“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

These chemical properties are more diffused in such an apparition than in a physical form, however. The chemical composition of a storm, perhaps, will give you an idea of what I mean. … They cause small disturbances in the physical system. As a rule, they are not solid, in the same way that clouds are not solid, and yet they have shape and to a certain extent, boundaries and movement. They definitely have a reality, though you cannot usually perceive it with the physical senses.

Now it is possible for someone within the body to perceive someone who is not, but it is not usual. The perceiver must be a person of strong psychic abilities or the projecting personality must be driven by high emotional intensity to make himself known.

As I mentioned in The Seth Material, my waking projections and the spontaneous ones in the Seth trance yielded enough evidence to convince us that I was legitimately out of my body and perceiving another location — and not just out of my mind. It is far more difficult to get objective proof for dream projections, yet the subjective proof is quite definite. The task of trying to maintain specific states of consciousness is enough work and effort to convince anyone having the experience that far more than simple dreaming or imagination is involved.

Now, there are also electromagnetic changes [during projections] that can be perceived with instruments. Certain electrical fields will make themselves known under these conditions. The fields have always existed, but they will become apparent to physical instruments only when they are being crossed — in other words, at the very act of projection.