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Mydral, consciousness can be split ; it is not exclusive to just one "body." See Robert Bruce's mind split, for example...

When we get hurt, we have a tendency to put our hand over the wound, and it suddenly hurts less... When we hurt ourselves it also hurts less than when someone else does it. For example, if you've got a splinter in your foot and try to get it out with a needle, you'll be able to withstand the pain much better than if someone else does it for you. I'm not sure why that is, but I think it's the same for everyone ; is that what you're talking about?

As for dreams, use that "thinking on its own" as a springboard for projection. What you want to do is start thinking of a situation consciously until the subconscious mind takes it over. Once that happens you'll start perceiving images and sounds from your thoughts as if you were there. Overall it should take about 20 minutes... The very basic theory behind it is that there is a physical mind in the brain and a non-physical mind. The only mind you have control over while awake is the physical one, and the only one that can dream or experience a projection is the non-physical one. By pretending that you are in a fictional place for several minutes, you can "fool" the subconscious mind into thinking that it is actually in that place, and you will ultimately enter the fictional place. Once you are stable in that fictional place, you can go to the next step and project your consciousness out of body and fly out. Most projection techniques you'll find are based on this principle.

Essentially, our thoughts are very faint dreams. As we fall asleep, we'll experience hypnagogic imagery (pictures and sounds) which originates in our thoughts rather than our physical perceptions. When you go even deeper, you get full-fledged dreams. Out of body experiences and lucid dreams are simply experiences in which the non-physical subconscious mind does exactly what the conscious mind wants it to do ; to such a degree that there is real-time awareness of the present moment like in waking consciousness.

The problem is, the subconscious mind does not work the same way as the conscious one... Memory, movement, decision making, communication... They're all different in the spirit world, and so you have to make the subconscious simulate physical consciousness, otherwise you won't be able to perceive or remember anything.

A person who can feel other people's feelings is an empath.

The way you explain things is interesting because I've felt similar things. "Theorizing" in your head is an interesting form of conversation. You're all alone in your head, apparently, yet you somehow use your brain so much you start to feel like you're having a conversation with yourself, or even with another person, using non verbal communication.

This is technically similar to schizophrenia, and I'm starting to think that there's "good schizo" and "bad schizo" -- I've seen quite a few reports of skilled astral projectors being able to have non-verbal communication with another part of themselves. The "inner voice" Robert Peterson mentions, for example, or the "internal language" Eric Pepin describes in the Handbook of the Navigator, are good examples of "good schizophrenia". You are aware of multiple personalities or identities within your own mind, yet you do not suffer from it, you actually benefit.

The basic idea is that a part of your mind is responsible for things such as intuition, inspiration, etc... You receive data from a higher intelligence, from yourself. By constantly using your brain and theorizing, you are getting in touch with this higher part, so you train your intuition and inspiration. Sometimes, as you're reflecting on something, you'll find that certain ideas seem to come out of nowhere.

The great part about this is that you get kind of a boost in confidence. You learn to listen to yourself, you trust yourself, and then suddenly things around you start going better, you get interesting coincidences, small precognitive events that can't be proven. I'm pretty sure it's the beginning of some kind of extra-sensory power, something that inventors, geniuses like Einstein or Edison discovered on their own. The more you "talk with yourself," the closer you bring yourself to your mind's full potential.


And overall, I think all the "higher knowledge" we acquire by knowing about things such as astral projection is beneficial to the way we think and handle life. We learn to be less troubled emotionally, to lose fear, etc... I feel that I'm a lot more stable now than I was a year ago, it's much easier to look at life on the bright side and help people realize that they're not actually suffering from their problems, but from the way they blow things out of proportion. When you firmly believe in life after death and reincarnation, even the most serious problems will seem like tiny pebbles on your path...

I think the first one is highly unlikely, i don't know of anybody that would go to that kind of trouble just to make up a story.

What kind of trouble? Taking mushrooms and writing 3 pages of text? Think about it... The internet is full of people looking for attention, I don't find #1 that unlikely...

Also, remember that 2012 is taking more and more importance, it's the next "end of the world" -- it's possible that a lot of disaster scenarios picked up by psychics are actually just people's fears... As we get closer and closer to the date, more and more people will learn about it, and stress levels will go up. The collective consciousness will progressively get filled up with all this emotional energy from thousands of people, and when you try to predict what's going to happen that year, you mainly pick up that radiation.

So indeed, what he says is believable, but there's really no telling whether it's the truth...

Ahhh the sun's gonna explode! :O

That type of experience is something I have trouble wrapping my head around.. When you know you're out of body but not yet projected, you're all stiff, crippled by sleep paralysis, hearing crazy rumbling sounds, vibrating and whatnot... But when you don't know, you can just waltz right out of bed and it'll be like nothing happened... :O

Well, now I have another problem.. This happened 2 days in a row...

