“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I smiled at Seth as “he” leaned toward me. “I thought so. It’s been very interesting.”)

(I intend to copy a page or two of the session to insert in my notebook containing suggestions of notes for Dreams, Seth’s latest book. I mean the material about time. I also thought we should somehow keep the session in mind, and not let it get lost in the files as the years pass — one of the reasons I want to use part of it in Dreams. Since it’s private, it might not be published any time soon otherwise.

I lay down for a nap in the bedroom after Jane got up from her own. I had the following ideas as I lay in that state between waking and sleeping. I found myself musing about what I thought was a great idea for a novel. I tried to describe it to Jane as we ate supper and watched the news on TV.

I thought of myself as a woman at the mall in Big Flats, near Elmira. As I went through a double revolving door I caught a glimpse of a young man, say in his mid-twenties, who was an exact duplicate of my own son, who I knew was not in the mall, but was away on business of some kind. The shock of seeing my son’s double was so great that instead of chasing him to question him, I had to sit down on a bench to recover. By then the young man was gone. I envisioned myself returning to the mall again and again to see if I could see the person — and finally I did. Either I followed him to his car, then talked to him, or followed him to where he lived with his parents — but he bore an uncanny resemblance to my own son.

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.