“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.”

(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

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.”

“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: