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But I’ll make a start. For starters, the Notion Club Papers provide an illuminating window into the limitations and possibilities of these direct experiences. Ramer, Tolkien’s alter-ego, explains that he can’t very well choose what to see, he can only aim in a direction and absorb what comes up. Further, once he has experienced a scene, he cannot experience it again; he can only remember it as best as his memory will provide, and it often evaporates, just as dreams usually do. Third, speech, in these experiences, is understood telepathically, and he cannot usually remember the actual words at all, only their content and something of their flavor. Fourth, he has an easier time entering into the experiences of inanimate objects than of conscious beings. Finally, when he did observe conscious beings, he usually was not apparent to them, and only very rarely was physically present enough to interact.
My extrapolations from these facts are as follows. First, knowing he would see a scene directly only once, JRRT endeavored to collect as much ancillary information about a scene as he could before attempting to experience directly the object of his interest. Then, when he would focus on the scene directly, he could attend much better both to the details and to the bigger picture. So, for example, he probably hung out, ghost-like, in many hobbit taverns, popping in and out over many ME decades, listening to stories, trying to puzzle out the continuation of the Baggins saga, before he put himself into the party field to see what really happened. Since he could only attend that party once, he made sure to know as much about it as he could beforehand. But making heads and tails of the snippets of tales he heard was a major labor, full of guess-work and mistakes, which accounts for the many quite different versions of the beginning of FotR in HoME.
For example, JRRT might have listened to tales told about the War of the Ring well into the Fourth Age, collecting stories from guardhouses and pubs in Minas Tirith before moving closer to the citadel. And he may have failed to see the scenes he wanted most. He probably did not manage to attend Aragorn and Arwen’s wedding, and he certainly did not see Arwen’s end in Lorien.
All this explains why, in HoME and HotH, he was so often far off the mark in his original understandings of the story he was trying to tell. It also explains the desperate rush of some drafts and the frequent “story foreseens”; when he got a vision, he had to dash it onto paper before he lost it.
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