“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Elements from past, present and future may be indiscriminately available to you. You may be convinced that a given episode is the result of subconscious fabrication, simply because the time sequence is not maintained, and this could be a fine error. In a given dream projection, for example, you may experience an event that is obviously from the physical past, yet within it there may be elements that do not fit. In an old-fashioned room of the 1700’s, you may look out and see an automobile pass by. Obviously, you think: distortion. Yet you may be straddling time in such an instance, perceiving, say, the room as it was in the 1700’s and the street as it appears in your present. These elements may appear side by side. The car may suddenly disappear before your eyes, to be replaced by an animal or the whole street may turn into a field.

One involved spectacular color. I lay down to try a projection one Friday afternoon last January — my last projection experiment for the winter. Rob was out. It was another dreary day with veils of light rain falling. I was just beginning the final draft of this book and told myself that I could have an excellent projection to use in this section. I specifically requested a projection within the room, rather than to an outside location.

I fell asleep and dreamed that Rob had just come home and had begun to redecorate the room. Though I was surprised to see him, I accepted without question the fact that he was home early and did not realize I was dreaming at this point. Instead, I found the room transformed with spectacular color such as I’d never seen before — brilliant, shimmering, alive and richer than I ever imagined color could be. Everything in the room took on this fantastic other-color life. I felt myself drink it up, absorb it, in a way that’s most difficult to explain. The white walls were replaced by intricate colored wallpaper and drapes of velvet. The colors seemed to have a natural life themselves, glowing from within, throbbing with vitality.

I kept exclaiming about the colors and ran into the next room to see if the effect went through the whole apartment. My image in the bathroom mirror stopped me. I was wearing a lovely headdress of orange and yellow intertwined threads, each one glistening in the golden light that now filled the room. I took it off and examined it, wonderingly, then looked in the mirror again. My own hair shone, each separate hair vigorous and sensuous with color. My skin appeared the same way, giving forth the most subtle tones.

Other adventures followed: Rob disappeared, and I found myself walking along a strange outside corridor, like a public path, only high in the air. Other people passed, all dressed in delightful long flowing trousers and gowns of indescribable colors. Looking down, I saw that I was wearing a beautiful pair of trousers of some clinging, bright material.

The next thing I knew, I was flying above land a good deal south of here because there was no snow, and a Middle-Atlantic-States-type landscape. Many cars were heading north, and there was some commotion at an intersection below. A woman came out of a house nearby to watch. Some kind of a roadblock was set up. I tried to come closer to the ground to see more clearly, but instead was whisked back through the air to Elmira.

I returned to my body and experienced a false awakening in which Rob spoke to me. I couldn’t wait to open my eyes to see what the room looked like and if the colors were still present. Instead, the room was faded by contrast.

“Rob, I had the wildest experience, but unfortunately I’m back now because all that great color is gone,” I said; and I told him what happened. As I finished speaking, something caught my eye — the wallpaper. While it was not as colorful as it had been earlier, neither was it the white painted wall that should have been there.

With this realization I really awoke to the ordinary room and checked the clock. The whole experience took place between 2 P.M., the last time I’d looked at the clock, and 3 P.M. Then I realized that my left hand was completely immobile, folded up and locked tight. There was no feeling in it whatsoever. When I tried to move it, it wouldn’t budge. I decided that it was a muscular rigidity resulting from the projection and waited quietly for several minutes. Then slowly it regained mobility and feeling.

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.

Seth has more to say about hallucinations and objects in Session 287 for September 21, 1966, and perhaps the first part of the following excerpts helps explain my experience. Seth was talking about basic reality in the dream state.

[Here Seth went into some material that was highly interesting to Rob:]

My own most recent projection was very close to home, compared to the possible journeys Seth mentioned in the previous excerpts. Again, it reminded me later of reported sense experience under the influence of drugs. It was most unusual and I’m sure I’ll never forget it.

Last Thursday, May 6, 1971, 1 took an hour nap in the late morning. No suggestions were given. It was another dark day, and the air was full of moisture. I “came to” in Rob’s studio. I was standing before the open window, looking out at the pear tree, but it was the air itself that captured my attention. It was transparent as always but thick as Jell-O.

Astonished, I thrust my hand out the window, and the motion set ripples out, making fairly deep “cracks” near my fingers and more shallow ones farther away. The tree, I saw, was not only held up and supported by its roots deep in the earth, but by the air itself. Why had I ever thought that branches stayed up simply because this was how branches acted? The air itself helped hold them!

I was fully alert and more curious than I can say. Several times I put my hand out as far as it could go and wiggled my fingers. The air stirred, like pudding. There was much greater contrast than usual between the very dark clouds high above and the rest of the air, and colors — dark purple, a greyish white and several green and dark greys — almost appeared like clumps, thick and then thinning.

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.

The experience was so intriguing that I thought of it often in the days following. That Sunday as we were out driving, the idea suddenly struck me that there might be a force coming up from the earth, in opposition to gravity. The two could be part of one phenomena, of course. It could account for the fact that seeds do push up through the earth, not only attracted by the sun but nudged by this force beneath.