“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As we were going to bed, I began to feel a tremendous energy in the room. I tried not to be frightened and told myself that the intuitive self sensed something exciting going on, even if the ego was worried. I closed my eyes and the energy became stronger. Then I fell asleep and ‘woke up’ to find myself projecting in the dark-yet-not-dark of many projections. Seth stood in the doorway, looking as he does in Rob’s painting of him. He was short, rather stout, dressed in light shirt and pants. I realized that he took this form because it is reassuring to me.

The next thing I knew, I had the feeling that I was hovering in our dark bathroom. We close the door between the bath and living room to keep Willie, our cat, in the living room at night. I was before the closed door, but wasn’t able to penetrate it. I felt no fear or panic. Although I was awake while sleeping and definitely projecting, I didn’t realize this at first. The fact slowly dawned on me. This was the first time that the fear element wasn’t present for me. I had no actual memory of leaving my body, and I must have fallen off into normal sleep for a moment, because the next thing I knew, I found myself out of my body, hovering just above my sleeping physical image.

Before he went back to sleep, Rob told me what had happened. I was amazed, because I hadn’t been in bed over five minutes yet. I’d been waiting for his snoring to quiet down or hopefully, stop. When it didn’t, I asked him to turn over. The bathroom light had been off only ten minutes at the most and the bathroom door closed. Except for undressing, these were the last two things I did before going to bed. A humorous domestic quandary results. Now I’ll have to think twice before asking Rob to turn over if he’s snoring. I’ll be afraid of disturbing a projection.

Rob has had several spontaneous projections but none experimentally produced. The one Seth mentioned happened several years ago, in wintertime. We slept in the living room for the night because the back of the apartment was chilly. Rob had just gone to bed on the opened-up couch. I puttered about, in the same room, ready to join him. All the lights were on. He closed his eyes. The next instant he found himself fully awake and conscious in his studio.

I was having trouble getting away from the couch and walking properly. All through this, I was afraid that my body might not be as deeply asleep as I’d earlier supposed, but all of my consciousness was with me in my astral form. My vision wasn’t clear, though, and the room looked hazy. I shook my head to clear it and saw to my dismay that the entire living room wall was lying flat on the floor, face up, closed door and all. This told me at once that I was hallucinating and if I didn’t watch it, I could fall into a dreaming state. (If I’d just accepted the wall’s position as ‘one of those things,’ I would have lost my critical awareness.) I decided that it might be better to go back into my body and try over.

By now, I was standing with my back to my body, and I just ‘fell’ backward into it. I got out again fairly quickly, this time able to study the strange sensing involved in distinguishing between the astral self I wanted to sit up and the physical self I wanted to stay flat. I walked out to the center of the room which now was perfectly normal, but had difficulty walking and remembered that in my case, at least, this sometimes happens when I’m close to my body. I decided to go to Rob’s studio, where he was working, to see if I could make him observe me.

I was still walking very slowly, with my astral eyes slitted to cut down the focus of distractions. I closed them to deepen my trance and reached out for the bathroom doorknob. I felt it hard and round, perfectly normal in my astral hand. Then I paused in uncertainty; something didn’t seem right. What had I done wrong now? I opened my astral eyes fully and stared down at my hand. It circled a ‘knob’ of air. For just another moment I felt the hardness, the bulk of that knob. Then only air was there. Obviously, I’d hallucinated the doorknob. The door was still several feet away. Disappointed with myself, I returned to my body, determined to plan out a new course of action.

At the end of the park basin are a flight of stone steps leading to another street and an old house in which I once lived for a short time. I went there. The front downstairs door was ajar, but to see how well I was doing, I walked through the part that was closed and went upstairs. After wandering through the upstairs hall and seeing no one, I went out to the side porch and stood looking out at the park and enjoying the night air.