which did arrive on Sunday, and you were much easier on your father Sunday because the dream tipped you off as to the tactics that your mother would use on one level, and also allowed you to punish yourself and your father symbolically rather than actually, for a violent tendency which is now apparent in him toward her, but is not as readily apparent, but repressed, in yourself.

Had the dream not so prepared you, you may well have struck out verbally at your father most forcibly, in an actual attempt to make him suffer for his own rather restrained violence, because you would have feared and not been able to face its somewhat weaker but still definite latent manifestation in yourself.