“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the meantime, the dream-recall experiments led first to spontaneous projections from the dream state, and then to deliberate experimentation. Rob and I were unacquainted with the information on projection to be found in esoteric literature. I was incredulous at the instructions and information given by Seth, yet I’d already had enough experience to know that Seth’s “theoretical material” worked. As we followed it, our own results brought the material itself to life.

Following Seth’s instructions, I was learning to recognize when I was dreaming while I was dreaming, manipulate dream events if I wanted to, leave my body and separate halluncinations from reality.

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.

(Since Seth makes further reference to this incident, I’ll describe it briefly, though waking projections will not generally be discussed in this book which is devoted to dreams and related material. I was so reassured by Fox’s experiences that I instantly tried to project from a waking state. I lay down on the bed to support my body, closed my eyes and used all my will-power to eject myself out. Almost at once, and I must admit, much to my astonishment, I succeeded. There was a wrench, almost painful, a click at the back of my neck and I found myself flying through a window at seemingly incredible speed, out of the house at second floor level, gaining altitude and heading over Water Street toward the mountains in the distance. My head felt bursting with pressure. Fully alert and conscious, I was terrified of falling.

Here, as I told Rob later, the “brave experimenter” quite simply panicked. I was scared stiff; I’d bitten off quite a bit more than I could chew. At the moment I panicked, I was suddenly pulled backward through the air faster than I’d come, if that was possible. This frightened me more than the forward flight. This time, there was a strange, very loud noise, like the magnified twang of a rubber band or cable that seemed to be reeling me back in. I actually hit my physical body with a shock, my physical head and neck banging up and down on the pillow, so that my shoulders and neck were stiff for a week.

I realized only later that the cord or cable I’d felt was the astral cord. The experience put me off enough that for some time following I always used a light trance or dream framework for projections. Now Seth said:)

The actual physical window was behind his head. He felt impelled to have a window in front of him in order to get out of the physical house, and the window through which he went was a fabrication of his own, a symbol. I found this amusing. He did not have the confidence, you see, to see himself passing through the physical walls, as he did in fact. Instead, he formed the imaginary window and projected through it.

That particular experience was my most “shocking,” and I’m just as glad it happened in the beginning. Later, I always specified that I wanted to get out of my body in my room or apartment or go to another specific location. Very rarely do you go wide-awake, speeding out of your body like a rocket. Dream projections are quite different, in any case, and the ego is already protected, as mentioned by Seth.

Everything was very new to us then, though. I was more than satisfied with the experience, scare or no; and Rob was envious, telling me that he wouldn’t have panicked under the same conditions. As it happened, he spoke too soon.

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.

But nothing happened. He just hung there. Suddenly he realized that he was out of his body and didn’t know what to do next. He yelled out for me, but I was in my physical body, humming merrily out in the kitchen, and I never heard a thing. Desperately, Rob wished for some support, and quite spontaneously he created a child’s scooter that appeared beneath him. He could see the yard and garage clearly but the image of a grown-up man on a scooter up two stories from the ground was just too much — he snapped back to his body.

But the reality of all of these constructions will be equally vivid, you see, for they are, indeed, equally real. I will give you a simple example. You may find yourself in a room with certain people. Later, upon awakening, you realize that both the people and setting belong to a particular sequence in a novel. You think then: ‘This was no projection, then, but only a dream.’

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.

I fell asleep at once. The next thing I knew I seemed to be in a lovely garden that I had planted myself in some undisclosed past. Then I thought that I was wide awake, telling Rob about the dream. As I chatted with him, a nagging doubt bothered me. Was I really awake, or was this a “false awakening as described by both Seth and Fox, and which I had experienced in the past? I looked about the bedroom. Everything seemed perfectly normal. It was difficult to imagine that I might really be asleep and dreaming, and not awake. Yet I’d gone to bed to experiment, I knew, and to make sure I decided to take it for granted that I really was dreaming, despite the semblance of normality.

At once, my feet and legs felt very strange, filled with a rustling sensation. There was a funny sense of inner shifting. Suddenly, I saw many mirrors, which I knew were not physical and didn’t belong in the room. I was propelled through them with amazing speed. There were scenes within the mirrors, and people moving about. I rushed through a series of such scenes. The traveling sensations were very real, indisputable and somewhat frightening.

Here I experienced another false awakening in which I told Rob what was going on and explained the previous episode. (Actually I’d returned to the bedroom, I believe, still in astral form, lost the necessary focus of consciousness and hallucinated.)

I left the room almost at once and appeared in a house supposedly owned by friends, Jack and Lydia. This was not their normal house in daily life, though, and I was aware of this. Here I stood talking to Rob again, quite forgetting that he was at work. As I spoke to him, I turned my head and saw another Rob, a perfect double, standing in a room directly across the corridor. Amazed, I told Rob to stand where he was, while I moved closer to the door to check my observations.

“Look, Rob. Come here,” I said, and Rob came to the doorway where he saw his own double clearly. They stared at each other, the double looking as amazed as Rob was.

Then I fell into a brief period of unconsciousness. I came to to find myself back in the garden I had seen earlier. A woman beckoned to me. I recognized her instantly as Miss Lizzie Roohan, a neighbor of ours years ago, who had been dead for at least fifteen years. Remembering her death, I was quite surprised to see her and even more intrigued by her appearance. Although she had been in her eighties when she died and in her sixties when I first knew her, she looked like a woman in her middle thirties. We carried on a conversation that I did not remember later. I fell into a normal dream which was also forgotten before the alarm awakened me.

The sensation of intense speed was very real at the beginning of the experience, and during the entire episode I struggled to retain a critical sense which I alternately achieved and lost. The experiment was a success, in that I was convinced I’d left my body from the dream state. But what about Rob’s doubles and Miss Roohan?

Ruburt’s projection from the dream state was legitimate, though his control was poor. The plants Ruburt saw represented the books upon which he has worked and is working. The Lydia episode contained many ordinary dream elements. [To Rob:] You were indeed present with Ruburt in some of his travels, but you have forgotten.

Ruburt saw two of you. He saw your second form as described earlier [in Session 262]. The other was Ruburt’s dream form of you, created by himself in the dream state. When you appeared in your form two, he was conscious enough to recognize your arrival and then point out the dream image he had already created. You were able to see it also, because of your own state.

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:

“The whole dream was in images. I saw the universe or whole reality, an infinity of spirals and stars, in multi-dimensional depth. Someone told me that most of our cherished ideas about the nature of reality were completely wrong. This was a revelation-type dream, but I couldn’t remember much of it at all upon awakening. Someone was guiding me, I believe.”

Ruburt [in the dream given before this session] was in the third form, and he did project beyond your solar system. This was still a projection within the physical universe, however. He was given information that he did not remember. When you explore the inside of a concept, you act it out. You form a temporary but very vivid image production. If Ruburt’s experience had been only this, it still would have been pertinent, for when you understand a concept in such a way the knowledge is never forgotten. It becomes part of your physical cells and your electromagnetic structure.

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.