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Is it possible for this to happen while asleep? I have never tried to, or read much about it, but I have had quite a few out of body experiences (both sober and under the influence). I ate a hit of LSD a week ago, and I experienced this "falling through myself" right when I went to sleep that night (on the comedown).
I have had this "falling through myself" feeling a few times since then, this week. But what happened this morning was beautiful and crazy. It did not occur during deep sleep as it was the last "dream" I had.
Anyways, I was standing in a field watching the sun set and moon rise. As the stars came out and were shining, I thought about what it would be like to see more. The next thing I know, I went through [the atmosphere?] and ended up outside of earth. I was on the side, because when I looked to my left I could see the moon, and when I looked to my right, a white glow from the sun. I could also see thousands upon thousands of stars. When this happened, I had, physically, the same "falling through" feeling, as well as when I returned. The moment I returned I bolted out of bed.
If this was a dream, this is the most visually detailed and beautiful dream I've ever had. Everything was at peace out there, so silent.
It's always difficult to qualify this type of experience when it happens to someone other than yourself, because all you have to work with is a verbal description. It is difficult to discern between actual astral travel, IRL travel with one of your subtle bodies (OBE, Out of Body Experience), or pure imaginative dreaming that can also be semi-lucid or completely lucid.
I read 'Journeys Out of the Body' by Robert Monroe, and he seems to do it during sleep, and he can't always do it exactly on command. He described that he tried to prove he was experiencing IRL by reading a sheet of numbers in a room next to him or something like this, but it was always difficult to arrive at an indisputable conclusion.
One's memory is extremely deep, and its vastness is often best explored by the unconscious during sleep. Therefore in terms of discerning what kind of experience you have, it's important to verify if things you saw in your experience that you wouldn't otherwise have been aware of IRL actually exist IRL. Often you are just moving through your memory/imagination.
Many experience reports I've come across describe little discrepancies between what was perceived in the experience and what is actually the case IRL, and these always make me suspicious that the experience was nothing more than imagination-driven. However, between purely imaginative semi-lucid or lucid dreaming and actual IRL OBE, there is also astral travel to consider, and here the lines begin to blurr.
It seems to me that everyone perceives the astral in different ways, but I also think there is confusion about the terminology. One of your subtle bodies is your astral body, and I'm not sure if it's this one or another one (or maybe any one among a number) that you disassociate from your physical body with upon legitimate OBEs. However, to me the term astral travel refers to when you are travelling in the astral, not in the physical.
Astral travel certainly requires the interaction between your astral body and the astral plane, but your subtle bodies remain within your physical body all the while. The astral realm is the realm of imagination, but everything that exists in the physical realm also exists in the astral. One example I've read is that the astral realm is a clear glass table, and the physical realm is a tablecloth you put over the table so you can see and use it better.
You can interact with the astral component of anything in the physical realm through your experiential connection with the astral realm, wherein this connection none of your bodies leave your physical body. This is because the astral realm is non-local and timeless while simultaneously infinite in terms of (metaphysical)space and (eternal)time. Entities living exclusively in the astral perceive the passage of time much slower than we do in the physical realm, btw (talk about a virtual hell if you're in some of the lower of the 33 dimensions).
This point can be debated depending on what you consider to be real, but honestly I consider the astral to be less real than the physical realm, albeit just as important in that all realms and dimensions are interconnected and mutually contingent. The astral is more like 'anything goes', and since in the physical realm one's limitations are truly one's power and identity, in the astral it can often seem rather pointless and hellish, devoid of true substantial meaning, especially if you live there without connection to the physical realm.
The astral can seem as real as IRL reality if you choose to or are naturally inclined to perceive it this way, which is equally just as real-seeming as lucid dreaming. The difference between lucid dreaming as a product of imagination and astral travel as a product of imagination is that in the latter your are experiencing beyond your own proper imagination and interacting with the imagination of others, or with other entities such as god-forms, thought-forms, egregors, etc.
This astral interaction, again, happens under a context of non-locality and timelessness. Differentiation in the astral, therefore, is not a matter of distance or time. Everything is simultaneous, and it is the qualitative character of something that separates it from something else; quantity is relative. Take, for example, the order of angels that exist... each angel's mission is unique, and no two angels have the same mission, for then they would be the same angel.
