“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In that dream your worries were initially reflected—worries that your friend Floyd has also encountered on his own about virility and age,⁴ so you saw the two of you in a five-and-ten-cent store, simply representing the world of commerce, where items are sold: Did you still have a value in that world? Were you still virile? You were each to take your test. (Pause.) Others saw you but were unconcerned, showing that the concern was your own, but also expressing the feeling that the world might not really care.

(9:59 P.M. Her eyes closed, Jane sat quietly in her rocker for several moments before leaving her trance state. Usually she’s “out of it” at once. “I kept waiting there, as though I was at the edge of something, and trying to get over it into something new. As though I was free-sailing…. My God, it was short enough,” she exclaimed as she looked at the clock for the first time. Actually, the session had lasted 1 hour 12 minutes—slightly longer than her average time of 1 hour 7 minutes for the last five sessions. Jane’s sense of time had been elongated while she spoke for Seth: “I feel like I was really far … like you were getting more than you could translate, like you were right on the edge of something….”

“My friend, Floyd Waterman (I’ll call him), and I were in a five-and-ten-cent store in Sayre, my old hometown. We were both dressed, but knew that we had to take some sort of tests for sexual potency. We stood near the large plate-glass windows at the front of the store—quite exposed for all to see, in other words, including those eating at nearby tables, yet no one seemed to be paying any attention to us…. Floyd had to take the test first, stepping into a little booth such as a cashier might use. As I waited to go next I turned to look out the front windows—and suddenly found myself surrounded on three sides by walls of the most beautiful floor-to-ceiling, intricate and colorful latticework of diamond-shaped glass crystals I could possibly imagine. I cannot describe the intrinsic shimmer and sparkle of those faceted walls, shining and vibrating in warm oranges, browns, yellows, reds, and violets. Each segment of each color was held within a very thin black frame, as on a much cruder scale the pieces of a stained-glass window can be contained by channeled lead strips. I can still ‘see’ those dream lights and colors as I write this account several hours later, after describing them to Jane. I’ve thought of trying to do a painting of my best dream images of all time … yet wonder how I can do it….”

2. We moved from our downtown apartments into the hill house almost five years ago (in March 1975), but Jane thinks she tried to write the poem Seth referred to several years before that. (She began speaking for Seth late in 1963.) I have no memory of her struggling with such a poem. I was most curious to see it so that I could quote a bit of it here. Jane has stacks of journals, poetry notebooks, manuscripts, and loose notes of all kinds, but neither of us could dig out what we wanted. Very frustrating! We hadn’t been as careful then about dating our work as we are now. “But I know I didn’t throw out whatever I did on that poem,” Jane said. One of us will probably find it someday—while looking for something else.