“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I felt as if knowledge was being implanted in the very cells of my body so that I couldn’t forget it—a gut knowing, a biological spirituality. It was feeling and knowing, rather than intellectual knowledge. At the same time I remembered having a dream the night before, which I had forgotten, in which this same sort of experience had occurred. And I knew the two were connected.

Following this episode, even my ordinary subjective experiences began to change. Very shortly afterward I began to recall my dreams—suddenly, and for no apparent reason. It was like discovering a second life. Not only that, but in the next two months I had two vivid precognitive dreams, the first, to my knowledge, that I ever had.

“I know,” Rob said. “But you’re interested in dreams, certainly after those two particular ones you had. And what do you call that experience you had last month? Besides, the books we’ve seen have dealt only with well-known mediums. But what about ordinary people? What if everyone has those abilities?” I stared at him. He’d turned quite serious. “Couldn’t you work out a series of experiments and try them out? Use yourself as a guinea pig.”

We were surprised that the board worked for us. I thought it was a riot, two adults watching the pointer go scurrying across the board, and we didn’t take it too seriously. For one thing, of course, neither of us particularly believed in life after death—certainly not conscious life, capable of communicating. Later on, we did learn that a man with the communicator’s name was known to have lived in Elmira, and died in the 1940’s—that took me back a bit. But we were much more interested in finding out what made the pointer move than in the messages it gave.

Rob asked the questions, then we paused while he wrote out the answers the pointer spelled. Frank Withers had given simple one- or two-word responses in previous sessions. Now the answers became longer, and their character seemed to change. The atmosphere of the room was somehow different.

The next two were much the same, except for one bewildering element: I began to anticipate the board’s replies. This bothered me no end, and I grew uneasy. At the next session—our fourth with Seth—I heard the words in my head at a faster and faster rate, and not only sentences but whole paragraphs before they were spelled out.