“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your terms, whether a minute or 10 minutes, or an hour or two hours were involved, you reacted ahead of time to a headline that you had not as yet physically encountered. You reacted creatively, using the precognitive story as a basis for a fictional endeavor. You turned it to art’s purposes.

(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.

It did not give you the bare headline, however — even though that and the story were perceived far too quickly for you to follow. What you were aware of were your own creative reveries in response to that information.

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.

On the front page of the paper was a rather long story, with photographs, telling how triplets were united by “chance” last weekend in New York City — a case we hadn’t heard of in the media before now. I’d forgotten to describe my idea for a novel to Jane, but the article immediately reminded me to do so. There were similarities in the story that reminded me of my own experience. The first two of the brothers were reunited through a friend (instead of a mother, say) who noticed the resemblance between them. Turns out the three were given up for adoption at birth, and although they knew they were adopted, they didn’t know they belonged to what actually had been a quadruplet group. (A fourth brother had died at birth.) Their unknowing would match my own dreamlike idea of the two young men living in the Elmira area but not knowing of each other. Even the ages of the triplets — 19 years — places them fairly close to my son’s age of 25 in my reverie, rather than, for example, brothers in their 40s.

I was quite struck by the similarities between the news story and my own experience. Jane thinks that because I forgot to bring in the paper before I lay down, I may have tuned into it, out there in the box beside the mailbox. I didn’t have any strong feeling that I had, however, but get a few thrills as I finish this account.