“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I sneezed three times just as Jane took off her glasses and went into trance. As Seth, she stared at me with quite an amused air, waiting until I was ready to take notes.)

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.

The main issue was the relative ease with which you were able to enlarge the hole in the glass door. Ease is the key word. To the world of the intellect, a glass door must be considered solid, as it is in the world of physical senses. In other quite as factual terms, indeed in the larger framework of facts, the door of course is not solid at all, as no objects are. Obviously that is known to science.

“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.”

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

“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.

“At the same time, it’s Rob’s usual self, learning from the creature-magical self, who then ‘gets the evidence,’ enlarges the magical hole in the glass; signifying two things — that the so-called usual consciousness can learn from the magical part, follow its lead and therefore catch itself ‘performing miracles.’

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.