“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Howard bought a small tempera of mine picturing two apples; and then to Jane’s surprise he bought off the wall of our apartment a small abstract oil that Jane and I had produced jointly, in a humorous attempt at working together. The little painting had turned out well and attracted much notice. It was the first piece of art work Jane had ever sold, and she was pleased.

(Jane well remembers the evening when she first consciously conceived Idea Construction, and so do I. Checking her manuscripts yields the date of September 10,1963, as when she made her first notes. I remember walking out to the living room where she writes her poetry, having finished my own work in my studio in the back of the apartment at about 9 PM; Jane’s first words were “Boy, have I got a great idea,” or to that effect. She then told me about idea construction, which I didn’t go for very much. Checking with her while writing this up, she said that she never did do any poetry that night; the idea came to her as she sat down to write poetry after supper, and she spent the evening on it.

(September 18, 1964, Friday: This was a long, complicated and very vivid dream that seemed to consume hours. It was in full color. In the beginning Jane; Bill Macdonnel; Clark, Alice and Larry Potter; and myself were in an apartment I did not recognize but took to be occupied by Jane and me. [Clark and Alice Potter had been our landlords in Sayre, PA, for over four years. The four of us had liked each other from the start and had always gotten on well together. Larry is their teenage son, and they have another son, Norman, older by a year or two, who was not in the dream.]

(Then Bill and Jane were gone. I was in the living room of the apartment with Alice and Clark, looking back toward a kitchen finished in brown wood paneling. In an intermediate room I saw Larry Potter. He was wearing a chamois-type fall jacket with knitted cuffs. He seemed to me to be taller and heavier than I had known him to be, which was about my own size. The amazing thing to me was that Larry was frantically busy at a wringer-type washing machine that was gushing forth a stream of water from its outlet, into a bucket that was almost full.