“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This knowledge automatically changes the dream state into another in which the critical faculties are aroused and operating. Dream actions are no longer taken for granted. Experience is scrutinized. You may “awaken” in your house, for example. If so, check your rooms against their normal arrangement. Anything that does not normally belong there may be an hallucination, part of the usual dreaming process. If you will such images to disappear, they will, leaving you within the basic unhallucinated environment. If you rationalize any such elements or accept them uncritically, you may fall back into normal dreaming.

“You’re normally awake,” Rob said. “The plant is ours. You just forgot about it.” So I accepted his statement and never even wondered that he might be a thought-form of mine.

Actually, I was only remotely aware of the difficulties of my hand. Instead, my mind was filled with memories of the spectacular colors I had seen. For a moment, I was almost enthralled as I partially recalled them out of the nowhere into which they had vanished. I had to go downtown to meet Rob for grocery shopping, so I dressed quickly. But it seemed that all the color had drained away from the world. Walking downtown, I was depressed. It was weeks later before I regained my normal feelings for our apartment. In the meantime, it seemed insufferably dreary. For that matter, so did the rest of the world. I’ve had normal dreams that were in vivid color, but nothing like that, and at no other time has my usual earthly environment been bathed in such iridescence.

What would happen to objects falling? I wondered. From everything I saw, I judged that they would glide to earth or drop slowly through that textured air. The effect was far from inert, though. The sky and air moved constantly, perhaps like very heavy jellied water, with the trees stuck in like huge seaweed. I felt as if I could almost walk on the air, but from the motion of my hand through it, I knew it was not normally heavy enough to support me.

Cautiousness and wonder made me pause. For one thing, the air inside the room was normal. For another, I felt as if I was observing a legitimate glimpse of air from the framework of a different kind of perception. Was this in some way air slowed down? And if so, was my “body” in the same state? Was this what air was really like and was it perceived this way by certain kinds of consciousness or at particular stages of molecular activity? All of these thoughts went through my mind, but before I could figure out what other experiments I could try, I snapped back to my body.

That experience is far more vivid than anything else that happened to me that day or during that entire month so far. It will be remembered long after I forget what else I did that day. It does no good to call such episodes hallucinations. They are, above all, valid psychological events. They enrich normal experience, broaden the usual restrictions of daily perception and encourage creative thought. The same applies to all of the dreams and projections mentioned in this book. These dimensions of experience and consciousness co-exist with normal reality as we know it, and I believe that in them we exercise abilities that are ours by right and heritage.