“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:31.) Give us a moment … As you lay there you were aware of the fact just beneath consciousness — usual consciousness — that you had not brought in the paper before your nap, as is your habit, and almost at a dream level you idly wondered what stories it might contain. Your inclusion of the hospital mixup in the tale was, as, you suspected, connected with the medical ideas you have been dealing with of late (in extra notes for Mass Events, and the book by the physician) — and here was an excellent fictional idea, you see, that could, among other things, bring those ideas into prominence.

I do not know how or when the two look-a-like young men met — but in my reverie I thought of the mother in question tracing back connections all the way to her son’s birth at the Elmira hospital. I envisioned the delivery rooms there, and the room where visitors see their babies (I’ve never seen those rooms in “real” life).

The story unfolds when the mother uncovers evidence of a mixup in the baby complex at the hospital: She had been given only one of her children, or some such affair; either that, or she had managed to adopt a baby from there. Either way, she finds out through much detective work that a whole series of mixups had occurred in the hospital that day — that in the Elmira area there are several sets of parents who have been raising the wrong children all these years. There had been mixups in the hospital because of new help, etc. I thought it would make a great novel as all of the entangled threads were unwound, and considering the emotional tangles that had been built up over the years as parents raised children they thought were theirs.

I think that the idea of mixups in the hospital came from a book Jane and I have been reading the past week, written by a doctor who warns against medicine, delivery rooms, the whole bit, in the establishment practice of medicine. He wrote that such baby mixups are far from rare. Then as we sat on the couch, I remembered that for the first time in literally months I’d forgotten to bring in the evening paper, so we could look at it while we ate and watched TV. I almost invariably bring in the paper before I lay down for a nap before supper, so Jane can read it while I sleep.