“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has been taking time off from God of Jane and If We Live Again to work on the Introduction for Sue Watkins’s Conversation With Seth. Sue took the manuscript for Conversations with her when she went to Florida for the month with her son and parents. If those three members of her family are enjoying a vacation, Sue isn’t—but at least she’s working on her book in warm weather!

Next, Jane quickly went over my recent batch of “Sayre-environment dreams,” as Seth called them. I’ve recorded six of those long and complicated dreams, set in my hometown, since December 22; in them I explored my various, sometimes contradictory beliefs about writing and painting, my relationships with society and the marketplace, and with my [deceased] father as he represented certain other beliefs. I’d recently asked Jane if Seth would comment.

Tonight Seth did comment—and very perceptively put all of the dreams together. “In your heart Sayre stands for your childhood,” he said in conclusion, “and to that extent, to you personally, for the childhood of all men. For, again to some extent, each man feels that somehow humanity as a whole was born at his own birth.”

We took a break at 9:40. “I’ll tell you,” Jane said as I congratulated her, “I just glanced at those dreams in your notebook. I didn’t take more than five minutes. I’ll be damned.” She laughed, pleased at Seth’s handling of them.

(“Thank you very much, Seth. Good night.”)

1. Seth’s idea that in their play children “try to imagine what death is like” certainly adds an intuitive dimension to my own activities as a child. “Cowboys and Indians” was our gang’s favorite game back in Sayre in the late 1920s, and as we roamed the nearby fields all of us made believe we killed our enemies and/or were killed ourselves. We had great fun, and used to play such games to the point of exhaustion.

I’ll also endorse Seth’s statement that children “are often quite aware of willing themselves sick to get out of difficult situations.” I remember very well doing that on certain occasions—usually to avoid some school activity—and that even then I was surprised because my parents didn’t catch on to what I was up to. (Getting well after the danger period had passed was no problem!)