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.
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:
A grand, spacious theater. I sit in the audience, in a plush red seat. A show is happening unimportantly. On the furthest right wing of the audience, I notice the seats curl up and over onto the wall, creating an Escherian geometrical situation; people sit in impossible and inarticulable orientations that trigger a feeling of profundity in me – anyway – I think, I should take a picture! This impulse pings my lucidity. (I’d identified this dream pattern before: I am looking at something impossible and beautiful and I want to take a picture of it. A deep shore of my mind identifies the pattern, and the rest of me wakes up. It mirrors waking life exactly – awareness of a pattern dissolves it.)
Now I understand the absurdity: I can’t take a picture because it’s a dream. To make myself laugh, I instead mime pulling a camera from my pocket and ‘photograph’ the impossible part of the theater, then ‘photograph’ a suited man behind me, who is watching me with his eyebrows raised; enjoying the nonsense, I also mime deleting the photo of the man I’d just taken, muttering no good, no good to myself. I find the whole performance very funny; I’m able to play shamelessly because I know none of it is real.
Fully in control now, I fly* into the impossible part of the theater, where I try to do something related to eroticism, don’t worry about it – it’s awkward, cartoony, brief – and then I’m awake.
*Flying is a commonly reported dream experience, but I wonder if the word ‘flying’ misses something. The flying of dreams isn’t physically dynamic – unlike the flight of birds, unlike ‘soaring’. It’s not ‘of the body’ – physics is absent. No drag, or momentum, or muscle-feeling. It’s more like moving a single point around spatial coordinates – like navigating a cursor inside a three (three?) dimensional chamber. You’re not majestic, but you are efficient! I find it almost identical to the sensation of moving around in creative mode in Minecraft. You’re not maneuvering a form, but a fixed locus of awareness; you are maneuvering a consciousness.
Lucidity became my obsession. I filled my house with spooky post-it notes reading ‘look at your hands’ and ‘are you awake?’. I worried about what guests might think – then thought, who am I kidding! I don’t have guests.
In my research on lucidity I kept encountering references to this thing ‘astral projection’. I’d heard of it: tales of the consciousness leaving the body; newly incorporeal travellers navigating shadow-sides of Earth, finding their own sleeping selves in bed. Others claimed to visit different realms entirely.
To this idea there was, on my part, both intrigue and resistance. Just months before, a friend had mentioned astral projection and I’d privately scoffed. The phenomenon seemed to be of a dubious New Age persuasion – maybe sparked by something genuine, but distorted by people confused about their vivid dreams. I, at the time, didn’t care to learn more. But my lucid experiences had scored my mind, like clay prepped for joining. I understood the territory: that feeling of operating a bodiless consciousness, how one might use their dream as a way to get somewhere else. And projectors insisted, again and again, that this was not more dreaming. They described experiences that felt not just more real than dreams but more real than waking life. Some reported seeing details later verified, knowing things it was otherwise impossible for them to know.
Now I was right up against the possibility, close to the nerve. I was already good at the first step, and I was, more than I’d ever been, open to experimentation in service of the improbable. I could see for myself, if I wanted.
It’s important to know: the year before this, I’d split the earth of my mind with Freud, Jung and psychedelics, and found myself at the edge of a widening spiritual curiosity.
Revelations abound, marked with skepticism. I was enormously grateful for the effect the psychedelics had on my inner life, the new gentleness I gave to myself; but could the mechanisms at play really have something to do with the transcendent? Were these experiences not just party tricks, strobe lights cast onto the stupid monkey brain that says woah? My skepticism persisted even while the trips happened to me. In a video from one of my trips, I lie in bed and press my head against the head of my deeply beloved cat Bug. Then I move towards the camera and say, disbelievingly, conspiratorially: ‘There was a moment just then where I felt sure that Bug felt the same about me as I felt about her. But that doesn’t mean it’s true. I just think it’s true.’
Eventually I read Terence McKenna and self-consciously thought he was a genius. His talks prodded at some intuitive core awareness, a knowing that all is not as it seems. Still there was resistance. I had grown up during the twilight era of D.A.R.E and I’d internalized, like many others, that any kind of chemically-altered perception was a corruption of authentic experience, not an extension of it; also, there was something so annoyingly cliché about a spiritual awakening catalyzed by psychedelics. I felt like I’d hacked my way on to a spiritual path – cheated, somehow.
