Astral projection questions

Beyond Dreaming
1

I’ve been making some short forays into the astral (Has a different feel to it than normal dreams or lucid ones, hard to explain) after consciously gaining the ability earlier in the year and I’ve got some questions. That, and I’d kind of just like to talk about this stuff with people who know what it’s like. I’m the only one in my peer group who’s been able to experience these things and it gets old realizing that they can’t relate at all. Gets kind of lonely sometimes, y’know? Plus, I’m working on creating a blog to document my experiences as I go so I would be grateful for extra input/opinions as I’m constantly inventing, defining and redefining frameworks to map my experiences in.

Does it get easier to avoid going back to your body?

It seems like if even the thought of my body crosses my mind I get pulled back into it and the adventure time’s over. It’s kind of annoying because I’d like to stay out and explore longer. I’m better at it than I was for a while trips but it’s still the difference between 30 seconds vs 10 minutes of awareness before I slip back into a dream state or slide back to waking.
Have to pee? Back in your body!
Get excited? Back in your body!
Arm falling asleep? Back in your body!
Cold foot? Back in your body!
Remember that you have a body? BACK IN YOUR BODY!
Etc.

I assume it gets easier to stay out with practice or after you venture further? Any tips or tricks from you experienced people on prolonging the experience or should I just be patient and keep practicing?

What’s up with the people/creatures in the astral?

The normal people seem to be oblivious/in a dazed stupor.

There’s lizard people I ran into one time that attacked me and any touch from them is an energy drain. (I think these were actually the forms of a couple friends on that level that I tried to contact)

There’s the glitches. They seem normal until you catch on that they’re talking in loops and usually are trying to sell you something or just keep your attention. A couple have tried to use sex as an attention getter but if you don’t fall for it they start glitching out, repeating the same words over and over and seeming to act like a robot with a logic circuit out. Usually I’ll have weird normal dreams after encountering these things and if I manage to catch on in the encounter there’s weird mutant monster creatures that I manage to turn the seemingly drugged people against. (In the normal dream that is)

I understand that my brain’s translation of what I experience out there is based on my own mind/library of memories but I’ve heard stories about people having conversations with different entities and beings on a regular basis. While I’ve done that once, I seem to attract stuff I don’t really want to focus on. The other time I managed to wander my way to a village I felt like I was the one in the drunken stupor it was so hard to focus. Am I just not quite up to that energy/awareness level yet?

Related to the previous question; how do you find your way around?
From what I’ve experienced so far there’s different layers and I’ve been attempting to keep logs and map it out. What I’ve experienced so far has been;

The black
Seems to be right on the edge of leaving my body. Sort of a transit state before getting sensory feedback.

The fog
Localized areas can be clear but anything on the edge of what you’re paying attention to has a white fog/undefined look to it. This sort of area is where I wound up the few times I’ve tried to experiment with shared dreaming and the friends I did seem to encounter seemed to be reverted to a fight or flight stage and displayed animalistic traits while retaining their energy signatures. (Hard to explain but it feels like them and has a certain color to it) The lizard people I mentioned earlier were located here. I think they were friends but that’s still to be determined.

Physical 2
Sort of like you’re in another body with mixed levels of awareness; from said drunken/high stupor all the way to hyper-aware where things feel more real that in your waking world. This is where I encountered the town and several different types of entities including the glitches. If something really draws your attention here it seems to be related to something you’ll encounter in your waking life shortly after. I think that this might be a part of where precognition abilities are translated from.

Energy
You have no body here, just a being. Things can get INTENSE but that’s not a bad thing. If you can imagine being a swirling ball of color, intent and emotions then you’re scratching the surface. Yet again, it’s hard to describe. Here I’ve encountered other energy beings who seem to have some sort of familiarity to me. An item of note from this state is that time does not seem to work the same way it does here with things usually feeling like you were gone for a while yet only a fraction of that is translated into real time. Not only that but this is the sort of state that can get really weird really fast. More than once I’ve felt a little unhinged after coming back from there and I feel like if I was a little braver it would be possible to “come back” to someone elses’ body or timeline. I was offered once and it gave me the simultaneous perspective of being two different versions of myself that grew up in different worlds complete with two lifetimes worth of memories. I had to pick which set of memories I wanted to retain/which world to come back to and as I returned to my body I shed the other memories as they weren’t possible to retain completely. Left me in a somber mindset wondering what was real for a little bit after that.

