“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.

(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.

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.”

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.