Out-of-Body
Descent Into Dreaming
Last night me and my wife got up at 3am to try and have out of body experiences. We usually do this once a week.
My goal for this session was relaxed awareness.
I’m really interested in this idea of relaxation… what does that even mean, and what is mechanically happening? It’s like the mind, by default, tries and grasps really hard at things. It projects expectations and wants to control. Relaxation is a sort of surrender.
But relaxation alone isn’t enough. If you only relax, you’ll probably just fall asleep. Maintaining awareness, without force, without the desire to control, while relaxing, is key. Or at least, that was my goal.
And it worked! After about 2 hours I found I was able to leave my body.
I experienced whooshing, which is very typical for me. My vision is black when I experience whooshing, so even though it feels like I’m zooming through the air, I wondered if maybe I was standing still, and air was being whooshed into me instead, giving the illusion of movement. I’m not sure.
After the whooshing, my vision started to come in, but just barely. I heard a scary voice from the corner of the room. It said something spooky, but I don’t remember the exact words. My response was to laugh it off. Scary voices don’t really bother me at this point, I have heard a lot of silly things over the years.
I floated towards the door, and my vision was becoming more clear. I looked down at my feet, and saw myself floating about a foot off the ground, as I glided down the hallway.
I went to my wife, who was on the couch. I inspected the blankets she was using. I thought if I could remember a specific detail, it might be interesting to check later. She had four blankets, layered – I memorized the blanket colors, in order: gray, blue, gray, blue. (Later, we talked, and this was incorrect.)
I thought: now what? Maybe I could try contacting my Dad. He lives about an hour away. I closed my eyes, and tried to teleport to his house. Nothing happened. For the record, I have never done this before, so I was curious if it would actually work.
I thought maybe I could “haunt” him as a little joke, that maybe he would tell me later he saw something. But I couldn’t figure out how to leave our house.
I thought I could use the GPS on my phone. So I went back in the bedroom and got my phone, and started pulling up different apps.
I will spare you the details, but by now you will probably see that obviously what I was doing had no relation to the real world.
This happens to me a lot when I stay out of body for longer than a couple minutes. Either I snap back into my body, or the experience slowly gets more and more ridiculous, as I descend into what feels like a dream.
It’s a bit frustrating… my consciousness doesn’t break from the moments prior to leaving my body, when I am inside my own head. It’s not like I black out, and find myself in a dream world.
Instead, I get out, see the bedroom accurately (I think), and start going on an adventure – only for things to slowly spiral out of alignment with reality. By the end, it is completely dream-like.
I’m not entirely sure what to do about it… I have had some success by checking in every couple minutes, to stay connected to my body. This has helped extend the time where I felt grounded in reality.
Maybe I will try that next week. Thanks for reading!