To "travel" in the astral, all you do is focus upon the character of whatever it is you want to interact with. It's chaotic nonesense, really, to just wander aimlessly around, because you are wandering in relativity and there is no path to walk. In other words, then, the astral is not a place for simple entertainment, especially not with drugs like DXM which light you up like a Christmas tree in the astral.
You can use the astral for interacting with other elements of the physical realm or other realms (including the astral itself), from the confines of your own ego (physical body), which is your anchor in infinity in the Eternal Now. Like William Blake said, infinity is in a grain of sand, it is in your pinky toe, in the salt shaker on the table. You can access non-local and timeless Nothing anywhere, anytime. Reality is a hologram.
So, what category do you think your experience falls into?
I think i have experienced what could be described as astral projection.
During a time of extreme psychological and emotional stress, i went to sleep one night after a joint.
After falling asleep, i became conscious of the room, my sleeping surroundings. I had been feeling victimised, which i shant go into, but was enduring a repeated inference from certain parties that i was homosexual. This is only relevant to the first stage of the 'projection'.
As i became conscious of the room whilst (unknowingly, though by the same token, knowingly) sleeping, i heard the 'voices' of my housemate in the room above (an innocent to my endurances but something of an enigma) and his girlfriend. The girlfriends 'voice' was weaker, the housemate's stronger. They were as they would be in a conversation, subject to the same vocal stresses. These voices were most certainly in my head. In fact, in only the right side (or was it left?) of my head/brain/mind. He, Oscar, was listing attractive women in a exacerbated and humourous tone 'Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston...' This was, though heard as spoken, a murmor amidst my mind. There was a small 'crank up' in the as yet redundant side of my mind, before it exploded through a momentary static into a pop of clarity.
I awoke. But not with finality.
This experience, the 'hearing', could have been a conversation i was hearing in a waking state, and i was 'viewing' as though laying on my side with my eyes open.
After the pop, 'i' sat up with a roar of purpose and emotional resonance. From a 'laying on my back position' to a sitting one. The transition from 'side' to 'back' was seamless and unseen.
As what i must presume to be my astral self hit the peak of the tremendous rise from the prone, roaring through the ether (as it seems, as i remember) to meet the seat, to sit up, a vision was flashed into my 'consciousness'. This remained an experience of the dreamscape.
The vision was all encompassing, there was nothing except the vision. It was a girl i knew (and grew to canonise and adore, without ever fulfilling my faithfully tended longings), Zissy, faintly transposed, in expression (a careworn but evasive and uncertain smile) against a crop of stars. I say a crop, but for that flashed vision, or moment, that flight of expression in my third eye, it was everything, and all. The smile was given, and all too soon, though im sure it could be everything and nothing, forever and never, it departed.
I wonder now that perhaps her face was an ideal of my mind, the feminine feature/s, akin to the uncarved block of the tao (perhaps that needs explanation, but it is a feeling more anything) now that she has been joined by a second, who can provoke the wildness of hopeful desire (of joy! ...sorry for all the clauses but this is how it breaks down for me...) in me, my heart, or whatever it is that drives me.
So to make that simpler, i saw an ideal perhaps, embodied (and told as a story) by her. Or envisioned.
I don't know.
I woke up.
So it seemed to happen in 3 stages, oh and this is the uber weird thing, i woke up properly, having seemingly kept 'waking up' in this experience, expecting, from the strength of reception in the latter stages, to find myself laying on my back, the position from which i 'tore' myself. I wasnt. I was on my side. So therefore, i must have been (physically) sleeping on my side all the while. Possibly...
Astral projection maybe, but an incredible experience for the fact it spoke of much to my being at the time, of many feelings and (conceptions). It also, in its strength and strange exciting unusualness, provoked a few other experiences, conscious ones. Journeys amongst the heartmind and the world. But thats probably enough for now, thanks for reading! Longer than i expected it to be...
It was a ardent experience, certainly. Just recalling it now is encouraging me to remember the times around it (yes, all the way up to now!) and to think of writing about them. Funnily enough it will be living them again, in harmony with the now, something this post has just helped me recognise. (I have written of some experiences before, though not enough, it was a very therapeautic and (happy) exercise!)
I have little experience of control of such things. Perhaps it is not entirely impossible.
But this was from somewhere of the ether.
Edit, note: I had been having formative experiences with mushrooms and pretty german girls in the 18 months or so leading up to this point in my timeline life. Btw
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