“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you are normally capable of dealing with physical reality, you will encounter no difficulties in alterations of consciousness, or leaving your home station. Be reasonable, however: If you have difficulties in New York City, you are most apt to encounter them in a different form no matter where else you might travel. A change of environment might help clear your head by altering your usual orientation, so that you can see yourself more clearly, and benefit. The same applies when you leave your home station. Here the possible benefits are far greater than in usual life and travel, but you are still yourself. It is impossible not to structure reality in some fashion. Reality implies a structuring.

If you take your own world view with you all of the time, however, as you travel, even in your own world, then you never see the “naked culture.” You are always a tourist, taking your homey paraphernalia with you and afraid to give it up. If you are American or English, or European, then when you visit other areas of the world you stay at cosmopolitan hotels. You always see other cultures through your own eyes.

In your sleep, however, your consciousness slips out of your body and returns to it frequently. You dream when you are out of your body, even as you dream inside it. You may therefore form dream stories about your own out-of-body travel, while your physical image rests soundly in bed. The unknown reality, you see, is not really that mysterious to you. You only pretend that it is. Sometimes you have quite clear perceptions of your journeys, but the actual native territories that you visit are so different from your own world that you try to interpret them as best you can in the light of usual conditions. If you remember such an episode at all it may well seem very confusing, for you will have superimposed your own world view where it does not belong.

(11:16.) In dream travel it is quite possible to journey to other civilizations — those in your past or future, or even to worlds whose reality exists in other probable systems. There is even a kind of “cross-breeding,” for you affect any system of reality with which you have experience. There are no closed realities, only apparent boundaries that seem to separate them.⁶ The more parochial your own world view, however, the less you will recall of their dreams or their activities, or the more distorted your “dream snapshots” will be.

You will, of course, try to snap as good a picture as possible. Varying results can be expected. Some of you will awaken with a dream picture that presents itself immediately. Others may find such a picture suddenly appearing later in the day, in the middle of ordinary activities. If you perform this exercise often, however, many of you will find yourselves able to use the camera consciously even while sleeping, so that it becomes an element of your dream travels; you will be able to bring more and more pictures back with you.

7. See the 710th session for Seth’s material on dreams, and the “snapshots” the conscious mind can learn to take during out-of-body travel.