So far I have yet to be able to return to the same location twice. Do any of you have a method you use for this or is it just a crapshoot? I seem to be able to pick the local via levels of concentration but the locations within them are seemingly random. In addition is there any knowledge or experience of the body/mind switching phenomena? It made me quite nervous as the longer I waited the harder it was to tell which one I came from. I’d like to know if there’s a way of experiencing that while retaining the memories of where you came from. I aspire to explore but I’m not quite willing to risk who I identify as to go experience another life just yet.

Anyhow, that’s just what’s been concerning me lately. If anyone else has questions I’ll try to answer to the best of my abilities as I just intended this as sort of a “general” thread. Thoughts or comments are welcome too!

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There’s a lot here. Let me offer a few thoughts.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you mention that the images you are seeing are filtered through your minds previous memories/experiences/biases. Think of this non physical realm as one in which you are receiving data of some kind, and your mind has to paint a picture, a metaphorical one. So we are on the same page there. But if you think about it, one challenge associated with what you are trying to do, it that you are creating a reality model, based on YOUR metaphorical translations. Someone else might have similar data arriving to them, but paint a different picture around the experience. Just the nature of the challenge, you know?

Here is what is interesting to me. When you interact with some of these non physical entities, how do you go about doing it? Do you use words? Or telepathy? Or something else? Words are so literal. Telepathy seems to work well for many. For what it’s worth, I am trying to learn to communicate to “my dreamspace” metaphorically. In other words, use actions or items that have symbolic meaning to convey a thought. This seems to be working well thus far.

As far as transporting to a specific location, I think you need to have a really good mental picture and sense of emotions with that space. I can do this quite well to get to places I am familiar with. I do it by entering a portal into voidspace, then feeling for some item I can grab for to pull me into the new scene. I imagine and sense the smells and feel and sounds of the target locale, and use these multiple perceived senses to help create the new scene around me.

3

Yeah, kind of went on a rant there.

That does make a sense, I’ve only got my own translation to work with. Figuring out a model that applies to more than just myself is a whole different ballgame of a challenge. It’d be a fun one though.

As for the non-physical entities. There seems to be different methods of communication and the difficult part is that interactions can take place over long periods of time such as weeks or months. Usually I’ll get a feeling that something’s out of the ordinary and some internal/external ques to pay attention. Messages can be words in response, sensations, pictures, emotions or, in the case of day-to-day coincidences that stack. There’s a sort of telepathy involved for most that requires being able to tell which thoughts/emotions/sensations are mine but it doesn’t have to be. An example of a day-to-day coincidence would asking a question and while it’s in my head and feel my perception pick up a snippet of conversation or see something that answers that question. Seems iffy but there’s a feeling of being pulled towards noticing it that is identifiable. To correspond, if there seems to be a good connection, I can just focus on questions and get responses immediately. If not I might need to clarify my focus, question, or any number of factors. It’s been a trial and error sort of process but keeping a journal has definitely been handy.

Interpreting messages is an issue that takes a bit of trial and error. It can be as simple as binary yes/no replies in the form of sensations but a lot seems to be symbolic which I’m trying to learn how to communicate as well. There’s a lot more room for interpretation with that one though which can get difficult to convey.

It’s funny that you mention your method of travel as that’s actually something I’ve just started to experiment with these last couple of weeks. I have yet to make it to a location via the voidspace method but I’ve found myself in a collection of suspended points and am able to approach one after selecting but I don’t see any difference between them yet or actually been able to enter one. Smell and sound are my least developed senses in that state though so that could have something to do with it.

When you imagine the sense and smells of a target locale do you decide beforehand where you’d like to wind up or do you try to pick the feeling of the place and work from there?