on astral projection

dreams, fear, and leaving the body

1: A THRESHOLD

You don’t have to believe me. I don’t know I would believe me if this hadn’t happened to me (to me? of me? from me?). But it did! And with it the way I understand and relate to reality has been fundamentally altered – impossible events are now diary entries – and it is an experience, I believe, that’s integral to understanding everything I’ll write from this point, and, in a way, everything I’ve ever written, so I need to tell you what happened, as honestly as I can, to the extent that I understand what happened, or else I might explode.

After the first experience, there was tremendous urgency: It needs to be now! I have a duty! It will change lives! Ah, no. That’s not how this works. As if the hearing about an experience is anything like the having of it. I can’t help you, but I can regale you, selfishly, from my empty room. Anyway, there’s no rush. There’s so much time for all of it.

My opener with friends I’ve held sweetly hostage: have you heard of astral projection? ‘Astral projection’ said a little sparkly and self-effacing – well, have you? Blinks, glints.

Here is the veil. Here it is sideways. Here it is on my head as I waltz into town.

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My dreams are frequent and long and rich with symbol. I document them with precision and reverence, pinning butterflies. They visit me, or, no! I visit them; every night there’s a glow in my chest, remembering I’m headed to the place they’re allowed to exist.

I love dreaming. I even love what others call nightmares. To me the nightmare/dream dichotomy is too clean for what happens in that place, as if terror and awe are ever truly apart. Even when dreams are disturbing in content, they’re never dark in feeling; they all come with a sense of safety and familiarity, a ‘knowingness’, wisps of profundity that buffet me through the day.

Something else: often, pieces of old dream come back to me right before I fall asleep. Just pieces – their spatial memory, mood, logic. I remember none of this in language or image but in feeling. Sometimes these fragments are many years old but perfectly preserved. It’s clear there’s a swath of ‘forgotten’ felt information stored in me, that does not age – catalogued away, in some vast neural library, and I do have a key – but the key only turns when I’m not turning it.

Last November I began meditating regularly, and soon lucidity in dreams became commonplace, an unexpected treat. Increased awareness in my waking life naturally opened into awareness in my dream life. Then in January came a breakthrough: full lucidity that didn’t collapse under its own recognition, which sometimes happens when I get too excited. The dream held steady: