“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

From 1963 until 1966, Rob and I worked alone, holding the twice-weekly sessions and following Seth’s instructions. I had several spontaneous out-of-body experiences during Seth sessions and while doing the exercise Seth calls psy-time. These checked out in physical reality and are recorded in my book, The Seth Material. Some of these episodes concerned strangers who had written to me. In out-of-body states, I correctly described distant environments giving specific, checkable information. Such instances did much to convince me that projections were not just imaginative dramatizations.

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.

But often, after doing all this, I would simply fall back to sleep again, dream normally until morning, and lose the clear memory of my experiences. I reasoned that if I just napped for an hour or so in the day, then I’d be less apt to forget. It became a great joke between Rob and myself, this “laying down on the job” or going to sleep in order to go to work. To some extent, it also upset my ordinary sleep schedule, so I usually experimented in this way for only a few weeks at a time.

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.

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.

Now, when Ruburt dreams that he has discussed a dream with you, in most cases he has done so. You both converse quite naturally in forms number two. With enough traveling, these conversations can be recorded in both of your dreams. The amount of work to be done here is astounding, but you can both do this, and in so doing, you can increase man’s knowledge of the potentials of the dream 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:

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.