“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This reminds me of a poem I wrote as a freshman in college:

It may be that the frog could have learned more by exploring his own frogness, and, certainly, I felt rather superior to the frog and the nature of his search — that’s implied in the poem. Now it seems to me that any lively exploration into reality should lead to exuberence and greater understanding, not sadness and alienation. And I don’t believe that our world, like the watch, is simply a discard from another greater reality, though certainly it is a part of one.

Dream One: I was in a beautiful landscape. There were two huge swings, the playground type, whose ropes reached straight up into the sky. Two boys arrived. They got on the swings, swinging way out over the hillside, over the lower land beneath, back and forth over the land for miles. Then a woman appeared and we began to talk. I told her that the swings fascinated me, but scared me also, because they were so high. Her automobile was parked nearby, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how I came to this place — which was in Ohio, I knew. This should have been a clue to me that I was dreaming, but instead I explained rapidly that I am an excellent hiker. Finally I got on one of the swings, swinging back and forth over the length of the hilltop, rather than over the edge of the land beneath.

Then the suspicion struck me that perhaps this was an awake-seeming dream, that I was still dreaming and that none of the dreams had been written down at all. I kept struggling to analyze my state of consciousness and finally decided to check the notebook again.

The next thing I knew, I was out in the living room having some difficulty standing on the floor, but bumping up and down a few feet above the rug. This, in itself, should have told me that I was out of my body, but the realization didn’t come. As I stood there, trying to figure out what was going on, I heard someone at the door. In came Miss Cunningham, wearing a nightgown and robe. She was mumbling and crying to herself, confused and disoriented. “Mrs. Butts? Mrs. Butts?” she kept saying, exactly as she used to when she came to me for help.

The room was dark, normal in every way, lit to some degree by the streetlights outside. At first I thought that Miss C. was sleepwalking and was worried about awakening her. Something else confused me. I heard very dim jazz music and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Miss C. was hardly the type to carry a small transistor radio in her robe pocket.

And some of these dream projections did yield evidence that was convincing to me. One night while experimenting in the dream state, for example, I found myself standing in a room about the size of our bedroom, but it was obviously being used as a closet. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. The walls were wood-paneled, in beautiful condition, and shelves were built along two sides. These were filled with boxes of various sizes, and jars of things like lotions and shoe polish. Clothing was hung on hangers by wall brackets all about. Everything was very vivid. What a waste of a great room, I thought. Then I saw that the room had no windows at all. I knew I was in someone’s house, and that my body was in bed. But where was I? Suddenly, I knew that the house belonged to Bill and Beverly Gray, previous tenants in our apartment house. They had moved to a house about a year previously, and I hadn’t seen them since.

About two days later I met her downtown, the first time I’d seen her since her move. My first book was already out, and she knew about my work, so I told her of the projection and asked if the room meant anything to her at all. Her eyes widened as she told me that I’d described an inner room in her new house perfectly, down to the bare bulb in the ceiling and the paneling. The room was really far too large for a closet, though small enough for a normal room. She hadn’t known what to use it for, and so she’d finally turned it into a closet.

Just lately the same sort of thing happened. Sometime during the night I “awakened” to find myself standing in a bathroom. In this brief but clear moment of critical consciousness, I saw a linen cabinet, open. On the shelf directly in front of me was a stack of towels, all more or less the same size, as if they were of a set. I could see only the front edges, of course, except for the top. They were blue-purple, and the top one had a flower in the center. I could see what was in front of me clearly, but something blocked my vision to the right. I tried to observe what I could, quickly. At first, nothing told me whose house this was, so I asked mentally, and got the words, “Tom’s, one of your students.”

On another occasion, I gave myself suggestions that during the night, I would project to Peg and Bill Gallagher’s house. When morning came, I remembered nothing except that I had tried to get there, drifted off in the general area, then lost proper control of my consciousness. A few days later Peg called me with a strange story. A newspaper man, a colleague of hers, told Peg that, though he didn’t know me at all, he awakened in the middle of the night convinced that I was in his room. My name kept coming to him over and over, and he sensed my presence. The man has no interest in psychic matters, and told Peg because he knew she was a friend of mine. His experience happened the same night that I tried to get to Gallaghers — and he lives in the same area.