The first time, it got me by surprise, I had written 5 lines about the dream, I clearly remembered doing it. When I got up, though, I realized the page was blank! I had dreamt the whole thing down to every last detail... Getting a pen, getting paper, writing it down, and going back to sleep!

The second time, though, I was prepared. So I got my pen, got my paper, started writing... Then, I thought something was weird... "How come I can see the paper even though my face is buried in the pillow?" So I start reading over what I had written on the paper... And the page is blank! That's when I realized I wasn't writing, I was just drooling on my pillow and having visions of me writing things down!

So I give it a second try... Same result... Still a blank page, still a dream...

So I give it a third try... This time I open my eyes, I sit down in bed, write down the dream.... And go back to sleep.

Well, son of a ?&%$! The page is completely blank! How am I supposed to record my dreams if this keeps happening?

I can fly, shoot lasers out of my eyes and control the weather. I can transform anything into gold merely by touching it. I can throw a rock 500 miles away. I can read people's minds and see auras. I can talk to animals.

You'll have to take my word for it, because despites all my amazing powers, I am absolutely unable to locate a video camera. As a matter of fact, cameras are my kryptonite.

Sorry.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I present to you my latest partial attempt at formulating a Universally Accepted Model (tm) for the non-physical universe. I'll be honest with you, this is what makes the most sense in my mind after reading about a million and a half books on the subject, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's accurate or "true." Oh yeah, and I hope it'll make sense, 'cause it's late at night and I'm just not that good at explaining 

Here's a diagram:



At the root, we are a blob of timeless, formless, sizeless thought energy that we like to call "the higher self". Inside this blob, we as persons are a subset of this thought energy. We are a sub-blob that contains our thoughts, our memory, everything that defines our identity. Within this sub-blob are all of our different focuses of consciousness, including waking consciousness.

Now, thought energy is vibrating, intangible, inexistant "stuff" that carries data. A memory of the word "tree" is an encoded blob of thought energy inside our consciousness that carries links to other blobs of thought energy that define it. The defining blobs could be things like memories created by a being after seeing a tree, memories created by a being after reading the definition for "tree" in the dictionary, all the expectations of what a tree should be in that person's mind, etc. Thought forms within a person's "blob" are all interconnected in some way. When you have a loss of memory, you actually have lost the link to the memories you were trying to access, but the memories are still there, intact, as thoughtforms, somewhere inside your "blob." Through altered states, it is possible to look beyond the confines of physical memory and retrieve lost memories from the blob.

The environment these giant blobs of thought energy we call higher selves are located in, that's what we call The Astral Plane.

An Astral Realm is a set of interconnected thoughtforms within one of these blobs.

I took Astral Pulse Island as an example in the diagram. Adrian, who is a subset of his higher self, and a subset of All There Is, one day decided to create a subjective Astral Realm that he named Astral Pulse Island, within his own consciousness. In this case, it was very much a "Dreamscape" ; a fictional place that existed only in his mind. The thoughtforms inside this Realm are an island, a pyramid, water, the sky, palm trees, etc. Adrian then gave other people the directions to this Astral Realm so they could visit it.

When a person decides to visit Astral Pulse Island, all they have to do is locate Adrian's creation, stretch their blobby appendages and connect with it.

In much the same way, our physical universe is an Astral Realm within what we like to call The Creator. The Creator owns all atoms, particles, our physical bodies, the emptiness between atoms, etc. The creator was particularly clever in that his Astral Realm is not made of concepts. Each atom is actually made of persistent little heart-shaped balls of energy. We are not our physical bodies, we are a blob in another dimension that is remote controlling a physical body, you dig? What we really are in this plane is an etheric body, a blob of energy that is capable of sending energetic impulses into physical matter. The etheric body is responsible for the exchange of information between the physical body and the mind. In energy work, telekinesis, "soul healing," we learn to direct energy outside of just the brain in order to alter physical reality.

The Astral Plane is a large mass of thought energy containing many fragmented subsets that like to call themselves identities. Each subset has an infinite size and can contain many interconnected thoughtforms. Your own mind, I'm sure, contains many worlds of your creation.

So when you visit the Astral Plane, what you are visiting is a subset of your consciousness. You may decide to visit or suddenly find yourself in an Astral Realm that was not created by you. This is extremely rare, usually there is a reason behind it. What happens is that you make your own personal blob, your consciousness, intersect with another entity's consciousness and access a set of thoughtforms. That realm may be as tangible as the physical world, especially if it was created by a human being. It could also be "weak" and be shaped mostly by your mind if the entity that created it did not put much energy into making it stable, or if it has nothing to do with physical consciousness.

