“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The dream body is the one with which you are most familiar. It has been called the astral body. It strikes you as being physical when you are in it, but you can do things with it that can’t be done ordinarily. You can levitate, for example. As a rule, however, you do not go through walls with this body. This is the body you use for ordinary dreams. Levitation is possible with it but on a limited basis.

Now, when you project from the dream body, consciously you are already outside of the physical one. You have already made the initial change away from physical focus. The mass of valid projections are made from the dreaming body. When the excursion is over, the return to the dream body is made with no strain, you see, for the ego is little concerned. In many such cases, however, the knowledge is not available to the waking self.

Following Seth’s instructions, I was learning to recognize when I was dreaming while I was dreaming, manipulate dream events if I wanted to, leave my body and separate halluncinations from reality.

Without moving my physical body and with my physical eyes closed, I reached over and checked my dream book, finding that the page was blank. Really angry at this self-deception, I decided to get out of bed entirely, go into the living room, turn the light on and make sure that I really wrote the dreams down this time. (When I got out of bed here, I believe that I was in my dream body, without realizing it.)

After projection is accomplished, however, there is a marked decline in chemical activity and hormone action, a drop in body temperature and a drop in blood pressure. The rapid eye movements noted by dream investigators cease entirely. [...] The physical body is in a deep trance state. The trance may also be masked by sleep, if the projection happens from a dream threshold.

In awake-seeming dreams you are indeed awake, but within a different psychological framework, indeed, within a different framework of reality. [...] These enable you to perceive an added depth of dimension which is responsible for the vividness and sense of exhilaration that often occurs within the kind of dream. [...] You are then able to realize that while you are indeed awake as you seem, you are awake while the body is asleep.

(Long pause in a steady, rather fast delivery.) Man’s dream body is still with him, of course, but the physical body now obscures it. The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can—as man quickly found out as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man feared nothing. The dream body does not die. [...] In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

3. At first, as I typed this session from my notes a couple of days later, I thought that Seth had contradicted himself here, for earlier in the session he’d stated that “the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.” Then I came to think that Seth actually meant that man has consciously separated himself from his dream body to a greater degree than other creatures have—that even though those other entities became “physically effective” before man did, they still retain a greater awareness of their dream bodies than man does. [...]

[...] He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him. He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements—a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. [...]

[...] the dreams also provide additional assurance, and while dreaming body states are altered—something physicians of course do not recognize. The existence of Sumari physicians will make sense when we finish our discussion of inward orders of reality and the dream state.

The physicians aid by giving precise overall directions to the body consciousness, simply facilitating healing, and directing energy—they are artists in their field. The body must adjust itself, and is doing so. [...]

The process occurring now began in a dream state, was further accelerated this morning, and further so in the relaxation just before the session. [...] It is also connected with what we were talking about this evening, since the initiation for this particular event was dream oriented.

(9:15.) Now, as you have memory of your waking life and as you retain a large body of such memory for daily physical encounters, and as this fount of memory provides you with a sense of daily continuity, so also does your dreaming self have an equally large body of memory. [...]

A portion of you, therefore, is aware of each and every dream encounter and experience. Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your physical life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned: You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams, so when you look at your dreaming self or consider it, you do so with a highly prejudiced eye, taking it for granted that your “reality” is real, and its reality is illusion.

[...] It is very difficult to admit that you are in many ways more effective and creative in the sleep state than the waking state, and somewhat shattering to admit that the dream body can indeed fly, defying both time and space. It is much easier to pretend that all such experiences are symbolic and not literal, to evolve complicated psychological theories, for example, to explain flying dreams.

You could not afford to identify too completely with such bodies until you learned how to survive within them, so in the dream state (pause) the true processes of life began as these new bodies and earth-tuned consciousnesses saw themselves mentally exercising all portions of the body. Behind all that was the brilliant comprehension and cooperation of all of the units of consciousness that go to compose the body, each adding its own information and specific knowledge to the overall bodily organizations, and each involved in the most intricate fields of relationships, for the miracle of the body’s efficiency is the result of relationships that exist among all of its parts, connecting it to other levels of existence that do not physically appear.

While you and all of the other species were what I have called sleepwalkers, your bodies by then were physically capable. [...] Now, from a waking state, you do not understand how your dream bodies can seem to fly through the air, defy space and even time, converse with strangers and so forth. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Your present technological advances can almost be dated from the [invention of] the printing press, to Edison’s inventions, which were flashes of intuition, dream-inspired. But if what I am telling you is true, then it is obvious that when I say that your physical world originated in the world of dreams, I must mean something far different from the usual definition of dream reality. Again, I could choose another term, but I want to emphasize each person’s intimate contact with that other reality that does occur in what you think of as the state of dreaming (all very intently).

The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course it had set itself upon. [...] In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did. The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man still lingered in that dream reality.

[...] (Pause.) While men had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed or clothed. [...]

[...] Along with Dreams, Jane is back working on If We Live Again and God of Jane. [...]

The dream body is the one with which you are most familiar. It has been called the astral body. It strikes you as being physical, though you can do things with it that you cannot do with your physical body. [...] As a rule you do not go through walls with this body. This is the body that you use for ordinary dreams. [...]

At physical death, after the last reincarnation, then the normal body form is the dream body, and excursions are made from this point, you see. It is possible to suddenly switch from the third form to the dream body, but at a considerable jolt to the consciousness, as a rule. [...]

The mass of valid projections are indeed made from the dreaming body. When the excursion is over the return to the dream body is made with no strain, you see, for the ego is little concerned. [...]

So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives “its own body of physical knowledge,” the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. (Pause.) The body consciousness is not “unconscious,” but for working purposes in your terms, [the body] possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now (underlined), is separated from what you think of as your own normal consciousness. The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness—the part delegated to the body.

[...] First of all you had the inner self, the creative dreaming self—composed, again, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. [...]

[...] The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder—and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.

[...] (Long pause.) At the time of this awakening man did experience, then, some sense of separation from his dream body, and from his own inner reality—the world of his dreams—but he was still far more aware of that subjective existence than you are now.

The practical nature of his own dreams was also more apparent, for again, his dreams sent him precise visions as to where food might be located, for example, and for some centuries there were human migrations of a kind that now you see the geese make. All of those journeys followed literal paths that were given as information in the dream state. [...]

[...] Some of you have physical children as well—but you will all “one day” also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about them for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. [...] All of your dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. [...]

[...] They had pseudoforms—dream bodies, if you prefer—and they could not physically reproduce themselves. Their experience of time was entirely different, and in the beginning the entire earth operated in a kind of dream time. [...]

There may be other terms I could use, in some ways more advantageous than the term, “the dream world.” I am emphasizing this dream connection, however, because the dream state is one familiar to each reader, and it represents your closest touchstone to the kind of subjective reality from which your physical world emerges. The dream state appears chaotic, shadowy, suspicious, or even meaningless, precisely because in life you are so brilliantly focused in daily reality that dreams appear to be staticky objective background noise, left over from when you sleep. [...]

[...] (Pause.) In your terms of time, however, the dream bodies took on physical forms. [...]

[...] What I really think happened is this: I left my body, wandered in my dream body around the County House grounds, went inside, saw the pamphlet, and then made up that dream about it. I know you can dream out-of-body as well as in it. [...]

In following Seth’s dream recall instructions, we found ourselves collecting some excellent examples of precognitive dreams. [...] Still others were so interwoven with other dream material that we just marked them as indicative of precognition and let it go at that. Sometimes dreams that seemed nonsense contained one clear, important image that shortly — within a few days — would appear in a different context entirely. In several cases, two or more future events would be condensed into one dream.

If possible, read your dream records at night, checking them against the day’s happenings. [...] Often, you must learn your own way of handling dream symbolism to make sense of dream. Not every dream is precognitive, nor is there any reason to waste much time with interpretations that seem too nebulous. [...] However, as a few of my own dreams will clearly show, if you do not know the meaning of a symbol, give yourself the suggestion that it will be made clear to you intuitively — thus trust your answer.

[...]

“Seth used Session 909 as a bridge between chapters 6 and 7 in Dreams. This means that now the session serves as a connective—a very effective lure, say—between volumes 1 and 2. Indeed, in retrospect it almost seems as though Seth, that ‘energy personality essence,’ planned it that way! And Jane and I look forward with intense interest to the final version of Dreams, for as always this work will be as revealing and educational for us as it will be for anybody else. I thank each reader for his or her patience in accepting the publication of Dreams in two volumes.”

Some of my descriptive passages in Dreams as I deal with Jane’s personal challenges are harrowing; they strike at the very heart of our fears of illness and disability, and even death, leading us to consciously face those possibilities while at the same time they perfectly mirror our equally profound inner needs and drives. In Dreams I’m presenting the account of Jane’s struggles with her “physical symptoms” in the clearest light I can manage. [...]

[...] In the personal part of this session, then, Seth explained how her very beneficial state of ease “now began in a dream state last night, was further accelerated this morning, and further so in the relaxation just before the session…. The [recent] dreams also provide additional assurance; and while dreaming, body states are altered — something physicians do not recognize.”

You dream, each of you, but there are few great dream artists. Many of the true purposes of dreams¹ have been forgotten, even though those purposes are still being fulfilled. The conscious art of creating, understanding, and using dreams has been largely lost; and the intimate relationship between daily life, world events, and dreams almost completely ignored. The “future” of the species is being worked out in the private and mass dreams of its members, but this also is never considered. The members of some ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians, knew how to be the conscious directors of dream activity, how to delve into various levels of dream reality to the founts of creativity, and they were able to use that source material in their physical world.²

Because you have in the past convinced yourselves that the conscious mind must of necessity be cut off from inner reality, you think that it must be alienated from the dream state. Following such beliefs, you find yourselves thinking of dreaming as chaotic, unreasonable, and as completely divorced from normal conscious direction, purpose, or function. It often seems that sleep is almost a small death, and psychologists have compared dreaming with controlled insanity.⁵ You have so divorced your waking and dreaming experience that it seems you have separate “lives,” and that there is little connection between your waking and dreaming hours. [...]

Dream bodies became physical, and through the use of the senses tuned to physical frequencies—frequencies of such power and allure that they would reach all creatures of every kind, from microbe to elephant, holding them together in a cohesive web of space-and-time alignment.

1. My dream represented a reaffirmation of a stand I’d taken early in this life—one that perhaps I’d felt since birth. Very simply: I dreamed that I was a youth, and that even though there was snow on the ground I’d been given the task of taking care of a beautiful young tree growing in a large field next to the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania. [...] Nearby in the dream were old industrial buildings, in which I became lost—but I found my way out of them and returned to the tree. [...] Jane was inspired by the dream to write a series of excellent short poems about it today.

(9:30.) Now (underlined): When he dreamed—when he dreamed (underlined)—man actually returned to a state prior to waking, from which his physical life itself had emerged—only now he was a new creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other species. In dreams all of the species familiarized themselves with their old affiliations, and they read their own identities in different fashions. [...]