“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The experience of “coming to life during dreams” with any consistency, having some critical awareness, some rational control, some glimpse of other-dimensional reality — these events in the overall are bound to transform ordinary concepts regarding the nature of consciousness.

I have been speaking of projection from the trance state. Projection from a dream is something else again, and when executed successfully, you have a fine example of the self as it changes the focus of awareness. Here the critical consciousness can be fully alert while the body sleeps. Spontaneous, unrecalled projections of this kind happen often. It is beneficial that they be carried out by the conscious wish of the projector. You learn, therefore, to manipulate your own consciousness and to experience its mobility. Quite simply, such projections allow you practice in dealing with realities that you will meet when you no longer operate in the physical system.

All through this period I was trying to train myself to come “awake” while asleep. It serves no purpose to include all of the many dreams of this nature that I recorded — dreams in which I managed to regain my critical senses, sometimes only to fall back into normal dreaming and sometimes to embark upon conscious experiments. But one experience in particular was very vivid and informative. Excerpts from the following session will show you what I was trying to do.

There are some notes I wanted to give you concerning dreams in which you feel certain you are normally awake. When these dreams are unusually vivid, then the ego is aware and participating, but generally it is not using its critical faculties. As you know, you can become critically alert, but when you do so, you realize that you are not in your normal waking condition.

In awake-seeming dreams you are indeed awake, but within a different psychological framework, indeed, within a different framework of reality. You are operating at a high level of awareness, and using the inner senses. These enable you to perceive an added depth of dimension which is responsible for the vividness and sense of exhilaration that often occurs within the kind of dream. The next step, of course, is to allow the ego to awaken its critical faculties while within this state. You are then able to realize that while you are indeed awake as you seem, you are awake while the body is asleep.

I’m convinced that I left my body when I decided to go into the living room, and met Miss C. who was traveling in her dream body, wandering about in her old surroundings and coming in for help as she used to do. Unfortunately, my critical sense was fully awakened only toward the end of the experience, though I made several valiant efforts to understand my condition.

Just lately the same sort of thing happened. Sometime during the night I “awakened” to find myself standing in a bathroom. In this brief but clear moment of critical consciousness, I saw a linen cabinet, open. On the shelf directly in front of me was a stack of towels, all more or less the same size, as if they were of a set. I could see only the front edges, of course, except for the top. They were blue-purple, and the top one had a flower in the center. I could see what was in front of me clearly, but something blocked my vision to the right. I tried to observe what I could, quickly. At first, nothing told me whose house this was, so I asked mentally, and got the words, “Tom’s, one of your students.”