“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now this honorary guard is made up of people in your terms both living and dead. Those who are living in your system of reality perform these activities in an “out-of-body” experience while the physical body sleeps. They are familiar with the projection of consciousness, with the sensations involved, and they help orient those who will not be returning to the physical body.

Now consciousness as you know it is used to these brief gaps of physical nonexistence mentioned earlier. Longer gaps disorient it to varying degrees, but these are not unusual. When the physical body sleeps, consciousness often leaves the physical system for fairly long periods, in your terms. But because the consciousness is not in the normally physically awake state, it is not aware of these gaps and is relatively unconcerned.

(10:50.) If consciousness vacated the body for the same amount of time from a normally physically awake state, it would consider itself dead, for it could not rationalize the gap of dimension and experience. Therefore in the sleep state, each of you have undergone — to some degree — the same kind of absence of consciousness from physical reality that you experience during death.