Let's say you find yourself in an Astral Realm where all the beings are red balls that talk to each other solely using muscal tones. You may very well see them as people having conversations. They'll see you as a big red ball that has an unusual way of beeping 440 Hz to say hello, and neither party will know how different they are from each other!

The Astral Plane is all about how you use your thoughtforms to relate and connect to other thoughtforms in the universe. The Astral Projection experience is in many aspects like a dream, because a plain old dream also happens to be a weird thought form salad.



Anyway, I'm off to detach my blob from my physical body and intersect with other parts of All There Is. See ya.

Kiwibonga -- I notice that this is the exact method I use for people I know and it works perfectly. But if I don't know the person (meaning I've never physically met them) then this approach doesn't always work. In fact it rarely works.

True, but it's not like there's any other way

Yeah, the way I see it is you have to let go of the physical brain and shift into another layer of the mind.

The physical brain cannot travel dimensionally, but other parts of your consciousness can. You cannot separate fully without a small break in consciousness, at least definitely not as a beginner. You have to "go under" for a few seconds, and then you wake up in dream world.

You basically invite the subconscious mind to become active while you are still in control of the physical brain. As you slowly start seeing more and more images, you transfer a part of your consciousness to the subconscious side, and you let the physical brain go idle. After a while, you'll realize that you've gained a first person point of view in the imaginary scenario.

The problem is we are too used to doing this when we go to sleep, that's why it's important to put strong intention into it, to actively control that layer of the mind that is external to the physical brain. After practicing it for a few nights, it'll become easier.

RigVeda, visualize his picture, think of everything he stands for until you have a clear "signal" ; stretch, pull. You'll find him.

XENUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!

Hrmm... Too bad it's 60 bucks... For a book of nearly biblical proportions, it's not surprising, but still... I guess I'll buy it when I win the lottery or something...

I've got quite a nice collection of books about astral projection, and I have to say so far the one book that has turned out to have the best techniques for me was the only one I don't have in paper form -- Robert Peterson's free online book, OBEs: How to have them and what to expect (http://www.robertpeterson.org/)

Ultimately though, message boards are one of the best resources out there, they not only contain practical advice but also allow you to ask questions. This is particularly important because what will get you out of body is probably not techniques from books, but a technique of your own created from everything you've read and understood about out of body experiences.

Isn't it the study that gets linked by a newbie every month?

I've been using that exact technique for the past couple of weeks and I had some great results. It's actually quite a striking coincidence that you posted this now of all times!

2 weeks ago, I imagined myself walking out of my room and out the door, into my apartment building's hall. I talked about this in one of Skippy's threads, it produced an eerie lucid dream.

This week, I lied down, I needed to go to the bathroom but I was too tired to get up, I had been working a lot and I was just exhausted. I kept thinking "get up and go to the bathroom, you idiot!" I suddenly found myself in class. I looked at the teacher and telepathically told her "I'm going to the bathroom," she sent back an "Ok, we'll still be there when you come back!" So I exit the room, walk towards the university's bathroom, get in front of a urinal. I look behind me and suddenly notice that there's guitars everywhere. Guitars of all shapes and sizes on the bathroom floor. I exit the bathroom and realize there's guitars everywhere in the hall as well. "Is this a dream??" -- I wake up.

The next day, images started coming to me as I drifted to sleep, so I concentrated on them. I had been designing a website with rather dark colors for the past few days, and the design came into my vision, overlapping with a shadowy landscape. It became stronger and stronger until I was in the landscape. It was a beach, there were heavy clouds blocking the sun. I was sitting on a trampoline and there was a boat. The landscape was very dark and difficult to see, my mind wasn't too fresh either, I could still see the darkness behind my closed eyelids, so I didn't manage to stay in for too long. Suddenly, I found myself in my room with open eyes, and realized I was in sleep paralysis with astral vision. I tried to leave my body, but I was too  awake. I got up, left the room, and lost consciousness. I had actually projected for a minute there! This continued into another lucid dream where I watched my brother play the sequel to a video game that doesn't actually exist

The next day (yesterday), I watched an anime before going to bed. I kept thinking of it as I was falling asleep, and eventually became part of it. I was in the cartoon, creating my own episode! I woke up with a very heavy body... Sleep paralysis again.. I didn't manage to project that time, there was too much noise in the house and I woke up fully.

In the end, it pretty much qualifies as "phasing," but it's slightly different from the usual "wait for lights to appear" approach. There's a prerequisite, and that is above average dream recall. If your dream recall isn't top notch, you'll have a lot of trouble processing what happened.

I found that repetition and persistence, in the end, are what allows these episodes to happen. When you think of a situation while lying down, it will automatically take over. It's all about staying the course and not thinking of anything else until you are there.

