When I was 16, about 25 years ago, I woke up floating above my body. I thought I was dreaming and started thinking ‘down’; I floated down. I thought ‘up’, and floated up. I repeated this a few times and then became aware of my cognition. I looked around the room, looked at myself sleeping and became accutely aware that I was not dreaming. At that point I had become afraid and felt my heart racing due to my discovery. Then, zip…back into my body.
In the morning my mother told me I was dreaming. I was sure it was real and dreaming was a remote possibility. With time, I’m afraid this has been reversed and now that it was real has become a remote possibility.
I became a skeptic mostly because of the few times I mentioned this, somebody always chimed in with, "Oh yeah, I do that all the time’ with just too breezy a manner. I mean it shook me up. The possibilities. Well, was I dreaming? Were you dreaming?
I haven’t devoted a lot of time to it lately, but I will say that I had a few experiences such as you describe several years ago. In fact, although I’m a few years older than you (~5). I find it interesting that these experiences occured at a similar age (I was 17). While they possessed a degree of cognitive perception (remembrance?) far above the norm, I eventually decided these were just particularily lucent dreams.
I have epilepsy, and during seizures I often experience a feeling of floating around above myself, or being one foot to the right or left, or being twice as big or small, etc. Certain dissociative anesthetics can also induce this phenomenon. Extremely vivid out of body experiences are produced by artificial stimulation of cortical structures. I think it’s a neurological thing. The hippocampus is one of many major brain structures known to be involved in spatial processing relating to one’s own body- but an actual “out of body experience” may be much more complicated and involve a constellation of neurological processes.
I had one such experience - I was about 12 or 13 years old (I’m female): I remember floating near the ceiling and looking down on myself in the bed. That’s all I recall. Over the years, I’ve been interested such phenomena and have read a great deal about it. You know when you’re kinda in a twilight sleep - not a deep sleep but not awake - and you suddenly jerk awake – I read that this is your “astral” body (spirit, whatever you want to call it) returning suddenly to your physical body. Do you ever meditate? There’s a kind of out-of-body feeling to it. You become disassociated from your body. So I definitely think there’s something to it.
I gave the age thing a lot of thought in the past. I was guessing that it might be one reason–a youthful phase–that I couldn’t duplicate the event. There is a writer on this stuff–but I think he comes of as a bit of a quack (forgot his name), but who wouldn’t with this topic. He did talk about the ‘roll out method’ which you are suppossed do to after some serious concentration (self-hypnosis? meditation?) I got results I called ‘partial projections’, but I really chalked them up to dreams and wishful thinking.
By the way–anybody hear a loud buzzing during an episode?
This kind of experience can change your whole outlook on religion. This is a subject that I have read a great deal about, out of body experiences (OOBE). I do not think you had a dream, you are what I consider to be one of the lucky few, to experience what life would be like after death. I also know about lucid dreaming and there is a tremendous difference between the two. I have had lucid dreams, but sadly, I have not had an OOBE. Most people that I have talked to or read about have done this by accident, meaning without their will. I have been trying to do this by sheer will alone, and have gotten close, but not yet. In time, I am sure I will. To get a better understanding, go to your library or local bookstore and check out the “new age” section, there you will find many books that deal with astral projection or OOBE. (same thing) One author I highly recommend is Robert Monroe. I want to do this for my own experiments, because when you are in your spirit body , or actually your energy form, you have no limits save for the current attachment to your physical body. It is possible to travel the universe and time, those who do not believe will surely slam me for that last statement, but I do not care. I look at it this way, when it comes time for my physical body to die, the truth will come out, and I for one will not waste my time waiting for an “angel” or some “ray of light” to show me the way to heaven. I could go on for a long time about this, but I have respect for other posters and my post should be just as brief. Read those books! You will not be sorry
I 've never had the patience for meditation, which is another reason I probably can’t do it again. But, we were all young, except for Lipochrome.
Anybody here heard of the supposedly famous astral projectionists who went by the title of ‘Blue’? Myth or man?
I guess to carry this a bit further I should add near death experiences, since my mother, rest her soul, said she watched as the doctors and nurses did a little ER dramatics as she nearly slipped away. She told me about this and that she was thinking ‘let it alone, already. i’m tired’ only to be brought back (so she could endure another few weeks of morphine and chemothearpy). Was she dreaming?
I only mentioned meditation as a comparison - it’s a similar “feel” - being disconnected from your body. Neobican, I’m with you on this. Glad I’m not alone - many of the teeming millions seem to be the strict science types who don’t believe anything unless you can see it or prove it. As for near-death experiences, they are out-of-body experiences, yes? The body may continue to live or actually die, but the astral body (soul, personality) lives on. I haven’t experimented with it recently, but there are books out there that guide in trying to achieve such experiences. I think most (all) actually do have oobe’s but just don’t remember them. Most, if not all, people dream, but don’t remember their dreams either.