I wanted something ‘cleaner’. My curiosity led me into meditation practice, then a weekend at ‘psychic school’, which pushed the boundaries of possibility but still lacked the show stopping quality I was after. By now I was banging my head against the hard wall of materialism. Phase me through!
I wanted to give myself over to a new world, but only one that couldn’t be denied.
This was the last night of January. Before sleep, I did a meditation designed to induce projection, one I’d practiced every night that week. The meditation involved moving my awareness around my body, mapping it into stillness; then, retreading the day’s emotional landscape, identifying active threads of feeling and neutralizing them, aiming to resolve the unconscious emotional states from which dreams are invented. Then I slept.
Then there was the buzzing. My body was asleep, and here was this feeling of deep vibration – electrocution without pain – inhabiting me like a possession. The sensation was not like anything I had ever felt. I feel frisson often and it was not that, nothing like that. The sensation was not of the skin. This was fundamental, cellular (cellular?), and it demanded me. If you’d been reading, you would stop; if you’d been walking, you might fall. The buzzing was the thing.
Fear rose like dark water, that old human joke: Am I dying? I wondered. This feels like dying.
The next awareness: not the familiar darkness of closed eyes but something else: a textured blackness, a fizzy blackness, glistening, something, a somethingness – not a void – a curtain, or a fog, with its own intelligence and intention. I would later call it the ‘loading screen’.
Me: awe and terror. The moment deepened; the membrane pulsed. My consciousness gathered to a single point like light through a lens. I couldn’t tell you how long I was there for, buzzing, looking. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do next, the realization of this frightened me, and then! Pain, sharp, precise, on the inside of my right thigh. Why there? I didn’t know, don’t know. Then I was awake, body and mind.
I sat upright and looked around my dark room, dumbfounded. There was the glitchy silence that falls in the aftermath of odd moments. The room was the same room. The dark was the same dark. But also a shift, some cavity open in me: it was the space where the doubt had been, and was now gone.
My tale rang a bell in one of my ‘spiritually-inclined’ friends; she recommended me Robert Monroe’s books, one of which, in a wonderful coincidence, was already sitting on the desk she called from.
Robert Monroe was a radio executive from Virginia who woke up bouncing against his bedroom ceiling one night in 1958. He thought brain tumor, thought madness, everything except what ended up being true: that his consciousness had slipped from its shell like a yolk.
I’d heard of Monroe but hadn’t engaged with his work. I was surprised by the breadth of it: in the thirty years after his first experience, Monroe wrote three books critically analyzing and storytelling about his thousands of journeys. Today the Monroe Institute hosts thousands of volunteers who are successfully and reliably sent to the impossible realm via a combination of meditation practice and Monroe’s specially designed audio frequencies. As far as I know, Monroe is responsible for almost all of the hard data we have about astral travel, having mapped what he called ‘focus levels’: distinct states beyond the physical, ‘visitable’ states of consciousness with consistent, observable properties. You are reading this from Focus 1 – unless you’re not – in which case, woah!
When his first book arrived I immediately flicked through. Monroe described the threshold point exactly as I felt it: ‘a surging, pulsating wave of what felt like electricity.’
To read that felt initiatory. I’d been very close.
Three days later, I wrote:
Began meditating around 3:30 PM. Eventually I felt myself flagging in and out of sleep – it was 4:30 by then – and I lay down for a nap. Odd series of dreams, one involving a home with more rooms than I thought it had, a basement full of things I didn’t realize I owned. There was something sexual about it. Again, in and out of sleep. I land on a scene of a lit-up outdoor trail I recognize, and then I’m in my parents’ backyard at dusk, and I can’t get my mom away from me. I know I’m dreaming. I look at my hands to stabilize the dream, which works perfectly, and then say, out loud, wow, that works. I just want to experiment with changing the dream, not going deeper – I think, exactly this, for some reason: take me somewhere where it’s daytime, and gentle.
The buzzing was near instantaneous. I was completely giddy that it had somehow worked again, even without my trying (because I wasn’t trying?). There was the black and twinkling ‘loading screen’, the buzzing coming in waves – and that’s when I began to roll!?!, an enormously clear sensation of rolling leftward continuously, with no resistance. It went on and I became disoriented and concerned. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ were nothing, memories. I thought, why am I still rolling? Why aren’t I going anywhere? I wondered, suddenly, if I might get trapped in this in-between place, rolling and twisting and buzzing forever – then there was incredible fear, black fear, oily and primal, I panicked – then a feeling of wobbling, destabilization, as though I was about to fall off a bike.
