nuttynutskin
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 15, 2011
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Basically what the title say. Has anyone successfully done astral projection? Any tips for someone interested? What were your experiences like?
When I was a kid I used to try, I got this book called 'Rune Magic" that described a process for astral traveling to various realms of Nordic gods. Never managed to do anything. It's something I'm curious about, but never really gotten into too much. I could believe it's all imagination, except that there are various accounts of people who have died or been very near death experiencing it, rising out of their bodies and observing things happening in the room that they could only have known if they actually saw it, but were lying there comatose or dead at the time.
@nuttynutskin Would you like me to move this to P&S? I think you'd probably get more replies there.
I really want to be able to get there, Foreigner. Thanks for the post, it was informative. I have experienced sleep paralysis a handful of times but it's only been when my serotonin was depleted (after several days in a row of MDMA or AMT). I was never able to get past the fear, but once I broke the paralysis and fell back to sleep I would have the most insanely vivid dreams.. I have never had sleep paralysis besides in that state, but I have gotten a lot better/more lucid at dreaming, so I think if I were to experience it again, I'd be able to banish the fear and see where it takes me. But I can't trigger sleep paralysis, no idea how to do that.
Then you can maybe make choices. At first, you may get excited by the realization and wake up
Splitting up your sleep into several phases at night is a good way to astral project.
Sometimes I end up in the astral through no apparent effort or reason. I am just dreaming and then suddenly I am in my bedroom. It takes a second to realize I'm not actually sleep walking but just out of body.
One of my cats usually wakes me up right as the sun is just starting to come up, and then I sleep lightly for another couple of hours, and this is when I always have my most vivid dreams.
Every time in my life (except once when I was trapped in what seemed to be an alternate reality where I was insane and had imagined my whole life - this was during serotonin depletion after sleep paralysis) that I have realized I was dreaming while dreaming, I have started to wake up, I can't seem to stop it yet. Sometimes I'll start to manipulate my surroundings, one time I told myself "I am going to fly now" and started to soar, but it got less and less immersive until I was aware I was laying in bed and just imagining the sensation of flying.
As I've gotten older I sleep a lot less deeply and I think this has a lot to do with my dreams getting more vivid. One of my cats usually wakes me up right as the sun is just starting to come up, and then I sleep lightly for another couple of hours, and this is when I always have my most vivid dreams. A recent period where I was tapering/withdrawing from phenibut and was comfortable at night but had pretty bad insomnia was the most intense and vivid dreaming period of my life because I was waking up or almost waking up a bunch of times.
Actually this happens to me a lot but I basically always believe I have actually woken up. I will go do relatively normal things, and then wake up again, but sometimes I'm still not actually awake, like the movie Inception except really ordinary (usually). Somehow I will be aware I had been dreaming and had been fooled, but will not stop to consider that maybe I'm still dreaming, until I actually do wake up, then I will think to myself "I wonder if I'm still dreaming and will wake up again", and that lets me know I am actually awake.
The first one was around 8am in the morning when i attempted it and i floated out of my body walked around my house woke up and everybody was in the same locations doing the same chores
I have to say that this was very helpful to me. Thank you. I have experienced sleep paralysis ever since I was probably 17 or 19. Prior to finding your post here I decided to check the Bluelight forum because of a dream I had, I posted in another thread, where I had once again found myself sleep paralyzed. Over the years I've become accustomed to it so it's not something that freaks me out anymore. Although the first time it occurred was especially freaky, I'd rather not talk about that. In this recent dream, however, I found myself in my own bed and was unable to move until I realized that wanting to place my hands and arms in certain positions rendered them (somehow) immediately there. So I had spent what felt like a great deal of time rearranging the positions of my arms before I finally wound up in front of the wall next to my closet, but there were no pictures like there usually are. I felt this strange sensation and I realized it was an OBE occurring. I also realized the OBE was related to my spirit guide, a nine-tailed spirit fox. HAHAHA. It just makes me crack up thinking about how I spent the next section of time within the dream kind of rocking back and forth without totally realizing what I was doing before being plummeted into the Foxes' territory. I guess if I had found your post here earlier I would have had a better understanding of what to do. But I like these synchronicities and how they occur because like you said here with "experience" that's primarily what it was. The experience was important as was the lesson that you provided in your post.Yes I've done it many times. At first by accident and then later at will.
The first time I ever did it was through the sleep paralysis state. When most people experience that, they struggle to try and move. Instead, you should just think of where it is you want to go, and then suddenly you'll be there. But it's hard at first because usually SP triggers a lot of fear. However, the key thing about SP is that the mind is awake while the body is asleep, which is essentially what astral projection is. During SP, you are already in the astral, you just haven't stepped outside of your body. This was how I first discovered astral projection.
My early experiences were very disorienting. In the astral, you can see in the 360 degrees because you don't have physical eyes. You can also go anywhere you want instantly, but the problem is that if you think of more than one place at a time, you'll bounce all over the place really jaggedly. In my early experiences, I wasn't fully aware I was astral projecting until after I woke up. I would visit my parents' bedroom and watch them while they were sleeping, not realizing I was doing it... but because they were my parents and I felt close to them, it was only natural to go to them. I often slept in their bed anyway, so visiting them in the astral was just an extension of that.
The usual way that I enter it now is through the dream state. Once I realize I'm dreaming I decide to leave the dream and then I'm just out of my body. It took many years to be able to recognize when I am dreaming and make conscious choices, all without waking myself up accidentally. The dream state and the astral state are basically the same, though they exist on a spectrum. A lot of times, people are in the astral but the dream state is overlaid as a projection, or perhaps a coping mechanism, so the mind can interpret what it is seeing. I say coping mechanism because most modern people can't handle the experience of their consciousness being separate from their body, so they need the dream construct to safely process the astral experience.
Some dreams are just dreams (mundane physical brain processes), while other times they have a very particular flavour that lets you know they're astral... like really vivid colours, bright lights, and an other worldly quality. That's what I mean by a spectrum... the dream state and the astral state can be blurred together in varying degrees. Sometimes you are 90% seeing the astral but there are some dream projections/characters floating around. Other times you're 90% dreaming but you get brief little windows into the astral, but you can't maintain the clarity and the subconscious dream forms take over again. Sometimes it's totally one, or the other.
If you can recognize that you're dreaming, then you can decide to leave the dream. Once you decide, the dream projection will dissolve and you'll be able to see the astral clearly. It's not always possible. If I'm genuinely tired then I may not be able to enter the astral even if I want to because my physical body needs rest... so the dream construct will pull me back in.
Theosophists call the dream layer the causal level, or the emotional level. Most humans enter the astral through the causal plane of consciousness. It relates to the third chakra. In Daoism, the liver is the one organ whose soul can detach and travel separately, called the hun or ethereal soul. The liver system is part of the third chakra. According to the ancient philosophies, there is a part of us that does not wish to remain confined to a human body and needs to leave to travel even while we are alive. This is usually done through the dream/astral state.