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Lucid Dream? Astral Projection? Visions of Death??

6 years ago2,086 words

I just had an extremely remarkable experience which may have just been a lucid dream... or maybe something more?

For whatever reason, I've been feeling incredibly tired recently. There are many obvious reasons why - depression, lots of work to do (thankfully finished for the time being, as of Friday, but it's why I've not posted in a while), messed-up sleeping times - but it feels like more than that. Walking to the shops for a few minutes left me out of breath, playing active VR games for a short duration made me feel like I was going to pass out or throw up, even though I could play the same game for much longer only a couple of weeks ago while barely working up a sweat.

Such a thing just happened a couple of hours ago, and I had to go and lie down on my bed because my muscles felt so heavy, I was shaking and I felt lightheaded. I don't know why... I was planning to go to see a doctor about it tomorrow. But I couldn't keep awake, or get up really, so I decided to just rest for a bit, fall asleep.

I was having a lot of hypnagogic hallucinations typical of being on the transition between sleep and wakefulness, and I kept going back and forth between the two, though I don't recall if I had any normal dreams. My thoughts/illusions were especially odd though, and I was worried that there was something wrong with me. I also felt that I couldn't move my body despite trying.

I remembered what I knew about the 'astral body' spoken of by people who claim to be able to do things like astral projection, etc, so I decided to just stand up using that. I felt remarkably calm about it, and I had the bodily sensation of standing despite simultaneously having the less clear bodily sensation of still lying on my bed. I think I walked around my room a bit, before 'waking up' and realising I was still lying on my bed. Or it felt more like one of those recursive wakings-up you might have experienced, where you thought you already had woken up, but wake up for a second time to find yourself in your 'real' body.

Remarkably, the standing up wasn't like some sudden opening of astral eyes to see a vivid image of some other world, as in the previous experience I had that I thought might be astral projection or something like it. Rather, I was very consciously aware that I couldn't really see anything, or that my environment was dark and unclear; I had 'dream eyes' in the sense that a lot wasn't visible to me unless I was focusing on it, or like it was seen as a reflection in dark water. Not vivid or vibrant or all-encompassing, as in real life. It felt very different to the waking world, but then again it was definitely different to dreams, and didn't quite feel like the lucid dreams I've had either.

One of the most interesting things is that I was going around the dream version of my room talking aloud to myself, commenting on things, sensations. Touching things, notably, and they physically felt like they should have. Fabric felt like fabric, wood like wood. I slid my arms along my desk, pushed against it and felt it pushing back. It's rare that I experience touch in dreams, and it's only in lucid dreams. It's never been as clear as that before.

I noticed that my surroundings weren't constant. When I turned away and turned back, things changed. I was in a room full of furniture, beds, sofas, things like that. I touched many of them while commenting, and wondered aloud whether they were all variations of some kind of 'sofa archetype' I had in my mind, or whether they were from memories. I recognised one as belonging to my grandmother, another as coming from my father's house (which I still thought of as 'home', and commented that that was odd). Looking back now, I'm not sure whether they even were from those places. But they might have been? The memories are distant and ambiguous. Hmm.

There was another person there at some point, but he seemed vague and insubstantial; transparently blue, I think. I asked who he was. Casually, he said "Oh, I'm just you" (or something to that effect). Okay. Don't know what that means, and he didn't look like me, though I did sense he was a youngish man. He seemed content to not interfere. Then I noticed another person, a man, who looked and sounded a bit Latino or something. He said that he was called 'Mecca' - or something that sounded like it - and asked me to follow him to get registered or something along those lines. I wondered whether he was actually called 'the Maker', and he laughed. We walked; the room was now suddenly an outside area, and I was looking around with awe. He commented that my 'ability' was unusual - perhaps I wasn't expected to have 'vision' this strong at this point? - and I commented (bashfully) that I could see a castle on a distant hill, could make out the windows on it. Notable, because my dreams pretty much never involve interactions (I'm always a distant observer), and I don't recall them ever saying anything good about myself either! The environment was odd; it felt peaceful, but very 'messy'; there were lots of types of scenery all just bunched together - a chunk of red canyon right next to a round green hill with castles - as if someone had taken a bunch of memories of vistas and clumped them all next to each other. Almost what you might expect to see behind the scenes in a theatre production, with all the backdrops side-by-side.

I asked Mecca whether he was dead. He said yes. I asked when he died, and he said in the fifties (I assumed 1950's, but it could have been any fifties, really). I asked him what he thought of the improvements in technology since his time period... but I don't remember what he said; I think maybe there was a distraction. This bit is annoyingly fuzzy.

