“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.

“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.

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.

I hadn’t consciously known about the situation in any way. Indeed, I haven’t been to Sayre in many months, even though my old home town is only 18 miles away. Jane hasn’t been in our car for some time now, and I leave her alone in the house as little as possible.