“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

4
My First Glimpse of Dream Reality

“In what land was this?” Rob asked.

“Will you tell us what mental enzymes are? You mentioned them once before in a past session. I guess I’d rather learn more about that right now,” Rob said.

You both know what love and hate are, but as I told you earlier, try to think in new ways. Love and hate, for example, are action. They are action and they both imply action in physical bodies …

This session actually lasted from 9:00 P.M. until midnight, so only excerpts have been given here. The material on mental enzymes intrigued us. Looking back, we can see what a chore it must have been for Seth to introduce us to ideas that were very basic — to him — and quite new to us. Much later, he was to give some excellent material on the nature of physical matter and its “mental” components. But at the time of this session, he told us all we could understand, while he began slowly to build up the necessary background and concepts.

One night while Rob was busy in the studio, I decided to experiment with a crystal ball. Since I didn’t have one, I substituted a lovely blue bottle which was filled with water and into which I stared intently for a good half hour. Just as I finished, Rob came out to see what I was up to. According to him, I had been too quiet.

I laughed and said, “Well, there’s nothing to crystal-gazing. All I saw was what you could expect — lights and reflections and things. I guess you can’t win them all, as they say,” and I plunked myself down in our wooden rocker. In the next moment, a fascinating series of events occurred that were to culminate in the third dream-state experience mentioned earlier in this book. I’m going to quote the notes I wrote the following day. In this way, our attitude towards the events at the time becomes obvious.

Rob asked me what was wrong. I answered that I felt odd and unlike myself. My body then was very light — weightless to me, anyway. I wasn’t conscious of any muscular weight or pressure at all. My arms and shoulders felt like water or air. Rob told me to get up. He was beginning to look worried. But I could hardly rise from the chair. He had to help me to the couch. I didn’t feel physical enough to move.

Rob thought the concentration of writing a statement of how I felt would help. Instead, my efforts showed what a crazy state I was in. My handwriting just wasn’t my own. Hardly any pressure was exerted on the pen. The writing was wavery, small and grew progressively smaller. The prose expression was nothing like mine; it was very childish. Thoughts or messages poured to mind, and I wrote them down in this weird (unedited) script:

While experimenting, we found that I could make a rapid decisive motion if I exerted great mental force. Rob asked me to lift a coffee cup with a normal gesture. (Earlier, he had held the cup while I sipped the coffee.) I concentrated as hard as I could on what he wanted me to do — which seemed hilarious to me, and an impossible task — and then really made a supreme physical effort. As a result, my hand jerked up high, suddenly, and then just as suddenly swung back, banging the cup back on the counter.

Applied suggestion by Rob would have snapped me out of this state easily, but we didn’t know that at the time. As it was, the condition lasted about three hours, ending only when we went to bed, past midnight. By then I was no longer frightened but merely curious and trying with one part of my consciousness to find out what the other part was up to — and how it went about its business. Finally, I fell asleep, expecting nothing but exhausted slumber for the rest of the night.

I was too amazed to speak. Seth had barely begun any discussion of the dream-state realities and I was at a complete loss. Both men were smiling as they stared at me. Obviously, they weren’t intruders in the usual sense, and they were not at all threatening. Their presence was a complete impossibility, yet I couldn’t deny the evidence of my senses.

As they vanished, I felt the strangest sense of loss. I ‘knew’ that the men were as real as I was, and that I had glimpsed some other dimension of reality quite as valid as the one I knew. Through all of this, I hadn’t thought to disturb Rob, who was sleeping soundly beside me. My attention was utterly focused on the events. Now, turning toward him, I remembered the noise that had awakened me. Hadn’t it awakened him? Had there ever been a noise?