“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

During this time, I was experimenting with waking projections also. The idea behind those was different: I wanted to go someplace in an out-of-body state, record my impressions of what I saw, and check the results in whatever way I could. With the dream projections, I was more intrigued by the manipulations of consciousness involved (the trick of staying between hallucinations and physical reality) and the methods. These tell far more about how consciousness works, and I was always intrigued by trying to continue normal awareness throughout dreaming.

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.

Certain chemical changes must come about in the physical organism before projection can occur. Were it not for these, you would still be imprisoned within the corporal image. You know that dreaming has a definite chemical basis, that chemicals built up during period of waking experience are released through dreams. Not only are these released, but they form a propelling action that allows energy to flow in the opposite direction. As chemical reactions allow the body to utilize energy and form physical materializations, so the excess built up becomes, then, a propelling force, allowing action to flow in what you would call subjective directions.

Projections involve many more aspects of the whole self and are a mark that the personality is progressing in important ways. The inner senses are allowed their greatest freedom in projection states, and the self retains experience that it would not otherwise. When this knowledge becomes a part of the ordinary waking consciousness, then you have taken a gigantic step forward.