“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth’s series of sessions on projection continued through 1966, 1967 and 1968. In 1966, portions of the sessions were also given over to the clairvoyant experiments, and much of Rob’s time was taken over in writing up the results. By late 1967, Seth was also devoting some sessions to helping strangers who had written us, as mentioned in The Seth Material.

My ESP classes didn’t begin until 1967, so Rob and I tried out the projection experiments alone, and only later were we joined by my students. I had given up my gallery work, and was teaching nursery school during part of this time. This was the framework in which most of these sessions took place.

Remember that I told you you may visit not only the past, present or future as it exists or will exist in your terms, but you may also visit realities that never existed physically. In our early sessions, I mentioned that intensity regulated the ‘duration’ of experience. Now, many events that were only imagined never took place physically, yet they exist. They simply are not a part of your definition of reality. You may, therefore, visit a museum that was planned in the sixteenth century but never built. Such a museum has a reality as valid as the house in which you live.

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.

Dream One: I was in a beautiful landscape. There were two huge swings, the playground type, whose ropes reached straight up into the sky. Two boys arrived. They got on the swings, swinging way out over the hillside, over the lower land beneath, back and forth over the land for miles. Then a woman appeared and we began to talk. I told her that the swings fascinated me, but scared me also, because they were so high. Her automobile was parked nearby, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how I came to this place — which was in Ohio, I knew. This should have been a clue to me that I was dreaming, but instead I explained rapidly that I am an excellent hiker. Finally I got on one of the swings, swinging back and forth over the length of the hilltop, rather than over the edge of the land beneath.

This was followed by two innocuous dreams, also recorded consecutively.

False Awakening or Awake-Seeming Dream: Now I had a false awakening. In the back of my mind all night was the resolution to make sure I recorded my dreams. Here, I was sure I was awake. I wrote the dreams down in my notebook which was on the bedside table, and then, to make sure, I awakened Rob and told him the dreams also. Rob pointed out that the first dream and one of the others were definitely related. Again, I was positive I was awake.

Then the suspicion struck me that perhaps this was an awake-seeming dream, that I was still dreaming and that none of the dreams had been written down at all. I kept struggling to analyze my state of consciousness and finally decided to check the notebook again.

Without moving my physical body and with my physical eyes closed, I reached over and checked my dream book, finding that the page was blank. Really angry at this self-deception, I decided to get out of bed entirely, go into the living room, turn the light on and make sure that I really wrote the dreams down this time. (When I got out of bed here, I believe that I was in my dream body, without realizing it.)

The next thing I knew, I was out in the living room having some difficulty standing on the floor, but bumping up and down a few feet above the rug. This, in itself, should have told me that I was out of my body, but the realization didn’t come. As I stood there, trying to figure out what was going on, I heard someone at the door. In came Miss Cunningham, wearing a nightgown and robe. She was mumbling and crying to herself, confused and disoriented. “Mrs. Butts? Mrs. Butts?” she kept saying, exactly as she used to when she came to me for help.

The room was dark, normal in every way, lit to some degree by the streetlights outside. At first I thought that Miss C. was sleepwalking and was worried about awakening her. Something else confused me. I heard very dim jazz music and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Miss C. was hardly the type to carry a small transistor radio in her robe pocket.

I stood there a moment, wondering how she got in, and decided that I must have left the door unlocked. But how to get her back to her own apartment, I wondered? I completely forgot that she had moved. Now I stood by the bathroom door. She came closer, muttering under her breath, and for a moment the two of us were clearly delineated by the streetlight. Our eyes met. Instantly I realized that I was out of my body, and so was she. Miss C. gave a deep, frightened gasp and disappeared. Instantly, I opened my eyes to find myself in bed, body and all. I was as bewildered as I’ve ever been. Only one split second ago I’d been in the living room.

Quickly I got up and rushed out to the other room. No one was there. It was 12:30 P.M. I sat down and wrote down the experience and the earlier dreams. As I wrote, I heard dim music. It was coming from the apartment upstairs, and it was exactly the same kind I’d heard earlier. With some excitement I went back to the bedroom. It was quiet and still there. The music could only be heard where I’d met Miss Cunningham.

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.

Ruburt’s experience with your Miss Cunningham was quite legitimate. He used a most advantageous method of projection without knowing that he did so, and I highly recommend this method to you both. When you awaken — or seem to waken — in the middle of the night, try to get out of the body. Simply try to get out of bed without moving the body and go into another room.

You must want to do this, however. Often, you do not want to see the body by itself, so to speak, and so choose methods that make this more difficult. Just this one exercise will sharpen your control greatly. It is an ABC. This experience is also less startling to the ego than a more abrupt projection, and the ordinary nature of the activities — walking into the next room, for example — will be reassuring. You are more calm in your own surroundings. Of course, Ruburt was out of his body when he saw Miss Cunningham, who was in the same 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.

And some of these dream projections did yield evidence that was convincing to me. One night while experimenting in the dream state, for example, I found myself standing in a room about the size of our bedroom, but it was obviously being used as a closet. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. The walls were wood-paneled, in beautiful condition, and shelves were built along two sides. These were filled with boxes of various sizes, and jars of things like lotions and shoe polish. Clothing was hung on hangers by wall brackets all about. Everything was very vivid. What a waste of a great room, I thought. Then I saw that the room had no windows at all. I knew I was in someone’s house, and that my body was in bed. But where was I? Suddenly, I knew that the house belonged to Bill and Beverly Gray, previous tenants in our apartment house. They had moved to a house about a year previously, and I hadn’t seen them since.

That’s all that I remembered. I must have fallen back into a normal dream state, and when I awakened, it was morning. I wrote down what I had seen, dated the record as usual, told Rob and wondered about calling Beverly to check. She was only an acquaintance, however; we had never been close. So I let it rest.

About two days later I met her downtown, the first time I’d seen her since her move. My first book was already out, and she knew about my work, so I told her of the projection and asked if the room meant anything to her at all. Her eyes widened as she told me that I’d described an inner room in her new house perfectly, down to the bare bulb in the ceiling and the paneling. The room was really far too large for a closet, though small enough for a normal room. She hadn’t known what to use it for, and so she’d finally turned it into a closet.

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.”

Again, the next thing I knew it was morning. I wrote down what I remembered. The trouble was, I have two students named Tom. When I mentioned this in class, one had no idea of what kind of towels were in the bathroom. The other said my description seemed to apply to those in his bathroom linen closet. It wasn’t until several weeks later, however, that Rob and I visited Tom Height. “Come on, check out the bathroom,” he said, as everyone laughed. But the minute I entered, I saw it was the room I’d been in. The closet was right inside the door, and a jut in the wall blocked vision of the rest of the room. The cabinet and towels were identical.

On another occasion, I gave myself suggestions that during the night, I would project to Peg and Bill Gallagher’s house. When morning came, I remembered nothing except that I had tried to get there, drifted off in the general area, then lost proper control of my consciousness. A few days later Peg called me with a strange story. A newspaper man, a colleague of hers, told Peg that, though he didn’t know me at all, he awakened in the middle of the night convinced that I was in his room. My name kept coming to him over and over, and he sensed my presence. The man has no interest in psychic matters, and told Peg because he knew she was a friend of mine. His experience happened the same night that I tried to get to Gallaghers — and he lives in the same area.