I asked him if I was dead. Not with any fear, just curiosity. I could have accepted it if I was. I didn't mind, though there'd been no tunnel of light or anything like that. There's a bit that's unclear - I can't remember what he said - but I remember 'returning' to my body - more like a shift of attention than a journey - and flopping my arms slightly (though they felt paralysed) - reporting to him that I could do so. He said something about how I was in a fetal position - I was - and that I should extend my knees/legs, to ensure that I wasn't dead. I did so... and in doing, I felt like I 'lost the connection' and couldn't return. It wasn't like waking up from a dream; it felt more sudden, and the experience felt more vivid in my mind. With dreams, it's often like you have a vague familiarity of having experienced something without recollection of the details - if you remember anything at all - and you take a few moments to regain your senses, even to realise where you are sometimes. Even with lucid dreams, it feels like some gradual transition through a different state of consciousness before waking up. This felt like going from one state of alert, active awareness to exactly the same one, just with a change of environment and a disappointment that I'd been suddenly cut off. When I got up to go to my computer, I didn't feel any more awake than I did while talking to Mecca.

My guess is that things like lucid dreams and astral projection are similar kinds of consciousness experiences, different to dreams but not massively different to one another. I'm sceptical about having actually witnessed something beyond my own fatigue-addled imagination - though it'd be lovely if I had - but it's noteworthy how I felt afterwards, how I feel now. With lucid dreams, I've enjoyed them to the point of feeling myself laughing aloud as I swoop through the sky while feeling the wind on my face or whatever, and I wake up feeling like a ride is over and I'd like another go, but can't. "That was a nice lucid dream", I think, then get up and get on with my day. With this, I felt like I'd seen something beyond normal experience, and like I absolutely had to get up and write about it here, which I did. While I couldn't even get out of bed earlier, the motivation to report about it surpassed my fatigue. I also remember it quite vividly... or at least as vividly as I'd remember something from the waking world (that is, imperfectly, with many details missing, but still distinctly clearly). Back when I had my other 'astral projection' experience, years ago, I woke up laughing about how taking life seriously is ridiculous, how it's all just some kind of game anyway, and I felt I'd been somewhere other than inside my own mind. I still remember it, years later, or at least how it felt. Maybe this experience will stay with me similarly.

It's notable that lucid dreams tend to happen quite easily if I fall asleep after having already woken up, sometime in the morning. I never have them during the night, but they're not uncommon if I, say, stay awake for a couple of hours before falling back to sleep. That's why I'm wondering whether this experience was no different. And considering my oddly fatigued body and whatever factors are causing me to feel this way, it could have just been the combination of chemicals and sleeping at an unusual time that produced this unusual kind of dream.

It's also worth mentioning sleep paralysis, where vivid conscious experiences occur in your mind while you're unable to move your body. I've had that before, and those experiences have generally been nightmares. It also felt like the psychological aspects of the experience overlapped with the physical world, and the feeling of being locked in the body was a part of it. Like sensing some dark presence sitting on the end of my bed, and feeling powerless to get up and do anything about it. I felt distant from - yet remotely connected to - my body during this experience, though, and it was peaceful and calm throughout. I could also move my nonphysical body freely.

People who have Near-Death Experiences seem to get irritated when people are incredulous about their stories, because they personally know that the subjective experience was so intense, so profoundly different to anything they'd experienced before, that it must have been something special. But since other people don't have access to that experience, it's easy to just dismiss it as delusion, to refer to other conditions - drug trips, for example - which evoke subjectively intense personal experiences that appear to have some kind of deeper truth to them. It's all just brain chemicals, they say, convinced of the material nature of it all, that death is just dust and darkness.

I'd prefer to remain open-minded. This didn't feel like a mere dream, or even a lucid dream, but I doubt that I died, and there are enough dreamlike aspects to it to classify it as some variation of a lucid dream. There's a lot that we don't understand about the mind and the universe, though, and having direct experiences like this is fascinating insight into what we might be blind to in ordinary life.

...Anyway, I've been meaning to post for ages, mostly about negative thoughts and feelings I've been having, but such issues feel insignificant or distant as I write this. Whatever this was, maybe I needed it to snap me out of a funk. Or maybe the effects will be really fleeting, I don't know. I do worry that I'm becoming weirdly frail though; I'll see a doctor about that tomorrow, I think. Also, I've been working on a creative project recently, so I might post about that soon.

Have you ever had any experiences that felt distinctly different to dreams, despite occurring when dreams might and being obviously explainable as such to external observers?