My first verified projection, in 1998

[Jeff_Mash]

Thanks for posting that account, Patty.  I really found it interesting.  I have probably been projecting just as loing as you, but every time I "get out", instead of doing something scientific, I am still so excited to be FREE that I end up doing stupid crap, like showing off how I can stick my arm through walls!

I did have someone from alt.out-of-body try and get me one time when she was out of body, and although I don't remember the interaction with her, she was able to describe my bedroom in detail.  I thought that was pretty cool in itself.

The only "hit" that I have had (that I can remember offhand) was when I projected from one side of my house into a room near the kitchen, and I heard a couple of men faintly talking in there.  When I returned to the body, I found out that someone was listening  a talk radio station in the kitchen at the time.  But I take things like that with a grain of salt, and I try not to read too much into them.



Keep smiling,

Jeff Mash, Founder and Editor
MyJokeMail.com - Jokes and Humor
http://MyJokeMail.com

[michael]

Hi patty..that was a particularly fascinating account..like yourself I have had a good number of projections and have been fascinated and of course very puzzled by the fluctuations in perception.....that coke tag and can thing is very thought provoking...Ive written a few articles on robert's articles page which deal a little with the strange aspects of perceptions that occur..but Im nowhere near understanding why the symbolic merges with the "real" etc etc..fascinating stuff!please keep trying and comntributing to this aspect of projection..
michael

 

[Patty]

Hi,

Michael, I will have to check the articles page. I would love to check out what you have written.

Based on various authors, but mostly Bruce Moen (a relatively recent contributor to the field), I am of the opinion that I was perceiving the pull tab, but that the perception was somehow filtered through my beliefs or something before an actual memory of the event was stored in my brain. Like I couldn't get a firm handle on the perception, only enough that my brain tried to pull out the closest match that it could - and so my perception was interpreted as a coke can. It's entirely theoretical, but it's the idea that I work with when I get these sorts of results.

Jeff, heh heh - sticking arms through walls is pretty fun! Actually I was reading an account yesterday that was at the other end of the spectrum entirely - the projector was on another planet, having tea with two advanced beings and telepathically communicating ..... The account reinforced to me how personal these experiences can be.

There are so many possible avenues when one projects! They all have value. I often think that I spend too much time focused on proof. The 1998 stuff, the early few projections, were such a new place for me - It is such an amazing experience, really broadens one's appreciation for what it means to have consciousness.  It wasn't til after these, that we started working with a real system of getting evidence that I might actually be separate from my body.  Most of the attempts were too fuzzy ----- I was too preoccupied with all the fluctuation in the experience to hazard a guess. But I have had six experiences over the last few years that I tried to verify afterwards, and five of those were strong hits and the sixth was a partial hit.  More importantly, I see progress in both my success with projecting in the first place, and with figuring out what I am perceiving. I don't think I appreciated the progress until I started to look back at earlier experiences. But still the fluctuations dominate the experience.

Two of the recent verified experiences are posted somewhere on page two or three ("Last night's OBE" and "Three for three on my card experiment").

OBE is a wonderful avenue of human experience.

Patty

[Patty]

I thought I might share this. I haven't had a decent projection in a couple weeks, but I have been meaning to consolidate some of the more meaningful experiences that I have had over the last few years  and so towards that goal...

I faced my fear regarding exit sensations in 1998. I had never had a conscious projection, or even a lucid dream, but I had had some very frightening energetic sensations since 1996, following personal trauma. When I found Monroe's books, I thought the energy sensations might be pre-exit symptoms.

As I have mentioned before, once i decided to try to project (using the 'stay awake as your body falls asleep' idea that I read about somewhere) it took less than a week to succeed. I found myself in the bedroom, in the same location as my body, but clearly not 'in' my body. Whoa. It was so weird.  Completely 'real' but too brief to really check all the systems, you know, I really didn't have time to explore being body-less before my body woke up.

It was convincing enough that I asked my husband to put a note on a high shelf. I wanted to try to read it while out of body. During my second projection, which was every bit as convincing as the first, I found myself standing under the high shelf. It was so eerie (sp?). I was standing there, everything looked completely normal in the bedroom, but eerily grey and hummily quiet. Like there was a buzz that you couldn't hear, only feel, and there was no other noise. Very otherworldly. I stood looking at this shelf, out of body, and thinking - "how the heck am I supposed to get up there???" then I woke up.

I continued to project about once or twice a week following this, but never again have I had the complete sense of being in the physical world but without a body. (that is to say, since then, there have always been strange elements that don't fit the physical world. Like dream fragments or 'thought forms.')  In all of them I would wake up before reading the note. But, the first time I made it to the shelf  - I found an empty coke can. Crumpled, old, empty can. This stuck in my mind because I knew upon waking that it was so ludicrous. There was no way a coke can would have gotten on the shelf. The shelf is built into the house, and it would have meant that someone would have had to throw the can up to this shelf - ten feet off the ground - it made no sense. I was really upset by it, feeling like "If I can't trust what I see, then I am never going to prove to myself that we survive death." (Or something along those lines.)  

After maybe a half dozen attempts to read the note, I told husband that I couldn't read it. It was too dark (something that I thought shouldn't matter before I had any experience) and so we should take the note down and put something that I could identify by feel.

I got a ladder, and climbed up  -  and  on the otherwise empty shelf was a pull-tab from an empty coke can - it had been there for years, covered with dust. Also there was the note, which said "WAKE UP!"  (my husband's idea of a joke.)

I had been convinced that the empty coke can had been entirely a mental construct. Finding a tab from a coke can was so unexpected. It was only a little thing, and it might not mean much - but it was so surprising and rewarding.

(I won't comment on the fact that every time I tried to get to the note, I would 'wake up.'  Grrrr. )

I realized today that I can see progress in my attempts. For instance, I had real difficulty getting to the right spot on the shelf to find the note initially (the pull tab, for instance, was five feet away from the note.) But it occured to me today that this sort of targeting problem doesn't crop up anymore. I seem to get right to where my playing card is set out - no trouble at all. So maybe I will get these reality fluctuations under control, too.

Patty