Dreams and Astral Experiences

As a child, I would often have a hard time differentiating between dreams and real events. I’m still to this day uncertain about some memories as to whether they happened in dreams or in the physical world. This is because many of my dreams during childhood had this quality to them that instinctively told me that they were somehow real.

Colors and contrasts were much sharper than they were in the physical, and the things I could see and do within some dreams, and the sometimes astonishing lucidity in them, made me go to bed early at one stage just so I could have more time to experience the awesome world of dreams. It was like an adventure was waiting for me each night as I went to sleep.

Occasionally, the places I visited in dreams seemed more real than the everyday world itself. This made me wonder about the nature of dreams and reality, and how one could decide what was real.

The occasional intensity of my dreams would gradually diminish as I got older, but when I started to practice techniques for having conscious out-of-body-experiences, the intensity and depth to them that I remember from my childhood would come back, and I saw that their frequency could increase according to the amount of practicing I did.

After I started to try out techniques for astral projection, my first experiences came from waking up in dreams. When I went to sleep I would try techniques like concentration on my heart beats, and would often experience some or several sensations, like feeling light and heavy at the same time, vibrations, and so on.

But instead of projecting into the astral plane directly, I would fall asleep and later wake up in a dream that night. It was wonderful to be able to fly and go through objects, feel things in a more profound way, and just experience a world where there are few limitations as to what we can do.

All of the early astral experiences had the same flavor to them as the intense dreams I’d had as a child. However, I found (and still find) it hard to stay for longer periods in the astral, and wanted to experience a more direct and conscious split from the physical body instead of waking up in dreams all the time.

Fortunately, in this regard I think I received help in one experience that was longer than usual and which provided me with the opportunity to test out a technique taught on the courses that can be used to increase the clarity in the astral. I’ll relate the experience here:

One evening, after being unsuccessful with an astral practice and falling asleep, I remembered unusually many dreams. I woke up at some time in the early morning hours and felt that something wasn’t right. First I thought it was because of the dream I just had before waking up, but I quickly discovered that it was something else.

I could feel my physical body lying on my back in the bed, but for some reason my head was twisted in a 90-degree angle backwards, and I realized that parts of myself (at least my head) was outside of my physical body.

Then, I tried getting up from bed very gently, and struggled a bit to bring the rest of my body with me. It was easy to move the head, but my legs and upper body felt extremely heavy, but I managed to rise from bed and kept my head in this weird-angled position. To my surprise I didn’t land when I took a small jump to check whether I was in the astral. I found myself hovering just beneath the ceiling, and decided to pull my finger just to be sure. It stretched as I did, and I became convinced that this had to be the astral. At that point it felt easier to move, and I was fully out of the body.

My room looked exactly as it normally does, but it was pretty dark as it was night-time and the window was covered. Then I ran towards the window and jumped straight through it into the open air. As I passed through the window, everything outside was pitch-black, like a very dark, thick fog covered everything.

Drifting through this fog, seeing basically just darkness, I decided to try a technique taught on the courses called recitations that can dispel both negative influences and supposedly unclear environments. I knew from previous experiences that it worked against negative entities, but I was curious about whether it worked to clear up a dark environment.

As I was using this technique, the dark fog started to lift a little, enough so that I could see a certain symbolic object amidst the emptiness. Slowly, the fog continued to clear up as I finished the recitation. After this, I started calling a Spiritual Master who I really wanted to meet, and immediately afterwards I was being drawn in a specific direction. I followed and flew towards this pull for some time.

Next thing, all the fog suddenly vanished just like that, and I was in a familiar place which differed a bit from how it is physically. It was crystal-clear, the lucidity being comparable to the physical world, if not greater. The pull started to slow down, and I could intuitively feel that I was close to the one who was generating this pull. A very gentle feeling of peace suddenly appeared, and seemed to slowly increase as I got closer to the pull. Unfortunately, I got too distracted at this point as I heard some physical noise, and suddenly found myself back in bed, physically awake.

Even though I didn’t get further with this experience, it was very motivational and encouraged me to keep practicing. Nearly all of my astral experiences have been relatively short, but some of them have left a deep impact and a want to investigate further, like the one described here.

Most importantly, being in the astral consciously has showed me that there is more to life than what we physically perceive, and that we can personally investigate the mysteries of life and have paranormal experiences if we just practice. Knowing this, the sense of going into a new adventure each day has returned, and has made my life much more interesting.

~ Knut
Norway