I can’t decide if this next part was determined strictly by me, or out of me – as in, I don’t know who decided I wouldn’t continue – for a moment the decision making ‘I’ felt both mine and not mine – but I wouldn’t. I was wrenched from the vibrational state with a sense of being blown backwards, followed by a violent and adrenal feeling of crashing down through many layers, a clear felt distinction between layers, no visuals – and then I woke up! I, terrified, scrambled out of my bed and around on the floor, breathing hard, reaching for my chest, desperately trying to orient myself – I’m looking around my room – and realize it is not my room. Then a feeling of falling backwards, a whoosh. Then I was awake, really awake.
There was now a desire to continue that superseded all other will, how I imagine Natalie Portman’s character feels as she looks, hypnotized, into that kaleidoscopic shimmer at the end of Annihilation (she, notably and right after, gets absolutely bodied by an alien doppelganger freak). I was transfixed, not willing or unwilling, but overcome. I felt that I’d touched the edge of something vast.
And as for the fear – it wouldn’t stop me – even now we scream at eclipses, knowing what they are – terror is awe wearing black. I considered my 'nightmares', which were not 'nightmares', only because I didn't call them that; in the same way, I knew these threshold experiences were intense but nothing more.
Fear was the ejector; the way past the buzzing and rolling and twinkly black screen was detached curiosity. I needed to relax, let it have me.
2: LET IT HAVE ME
On the fifth of February I woke up naturally at 6:30, noticed it was morning, then went back under, looking for the mystery.
Now I’m in a field full of strangers, staring. This is the entire dream. It’s creepy and intimate and I am lucid. I think, fewer people!, and half of the staring people fade first to mist and then to nothing. I remember: dream people are puppets. I invent them, animate them, forget I’m doing it. Then I look at my hands. The dream pulses in technicolor; I’m stable. I think, OK, take me in, and I go.
Here is the loading screen, here is the buzzing. I roll leftwards, and worry, again, about getting trapped in the rolling – must calm down, I remember. Now a ringing sound. Rolling leftwards doesn’t seem to be making anything happen – but I haven’t truly let go. I think, give over, give over. There’s a sensation of surrender, like bending backwards over a cliff, or going limp in something’s giant mouth. From this state of surrender comes power and I’m able to try one mighty roll forward! – a location begins to piece into view.
My goal from the beginning was to walk around my flat astrally, and interact with my cats. To that end, as I did my final forward roll, I was thinking ‘home, home, take me home’ – but no, I’m not on top of the physical like I’d anticipated, I’m deeper, and this location that’s piecing together around me – I’ve never seen it before but I know it’s mine. It is home.
Reader: hello. I would like to speak directly to you. Notice your environment. Maybe you’re sitting. Notice the sensation of it, how what you’re sitting on pushes back against you. Look around, notice the light on the walls. Is there anyone around you? Notice how they clearly have autonomy separate from you. Notice the feeling of air in your nose as you breathe. Notice the clarity of your internal monologue. Notice the groundedness, hereness, of the moment you’re in. Notice how obvious it is that you are where you are, and not anywhere else.
You know what I’m about to say –
These words are nothing –
A white living room, bright, modern, pristine. Light of ineffable clarity emanates, somehow, from inside what I can see, not from any sun. It is both soft to look at and incredibly bright. The room is decorated overwhelmingly with monarch butterflies: sculptures, wall hangings, specimens in frames.
It is completely, undeniably ‘real’. I am here. I am trying to be a still lake in a hurricane of excitement: I’m doing it I’m doing it I’m doing it – OK, calm. Movement through the home is not of the body; I am a point of awareness, a little orbic thing. I move where my attention moves. Or, no, the opposite: space is rearranging itself around the point of my attention.
Further exploration reveals beauty upon beauty, expansiveness, ‘normal’ house things, tables, a kitchen (which makes me laugh – who’s eating?, I think), places for people to gather – I’m completely fascinated – I am about to go outside, into the yard (the yard!) – when I feel a presence in the home with me.
