“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On Wednesday, March 27, we received from Jane’s publisher the page proofs for Seth’s second book, The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book.¹ No session was held that night. Actually, correcting the proofs — carefully scrutinizing well over 500 printed pages word by word, checking and rechecking notes, spelling, punctuation, and so forth — kept us so busy that we suspended the next eight scheduled sessions, covering a period of 26 days. Ordinarily Seth would have used those sessions to deliver work on “Unknown” Reality. We disliked interrupting our creative rhythms in that fashion, although in the meantime Jane kept ESP class going as usual, coming through as Seth and as Sumari within that context. And we told ourselves that Seth was perfectly capable of resuming work on “Unknown” Reality whenever we were ready to do so, whether the time lapse involved one week or six months.

(Before finishing the notes I thought of asking a few other people if they had either heard of double dreaming, or had experienced it. The first person I talked to was our friend Sue Watkins, who has attended ESP class almost from the time Jane started it in 1967. I was more than a little surprised when Sue said that she’d enjoyed such events several times. Jane and I have known Sue since 1965, yet as far as any of us could remember [and for whatever reasons], the subject of double dreaming had never been discussed among us.

(But not only had she done it more than once, Sue said: She could recall portions of the simultaneous dreams she’d had on some of those occasions, which was a lot more than I could claim. Grinning, she proceeded to confound me further by describing the double dreams of another class member — since, obviously, the individual in question had also had certain dream adventures that Jane and I didn’t know about. I ended up thinking that my own little experience hadn’t amounted to so much after all; but still, it had made Jane and me aware of another facet of dream life. See Note 2 for any other information on double dreams that I may assemble, as well as for an excerpt from the description Sue wrote [at my request] of a multiple-dream happening of her own.

There is a correlation here with something Ruburt said in [ESP] class last evening. He said that writing can be, first, a method of standing apart from life to some extent — in order to capture life, and preserve the unutterable uniqueness of any given day. But, he said, you can then discover that the writing itself becomes the day’s experience. You are then “lost” in the writing as much as you feared being lost in normal living, with no way to step aside and view the experience. My addition, now, to those remarks is this: You would need the creation then of another “self,” who stood aside from the writing self in order to preserve the original intent.

2. A note added a month later: My surprise over the double-dream phenomenon continues, for by now I know of nine people (including Sue Watkins and myself), who have experienced either the same thing or closely related versions of it. Six people on the list attend ESP class; one is a close personal friend of Jane’s and mine; and two are strangers. Actually, we’ve heard of the strangers but haven’t met them. Both are professional writers, and their experiences with double dreams were relayed to me by Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor.