“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The dream body is the one with which you are most familiar. It has been called the astral body. It strikes you as being physical when you are in it, but you can do things with it that can’t be done ordinarily. You can levitate, for example. As a rule, however, you do not go through walls with this body. This is the body you use for ordinary dreams. Levitation is possible with it but on a limited basis.

The third we may call the true projection form. In it, it is possible to travel beyond your solar system, and to perceive the past, present and futures of other systems as well as your own. The various forms that you use do not dictate your experience, however. You may begin in one form and change to another — or go from the first to the third. On such occasions you must pass through in reverse direction [on returning]. The forms merely represent stages of consciousness.

There are, indeed, others who can help you in such experiences, and they can be of great assistance as guides. You will find projections much easier if your head is to the north. One small point here. Ruburt’s waking projection upon first reading the Fox book was also legitimate, as he should know.

Now, when you project from the dream body, consciously you are already outside of the physical one. You have already made the initial change away from physical focus. The mass of valid projections are made from the dreaming body. When the excursion is over, the return to the dream body is made with no strain, you see, for the ego is little concerned. In many such cases, however, the knowledge is not available to the waking self.

One weekend afternoon, Rob was napping, and I was doing the dishes. He fell asleep and “awakened” to find himself hovering about three feet out in the air outside his studio window, between the house and the large pear tree that shades the room. For a moment he just couldn’t understand what was happening. He knew that physically such a position was impossible, and he held his breath, waiting for the inevitable fall.

I want to give you some idea of the conditions you may expect to meet in any successful projections, so that you will be prepared to some extent. For simplicity’s sake, we will call the body forms discussed in our last session forms one, two and three.

Form one will spring out of an ordinary dream state. In spontaneous projections, you may become conscious in form one, project, return to the ordinary dream state and from there project again several times. You can expect these particular projections to be difficult to interpret now, though you may find the experience intact in the middle of any given dream record.

Your excursions with form one will be within your own system, largely connected to the earth, although past, present and future may be involved. You may, for example, visit New York in the year 2000.

It may, however, be a valid projection. The room and people exist but not in a way that you endorse as reality. They exist in another dimension, but as a rule you cannot perceive it. [To Rob:] The paintings that you will paint exist now. It is possible for you to project yourself into one of your own future landscapes. This would not be an imaginative projection. This is what I am trying to tell you.

You may find yourself, for example, in the middle of a battle that was once planned in some general’s mind, a battle that never materialized in physical reality. In such a case, incidentally, you were not a part of the battle and could not be harmed. However, you might be attracted enough to project yourself spontaneously into the body of one of the soldiers, in which case you could experience pain until your own fear pulled you back. As you learn control, such mistakes vanish.

It is possible for you to project to a future event in which you will be involved and by an act that you make in the projection, alter the course that this future will take. Such an action would therefore appear to happen twice, once in your present and once in your future. But in the future, you would be the one whose course is altered from this traveling self from the past.

I “landed” on a hillside. Two women ran over the hills, and I followed them. I had no idea who the women were, but I decided to see whether I could leap from the ground in this state to the top of one of the hills. As soon as I thought of this, I sped up through the air to the top, then backward to where I had been standing. To make sure of my results, I executed the same “leap” once again.

During this period, of course, we were recording all the dreams we could capture. Usually at least one of mine per night dealt with flying or levitation. During a series of dreams I seemed to be working to perfect my “flying technique,” and was taking lessons from others. Then, in the middle of several dreams such as this, I dreamed the following, according to my notes:

I want to make this clearer, however. Suppose that you suddenly understand the concept of oneness with the universe, and that this inner sensing of concepts is to be used. You would then construct dream images, a multitudinous variety of shapes and forms meant to represent the complicated forms of life. You would then have the experience of entering each of those lives. You would not think of what it was like to be a bird. You would momentarily be one. This does involve a projection of sorts, yet still must be called by contrast a pseudo-projection. A normal projection would involve one of the three body forms.

You will be able to look back and see your physical body upon the bed on some occasions, and in other cases you will not be able to do this. In the first body form, for example, you can look back and see the physical body. If you project from this form into the next, in order to intensify the experience, then from this second form you will not see the physical one. You will be aware of it, and you may experience some duality. In the third form, you will no longer be aware of the physical body, and you will not see it.

Some of you may call dream projections hallucinatory. Yet nothing of that kind happened to us before the Seth sessions. The instructions we were given worked. A curious new second life began, adjacent to our normal one. Some may call it a fantasy life, but surely it is no more fantastic or mysterious than the ordinary world in which we all find ourselves.

So at least twice a week I lay down to experiment, my body on the couch or bed, the alarm clock set, my house in order, while I try to “get out” to see what I could find. I seem to have a curious talent for this, and rarely do I fail to leave my body when I’ve really made up my mind to go. Yet for periods at a time, I just concentrate on the Seth sessions, with Seth on the one side of reality and Rob on the other — two good guardians. Then I avoid out-of-body experiments. A sense of strangeness seems connected with them then. My consciousness, so used to my flesh, says that I’ve had enough. And I’m afraid to leave my body in the wintertime. In black and white print, this sounds ridiculous, yet, emotionally, the statement has a logic that speaks louder than all my deliberate suggestions to the contrary. So I experiment between May and November, coming in for the winter when the wild skies of fall are over and the bone-chilling cold settles in.