"Don't do anything special" is indeed good advice -- when projecting, we take the exact same path as the one we take for regular sleep, there's always a "dream part" somewhere along the way, either in the form of hypnogogic imagery, a dream, or a lucid dream. The one difference with falling asleep normally is that you start out in control, and finish still in control. It's remarkably simple, yet not that obvious!

Just consciously act out a scenario, learn not to mentally process things, "just do it" without thinking "I'm doing it" and let it take over.

Something interesting about this method is how you not only pick your dreams, you also observe your mind picking the dreams for you... There's definitely a selection process going on, the "peak emotional event" of the day always makes it there somehow.

I meant street corner and date ; don't be afraid to look for something specific, if you are truly being "sent signals" you shouldn't have any problem finding them!

Crimson Tears, try to identify the place and time if you can... Perhaps this is an incident you need to prevent!

"Ask and you shall receive" ; isn't that in the Bible?

You can visit "God" if you just ask. I have yet to see a limit to the possibilities...

I agree about not doing it for hours -- if you've been lying there for 30 minutes and still haven't started drifting into an altered state, you're probably too concentrated on the physical. The only way to fail that is beneficial is to fall asleep completely, otherwise you're not going deep enough, and that's not really good practice.

I voted yes, but I don't think they make a difference for beginners -- they don't replace the basics of meditation, etc, which are enough to have an OBE.

I've got a dream recall problem...

Usually, I wake up without any memory of dreams, I get up from bed, and a few minutes later it hits me ; I "connect" and remember some elements.

Take last night for example. I had three long dreams:

- I was in an apartment building, there was something about a single mom and her baby. For a moment I was flying outside and looking down at the building.
- I visited my brother's school, and there was "school spirit stuff" on display in the halls. A woman asked me for my school ID and when I said I didn't have one, she laughed at my face. I put my bags and coat somewhere in the hallway. A parent who was visiting too looked at my stuff, and said "what the hell does this have to do with school spirit?" He took my stuff and threw it, then we started yelling at each other.
- I was part of a vampire hunting clan of some sort. I remember two "hunts" but I know there were more of them. We had a book about vampires with descriptions of the characters we had to eliminate. Someone was always with me, explaining what to do, but that person was invisible.

Anyway, when I retrieve a memory of a dream, I have this "single connection" that takes place. I "pick" one event, or one series of events in particular which I know to be part of a much bigger dream.

Let's say this is the dream's timeline when I suddenly realize "oh yeah, I did have a dream":

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP

If I connect with "event G," I'll lose the memory of events A through F, and unless H and the rest are the logical sequels to G, those will disappear as well.

What happens is I remember the whole dream at once, "pick" a moment in it to mentally process, and by the time I'm done reprocessing it, I lose the ability to make links to other events.

My dreams are just too long to remember the whole thing consciously -- I am conscious of these parts I am missing, but I cannot access them all, because as soon as I concentrate on one part, all the other ones disappear (even though they were more or less fresh in my memory seconds before)!

It's like there's this short term memory waiting to be downloaded, and once I download a chunk to long term memory and try to relive the rest, I reach a wall, because the "memory bank" I'm reading from only contains what I downloaded and not what's really in there.

Somehow, I feel that in order to recall the whole dream, I need to avoid downloading the dream ; instead I should be accessing it from an altered state and find another way to store memory that won't destroy dream pieces.

Any thoughts? Similar problems? Solutions?

If you remain in the mindset that a person is one entity in one place at one given time, then probably not...

But what is a person? It's an identity with characteristics, moods, memories, etc.. Even if the person does not consciously experience your visit, it does not mean that you have not visited them.

Let me give you an example... I visited my grandfather in my second OBE. I still don't know for sure if I did visit him or whether that was simply an illusion. But if I do visit him "for real" later on, and ask him "do you remember that time in March where I visited you? Was that really you or a dream?" ; the answer is not important, because the simple fact that I have this memory of visiting him means that it really happened, and most likely he knows about this visit, regardless of whether it was "really him" or an astral echo.

A thought towards a particular person always has an energetic effect ; even if you have "fake encounters," they are not necessarily a one way thing, they always reach their destination.

So the encounter may not be real, but its "energetic effect" is still valid. As usual, don't take your experiences at face value, but do not dismiss them as delusions or illusions either -- reality is only this strict in the physical, and that's not where deceased persons live!

Astral experiences tend to create more questions than answers, but in time you will know.

It's a bit like writing Santa... Even if he doesn't exist, you still get presents, you know what I mean?

Yeah, pretty sure that's what they got the name from.

From a more esoteric standpoint, our consciousness is out of body during the whole night, doing "work" (varying from self-help to helping others, to energetic work that we can barely understand as humans) and comes back to "check on the physical" in cycles. Dreams are basically the brain's interpretation of the work that was done, which is completely different from the actual experience. With phasing and projection, you basically bring your physical consciousness out, so you perceive things in real time and there are far less distortions.