Petrification.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to be here. Even in my preparations beforehand this was not something I considered. I feel the experience wobble. I consider giving over to the panic and then I resolve, remember. I say out loud: I am safe, I am safe, I am safe, I am safe. The experience strengthens, I settle; the presence, which has not moved, doesn’t seem affected by my destabilization either way. Now that I’m out of my fear I’m able to ‘tune into’ the presence. From afar I perceive it as an unfocused ovoid. There’s something masculine about it. It doesn’t seem to mean any harm. My fear in check, all that’s left is curiosity – and I’m strong now, feeling capable of getting a handle on the experience if anything does go sideways – so I decide to move towards the presence (at least, I think this is my decision).
This person – this soul – it’s clear in energy that they are here to help. I instinctively know he is, in some way, ‘responsible’ for me. I have a very conscious thought: (‘this is crazy…I just wanted to see my cats…’) and the soul – the guide – who knows all of my thoughts, laughs, and then I feel, oh my, a prismatic joy to be in his presence, a total sense of safety, security – something sexual there, too – I am so attracted to him, and yet I can’t see him clearly – this is difficult to explain, but I can’t focus on him, there is something shadowy or unfinished, his form in a dimension adjacent to my understanding, or of some forgotten quality, as though I’m trying very hard to remember someone’s face.
No matter – I feel him.
What I feel from and for him is a love that exists before and beyond the human condition; what I have been calling love before, with its thorns and anxieties, is only love’s shadow cast on the wall. Here is the real thing. This is a rounded effervescence of love, an edgeless love, without beginning or end, a becoming into one another, like two droplets of water merging on a glass pane. I gladly would become him; I would gladly let him become me. The pain of this is indistinguishable from joy.
I am his doe-eyed shadow. Take me with you.
We move through the house together, two lights, and the guide orients me: in the situation, and in the vividity of our love, which there is now something obvious about. Communication happens telepathically. There is dialogue powered by intuitive knowing – we aren’t hearing spoken words but knowing each other, reading each other. Understanding precedes expression. Words would be crude in comparison, clumsy, downright offensive, like translating birdsong into Morse. My fascination becomes me.
There’s a playfulness to our back and forth: it’s very happy and light-hearted. I keep mentally wandering off, getting distracted by the lure of my curiosity – the guide teases me, loves it, knew I was going to do this. He knows everything about me. He knows things about me that I didn’t know about me.
Now he conducts with me, patiently and kindly, what I understand are ‘trust tests’. These tests are too personal to reveal to you now, but they involve moments of unpleasant sensation. I am momentarily afraid and distrustful. I consider making myself frantic. But the lesson is clear: he can be trusted, and I must not be afraid. I know this too is love, and a game. Can you remain open, even in a state of surrender? Do you feel safe, even in intensity? Do you understand you’re bigger than pain, bigger than fear? Yes, yes, yes.
I did it! I am a happy bulb. The guide radiates approval, unsurprised. Now we can travel. I face him – still a blur I can’t resolve – as he holds me by the shoulders – or, a sensation of being held, by hands, on the shoulders.
We move what feels like ‘backwards’. Brief sensation, vision smearing like paint, and then we materialize into a 'travelling in-between place’.
At this point I understand: this astral environment – the one I'd reached – functions in a constant state of translation. I am taken to what is energetically a 'travelling in-between place', and I perceive it filtered through my life experience into something comprehensible. This translation happens continuously and automatically. The same principle applies to my butterfly-filled home – a ‘safe personal sanctuary’ – also to the guide, who is now taking form as an unfathomably beautiful brown-haired man, cherubic – my ‘age’ – slightly shorter than me –
So, anyway: we’re in Waterloo Station. London’s Waterloo, but altered: a lower ‘ceiling’, windowless, gleaming in its opalescence of light. Ahead of us, crowds bustle through platform gates. I think to the guide: (‘there are so many people’). He responds: (‘not usually this many’). These people are not dream puppets. They are very clearly autonomous, occupying their own separate wells of sentience, but they are asleep, themselves dreaming. They move purposefully but unaware, passing like sleepwalkers. There is nothing creepy or off-putting about this. It’s unclear where they’re coming from, or where they’re going – I don’t think to ask, it doesn’t seem to matter – there is so much going on.
