“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: In one dream when you were asleep, when you were seemingly not rational, when your intellect was seemingly not operating, you perceived information about your past physical environment. You saw your old neighborhood (on June 10, 1980)¹ — the Brenner’s place, with animal and industrial waste all over the yard. Symbolically you saw the situation in your own fashion, but you knew that the Brenner’s property had been polluted. You still have a love of that area. You are in a certain correspondence with it. In a fashion, you keep your eye out for information regarding it.

You picked up the information about the Brenners because you were in correspondence with that environment. You picked up inner evidence in that regard. You ignored countless other bits of information. Ruburt picked up your own camera activities because he was in correspondence with you. He must be in correspondence with the evidence of mobility that his body tries to give him, so that it can build up a new picture of his body.

“In vivid color: I lived in my parents’ house at 704 North Wilbur Avenue, in Sayre, Pennsylvania. I was my present age, 61. That the house had long been sold, that my parents had died in the early 1970s, and that Jane and I had been married for 26 years and lived in Elmira, New York, were irrelevant in the dream. Jane and my parents were not in it, nor were any members of the Brenner family.

“Years ago, after my brothers and I had left 704 to follow our own life paths, the Brenner family had built a house next door to our parents’ place. This represents a contradiction in the dream — or, rather, that I tried to combine two spans of time. On a summer evening after dusk in the dream, I went for a walk with Floyd Waterman (I’ll call him), a ‘real’ friend from Elmira who was visiting me. Floyd is a contractor.

“To reach Wilbur Avenue we cut across the tennis court, of grass, that my father had built for his teen-age sons so long ago. In physical life the Brenner house sits where the court had existed. Just beyond the court, and next to the sidewalk, grew an old shagbark hickory tree that I had always loved, and still remember vividly. The tree would be in the Brenner’s front yard now.

“As Floyd and I cut across the court I saw that the Brenner’s lawn was despoiled with a mixture of animal and industrial waste, like pollution. ‘What’s that?’ I exclaimed to Floyd, as I saw a large dark shape near the hickory tree. At first shock I thought it was a deer that might have been killed by a car the night before, say. It lay on its side with its back to us. Then to my amazement I saw that the supposed animal was actually the broken remnants of a hollow, life-sized metal statue of a deer that had stood for years in the front yard of a house on Harrison Street, in Sayre, at the other end of town. The house had been owned by the Maynards, who had no children. When my next-youngest brother and I were in grade school, our family had lived a few houses down Harrison from the Maynards. Mr. Maynard had been a carpenter. He and his wife and my parents had been friends. All of us kids in the neighborhood had been fascinated by the deer, which had been painted brown. We had climbed all over it. My father had photographed it.

“Now I saw, again to my surprise, that the deer had been broken in pieces and lay in the Brenner’s front yard, where the hickory tree had stood a moment ago. I exclaimed to Floyd Waterman that vandals had done the damage — young kids that I knew were causing trouble in the neighborhood. They’d broken off the animal’s legs. The Brenner’s front door was open and I saw the warm yellow light in their living room. I knew that I had to run into their house and tell them about the poor broken deer lying in their front yard.”

On July 23, 1980 — 13 days after I had my dream — the writer of a story in the Elmira Star-Gazette described how the Brenner family won an out-of-court settlement of over $10,000 from the Borough of Sayre and a large store owned by a well-known supermarket chain. The store is located a couple of blocks from the Brenner home, and just off North Wilbur Avenue. Construction at the store had overloaded sewage pipes and caused them to back up after rain storms, filling the basement of the Brenner house with sewage several times.

“Rob’s dream states quite clearly, precognitively, about the pollution of the Brenner property from the supermarket just up the street. Many of Rob’s dreams have involved a nostalgic view of the past, plus questions of safety and danger. I think he picked up on the precognitive element to show himself that his pictures of the past were too idealistic.

“The statue of the deer represents that idealistic image of the past; finding it broken in Brenner’s yard connects its real environment where Rob lived as a small boy [on Harrison Street] to Wilbur Avenue where he lived later; meaning that he’d idealized both backgrounds. The statue of the deer, an inanimate animal, contrasts with the waste left by a living animal. Idealized ones, statues, don’t leave waste, but they don’t live either.

“I think that I brought my magical insight into consciousness also because of some of my recent dreams, that seem to contain precognitive and/or clairvoyant elements. The Brenner dream is one of those. Jane has been doing invaluable work for me recently, interpreting those dreams. Indeed, she’s the one who’s dug up many of the dream and real-life connections.