“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Such was the case, of course. And once again, Seth used a “fresh” event — a dream experience of mine that transpired on the third night following the last session — as a basis for his book dictation tonight.

(On Friday morning March 29, I told Jane that sometime during the previous night I had awakened with the certain knowledge that I’d just finished having two dreams at once. I retained conscious memory of one of them for just a moment before it irrevocably faded. Neither Jane nor I remembered hearing of, or experiencing, what I’ll call double dreaming. I wrote an account of the phenomenon while wondering if I’d distorted some quite ordinary dream happening — and while knowing at the same time that I hadn’t. I decided to ask Seth to discuss the two dreams when we went back to having sessions again, then forgot about them until I got around to rereading my first rough version of these notes last week. [When Seth discusses my “dreams” in this session, however, it turns out that from his perspective he’s able to be more accurate about labeling them than I was.]

(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.

(Dreaming two at once led me to write down a second question for Seth. I wanted him to enlarge upon the statement he’d made at 11:29 in the 690th session: “Further developments in your concepts will lead to greater activation in portions of the brain now not nearly utilized, and these in turn will trigger expansions in both psychic and biological terms.” I wondered what connection, if any, might exist between the capacity to have [and/or to remember] more than one dream at a time, and those “portions of the brain now not nearly utilized.”

(I read my two questions to Jane as we waited for tonight’s session to begin. She listened carefully, then said that “there’s something there on the dreams” — meaning that Seth was around, was aware of our conversation, and would probably comment. Actually, Jane had grown very relaxed since suppertime; so much so that she’d considered skipping the session. She decided not to because of the time we’d missed lately. We waited. Jane sipped from a glass of wine. Then, taking off her glasses, she was in trance.)

Now, to begin with your dream: The entity is aware of the experiences of all of its personalities. Give us a moment …

Now: In the dream state your specialized focus need not be as precise or time-oriented as in the waking state.

(10:20.) In your case, you did perform an excellent accomplishment. You were aware of the simultaneous dreams, each being experienced in alternate realities. You could not at this point remember both dreams, because the physical brain apparatus could not handle the simultaneous data. This has reference to portions of the brain not used, as mentioned in this book.³

(To me:) You are, in a rudimentary fashion, beginning to open up those unused areas of the brain, or you would not have even been aware of the fact of two simultaneous dreams. Language and your verbal thought patterns make such translations highly difficult, however, even in the best of circumstances. A multilingual individual, in that regard at least, might have some idea of how concepts are structured through verbal pattern, and hence possess some additional freedom in such translations — provided of course that he or she was aware of the possibilities to begin with.

Now: One experience was a dream of your own, in usual terms. The other “dream” experienced simultaneously was, instead, your muddled interpretation of vital experienced reality on the part of another portion of yourself, in another reality entirely; a dimensional bleed-through. Once you are aware of such experience, most likely you will also have others in “your” dream state.

(10:43. Jane took a few moments to come out of a deep trance. Her delivery had been steady, almost fast. “I have a pretty good idea of what was said,” she told me. “And just before the session, I knew what Seth would say about your dream experience. Not that I could tell you now what he did say — but still I contained that knowledge somehow …” She also knew that the dream event tied in with my question about the “unused” portions of the brain.

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.

Already it seems that without too much difficulty an investigator could acquire enough material on double dreaming for a most interesting study. The variations mentioned above are intriguing in themselves, and range from an account of an “overlapping double dream” — that is, the individual’s second dream began in the middle of the first one, and extended beyond the end of the first dream — to one in which the dreamer told me, “I knew I’d been having two dreams at once, but I remembered them almost as one dream.”

Sue Watkins is gifted psychically and as a writer. (See the material she wrote for the 594th session, in the Appendix of Seth Speaks. She also appears in Chapter 5 of Jane’s Adventures.) In the opening notes for this session I mentioned a multiple dream experience of Sue’s, and promised to present something here from her description of it. Rather than material on the dreams themselves, I chose the first paragraphs in which Sue outlines the subjective framework of the whole dream event:

“As a dream self I’m sitting in my living room with a friend, Stephen, when suddenly self-knowledge, connections among events, symbols, and the inner logic and fabric of my life and experience became crystal clear. They begin piling up in a strange way, like cell on cell, or lines of freight cars crashing into each other just outside my awareness. It’s as though my dream self can handle only so much at once, and the stuff heaps up, and I get up and walk to the kitchen. ‘What’s going on?’ Stephen asks me, but all I can say is that I’m on the edge of a bursting. I don’t have time to explain further.

“As I walk into the kitchen the head of my dream self fills with vivid scenes, like other dreams, interpretations of each cell of this new awareness. I project all of this outward around me into literally hundreds of brilliant scenes; expressions, I knew, of probabilities, ‘past’ and ‘future’ events, sideways events I can’t even understand … all happening at once, with perfect comprehension of that by the ‘anchor’ dream self. I feel that while all of this is still coming from this anchor self, the selves in these dreams are equally as focused — each of them being dream selves, existing in their universes, and with each of their own connections expanding outwards in much the same way that mine do. I literally become the experience of being myself contained in all of these selves, while being these selves contained by me. In at least one of these selves, the knowledge of this entire event comes to consciousness like a half-recalled dream of its own, and the experience of recalling and being recalled is like liquid electricity in me, the anchor self.

“Upon waking, I can remember clearly but three of these dreams, yet the feeling of containing experiences simultaneously in this manner stays with me …”

One of the writers mentioned in the first paragraph of this note is Lee R. Gandee. Tam Mossman edited Lee’s autobiography, Strange Experience, which was published in 1971 by Prentice-Hall. In Chapter 9 of his book Lee describes a double dream experience of his that also contained strong precognitive elements. Here’s the capsule version of the event that he sent to Tam after I’d asked Tam if he knew of anyone who remembered having such dreams:

“As for double dreams, yes, I do dream two at once sometimes. If you’ll go to page 144 of Strange Experience, you’ll find my account of two simultaneous dreams. In one of them I’m on a troop train [in World War II] traveling to Karachi, India, and in the other I’m asleep in a cold barrack. I wrote in the book that ‘I was conscious of every movement, sound, and odor on the train, yet conscious that I was in a barrack that was very chilly. I was also aware that both the train and the barrack were dreams, and that my body was in the chilly tent at Leesburg, Florida.’

“Then, later, as in one of the dreams I got off the train, then went back inside looking for myself, in the other dream I got up, dumped coal in the stove and spread my overcoat over the blankets on the bunk in the barrack — and woke up in the tent. So I do have those double dreams, and the Karachi dream was a true dream. The men aboard the train in the dream were Air Corps men I knew in waking life, and they were sent there [within the month].”

And this is the place to mention one of those happy analogies that I’m able to make occasionally (even though in this case it took me several months after I’d had my own little double dream to come up with the very obvious association) — for in our reality, the double or multiple dream happening offers at least a pale insight into the numerous lives that, according to Seth, our entity or whole self experiences simultaneously.

I wrote in the Introductory Notes that I thought Jane’s speed in producing the Seth material was “a close physical approach to, or translation of, Seth’s idea that basically all exists at once — that really there is no time …” I’ll add here that the phenomenon of double dreaming can be another way of approximating the idea of simultaneous time (or lives), about which we as physical creatures always have so many questions.