Experience #1: I went from meditation -> trance -> vibes -> feeling out of my body but everything was black. Finally after trying for a while I "opened my eyes" to find myself on a foreign planet in a very dream like setting, not even close to reality. Spent a short minute there before I accidentally woke up.
Experience #2+3: I woke up in the middle of the night to meditate, and upon doing breathing exercises for a short time I found that I had pretty much lost consciousness but did retain some self-awareness. Then out of the blue I had some very light vibes and I found myself in a dream where a group of us had to go do some stuff in a futuristic haunted house. I feel like I was aware, but not enough to control the dream, just what I did in it. We got chased by a demon of sorts so I had us all return to our bodies. From there, I woke up inside another dream where we were in a futuristic place and I was sitting there "in my body". I looked at one of my buddys and said "I am going back in there". I meditated in the dream and felt the trance and even some light vibes as I projected back into the haunted house. I was there for a while and now that I think about it I must have just fallen asleep somewhere along the lines. When I woke up for real I barely remembered all of this. And mixed into all that was some stuff that was definitely plain old dreaming, no consciousness.
Is this what AP is like? Or is this more along the lines of LD? It had barely any semblance of reality and I never found myself near my real body. I also felt like although I knew I was dreaming, I didn't "know" that enough to do a whole lot about it. Occasionally in there I was just regular dreaming.
What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions for a real AP experience?
Experience 1 sounds like an AP. I'm finding 2+3 hard to identify... if you had waking awareness and full cognition it was most likely a AP. If not you probably just had a vivid dream or if you knew you were dreaming (you didn't specify this point) an LD.
Meditate daily in combination with the early morning wake up routine... this gets me to the vibes every time.
Thanks for the tips! I'll keep at it, it seems like it'll be rewarding in the end!