“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: I want to begin by mentioning one of the most important and vital messages in your glass-door dream (of two days ago),¹for its truth applies to the magical approach as well.

That is, the dream was giving you an example of one of the main characteristics of what we will call the magical approach. Ruburt did not stress this in his interpretation, which was otherwise excellent.

Now in your dream, you were quite clearly seeing the threshold between physical reality and the magical dimension in which that physical reality has its source. You were being shown — or showing yourself — the difference in the rules or assumptions between the two. The dog’s desire for food led him to walk magically through the door, for the desires of the natural creature are satisfied (pause) with an ease that has nothing to do with your ideas of work. What I am getting at is the introduction of the concepts of a different kind of work — very valuable, vital work that is performed at another level and in a different fashion.

Now in your dream you got the feeling of that kind of work, or action. It is the given power of the world, the given power of nature. It is the directed force of value fulfillment.² In other terms it is of course the energy of All That Is. The trouble is that the rational view of life has separated man from a sense of his own power source. When he has a problem, the rational approach to its solution seems the only answer, and often, of course, it is no answer at all.

1. From my dream notebook: (See my painting at end of Session 4.)

“Dream, very early Saturday morning, August 16, 1980.

“I’ll try to remember all elements of this dream in sequence. Most unusual. All in brilliant color:

“I dreamed that I was in the kitchen of the hill house, in Elmira, crouched down just inside the room’s glass storm door, which was closed. The kitchen’s inside wooden door was wide open, just to my left. Gus, the friendly old Shetland sheepdog who belonged to our neighbors across the street, came up to the storm door, looking for the handful of dry food I give him each morning when I scatter birdseed in the driveway. Gus was on the other side of the door, on the screened-in back porch, as he should be — only then I saw to my amazement that he was starting to walk through the glass panel in his eagerness to get to the food. I felt his head pushing effortlessly through the glass, and exclaimed about this to Jane, who sat at her usual place at the breakfast table just in back of me. I was really surprised. I had my hands on Gus’s head as he sought to enter the kitchen through the glass.

“I gently pushed against Gus’s head, and he began to back out through the glass. With a sudden inspiration I kept my hands on his head until they went through the glass with him as he withdrew. Then, in order to obtain some physical proof that this was really happening, with my right hand I began to ‘carve’ a squarish hole a few inches across in the glass where Gus’s head had been. I made the opening as the glass began to ‘congeal’. The hole’s sides were smoothly rounded and posed no problem as far as sharp edges went. And I ended up with the proof I wanted — an irregular hole that I had formed in the glass with my fingers. The dream glass was about one-quarter-inch thick — double, say, its ‘real’ thickness.

“After the Gus part of the dream, I saw through the glass door a man standing quite at military attention. He was older, graying, impeccably dressed in the dark blue uniform of an officer of the Navy. He was handsome and tall and slim. He looked something like the blue male I’m painting from a recent dream, although that one is in civilian clothes. There’s a resemblance between the two, but I’m not particularly claiming that the officer is the civilian. I only want to note that this would make the second instance recently in which I might have had the same character appear in separate dreams.

“Later in the dream, maybe at night, I was sitting on a couch with some close friends, as at a small party. My brother Linden, from out of town, could have been there. The room didn’t look much like our living room at the hill house. Jane was present. I believe we had the TV on. Either a character on the screen said something, or someone in the room did — whatever, it triggered my memory of the Gus episode. I began to laugh and squirm with glee, telling our friends that I’d experienced something great, and that I could show them the physical evidence of it. I didn’t get to actually show the hole in the glass, though, but for some little time I kept laughing and saying, to everyone’s surprise and amusement, that I’d really had that adventure this morning.”

Jane interpreted the dream the same day I had it:

“Dream of August 16, Saturday 1980 — the hand thru glass dream.

“This is another terrific dream, continuing the one in the last session, in which Rob was constructing an image of the magical self — seeing it as a kind of Captain Marvel character. In this dream, though, he uses the magic himself, making it far more accessible.

“The dream takes place in the kitchen, a room devoted to physical nourishment. Gus, the neighbors’ dog, in an intense desire to get the food Rob holds, walks right through the glass door — signifying the importance of desire in bringing about the magical satisfaction of needs. Gus probably also represents the ‘creature’ magical self, showing its creature characteristics; that it’s natural, after all.

“Later in the dream Rob is reminded of this incident by something someone says, either on TV or in the room — signifying a different mobility of consciousness, almost a dream within a dream, and also establishing the fact that physical and magical events are related.

Jane did such a fine job interpreting the dream (in my estimation!) that I didn’t bug her for more details. Later, however, I wished that I’d asked her a few questions. I think she’s quite right about the naval officer being a symbol for the more conventional, or rigid, rational self. I would have liked my wife’s comments on my brother Linden being in the dream. He’s a year younger than I am, and lives with his family down in Pennsylvania. He’s become quite religiously oriented, as is his right. I think that as I joyfully talked about my magical exploration in the dream, I was telling him something like: “Hey, there’s more than one way to explore the self, to be religious!” And I think that Linden and I were in correspondence in the dream state, and that in some way he got the message. …

Robert F. Butts (1919 –): My Glass-Door Dream. 1980. Oil on panel, 13 x 11 in.

My dream of August 16 was difficult to visually present: How could I show my contact with Gus through the seemingly solid glass — show that, as Seth says, desire is action? I first sketched the dream late in August, but did’t finish the painting of it until December.