There are some notes I wanted to give you concerning dreams in which you feel certain you are normally awake. When these dreams are unusually vivid, then the ego is aware and participating, but generally it is not using its critical faculties. As you know, you can become critically alert, but when you do so, you realize that you are not in your normal waking condition.
In awake-seeming dreams you are indeed awake, but within a different psychological framework , indeed, within a different framework of reality. You are operating at a high level of awareness, and using the inner senses. 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. The next step, of course, is to allow the ego to awaken its critical faculties while within this state. You are then able to realize that while you are indeed awake as you seem, you are awake while the body is asleep.
When this occurs, you will be able to use your normal abilities in addition to those of the dream condition. You will be certain of your identity, realize that the physical self is sleeping or in dream state and that the inner self is fully awake. This represents a definite increase in the scope of consciousness and a considerable expansion over the usual limitations set by you upon yourself.
Only then can you fully begin to manipulate the conditions that exist and communicate this knowledge that you receive to the ego. For the time, you see, the ego becomes a direct participator in such experience, at least to a degree.
Almost all; of our dream experiences do involve projection of one kind or another. These vary in intensity, type and even duration as any other experience vary. It takes a good deal of training and competence to operate with any real effectiveness within these situations.
All in all, the intellect plays some part, but the intuitional qualities are most important. There are chemical changes, also, that occur with the physical body when projections happen, and electromagnetic variations. These vary according to the form in which the projection occurs.
The projected form does make some impression upon the physical system. It is possible for it to be detected. It is a kind of pseudo-image, materialistically speaking, but it has definite electromagnetic reality and chemical properties. Animals have sensed such apparitions. They react to the chemical properties and build up to the (perception of) the image from these.
These chemical properties are more diffused in such an apparition than in a physical form, however. The chemical composition of a storm, perhaps, will give you an idea of what I mean. They cause small disturbances in the physical system. As a rule, they are not solid, in the same way that clouds are not solid, and yet they have shape and to a certain extent, boundaries and movement. They definitely have a reality, though you cannot usually perceive it with the physical senses.
Perhaps this diffused quality is the important difference(from your point of view) between an apparition and a physical form. There is an atomic structure, but in some ways it is less complete than the physical one. There is always a minute difference in the body’s weight when the individual is projecting.