Now the guide leads me to the side of the station, where there is a box, like a light box, platinum in its internal glow, built into the wall – the guide explains he can use this box to show me any moment of my life, past or future. I’m amused: (‘oh! it’s that thing people talk about’). The idea of a ‘life review’ is not something I’ve ever – either consciously or unconsciously – felt any supreme interest in or excitement about, but I’m glad this has happened as I can now contextualize my experience in the others I’ve heard. The guide teases: (‘I know you’re always wanting proof’).
Here the guide tells me his name – which I’m keeping, for now, as a secret token.
And now, I notice, near the box: oh, my friends! Of course! My friends! There you are! Arranged in a circle of chairs, waiting for me. I sit beside a girl I’m particularly excited to see again; we speak as if we’ve known each other for millennia. The group riffs on this thread of me ‘always wanting proof’ – there is joking about how I’m going to manage once I’m back. The guide pretends to call my phone and leave a voicemail, as a bit. Oh my god. I love them.
I know I am experiencing love’s purest distillation. Its luminosity is in everything I see and feel, it is structural, the ‘air’ is made of it, ambient love. It is impossible to hide but there is nothing to hide. And the confidence – how held I feel by them all, how easy it is to be exactly myself! Shame? What’s shame?
This moment eclipses my whole life and its joys – nothing like the trips, the drugs, the best days of it – nothing compared to this total recognition – I am known, I am known, I am known.
From here it gets spotty. I know we continue to speak in that easy, familiar way, and watch moments from my life together on a screen, although I can’t, to my great frustration, remember what the events were (I don’t know why this is, even wracking my brain after the fact – but they were the first to go from my memory).
One final moment burns clear: sitting in the circle, supposedly watching my life review, I glance behind me (‘I’m distracted…’) at the dreaming crowds streaming through the station gates. My arm rests on the chair back as I turn – and how clearly I can feel how it bites into the ‘wood’! I’m so obviously here; it’s unbelievable. My friend beside me laughs with love and joy at my awe. I’m stunned by this moment, the unmistakable sensation, the feeling of presence – I think, my body, my Earth body, is simply not in this position – and then I foolishly try to remember the position I’d fallen asleep in – and ah – no – it’s the thought of my physical body that draws me back to it, and then the experience begins to flicker and flag. The vision separates, there is a strain to see – I think: (‘no, no, what if I never come back?’) A voice in my head, somebody, with lightness, humor: (‘of course you’ll come back’). With great effort I look down at my hands – the scene sharpens briefly – there are my fingernails, the ring I wear – but it's like trying to steady a wobbling top. No good. I’m already going. It’s over now.
3: I HAVE TO KEEP BEING SAVANNAH BROWN
I have to keep being Savannah Brown?
The thought was so ridiculous that it made me laugh out loud.
How could I have forgotten? Where was my mind?
What I woke up knowing:
We do not ‘die’. The existence of my consciousness is unrelated to my physical body; my physical body only holds my consciousness, or channels it, temporarily. I remembered Aldous Huxley’s old riff, the brain as a biological reduction valve, a filter, that doesn’t create awareness but limits it.
‘Fear’ is a falsity that conceals from us the base level of our existence, which is a love that penetrates reality like a mycelium network, totally free of condition, that can be perpetually returned to, or at least remembered.
Laughter puts you in communion with the real thing. Play is a form of knowing, joy is evidence of accuracy, and surrender plus laughter equals passage, through fear, into total freedom.
These were not theories, or hopes, or conclusions that I had arrived at intellectually, but knowledge of William James’ ‘noetic quality’, direct apprehensions that carried their own certainty. I had brought these items back in full, clicking against one another in the heart like three perfect stones.
I meant it, when I said you don’t need to believe me. I know my certainty might suggest otherwise and that these are exceptional claims. But this is my unenviable predicament: having experienced something that feels as true as my life is true, yet utterly impossible to prove. What can I do but say it plainly? I’m telling you: I woke up and I knew.
In bed I stuck to my spot like a burr. I knew as soon as I started to play person again I’d forget. Already details were bleeding. Each moment back in this place – this less-real place, dreamlike in comparison – hid something else from me, stacked these damned layers of forgetting. The life review was gone – much of the dialogue. My face was wet with tears.
For the first time I told myself the story. Then I typed everything I could remember into my phone, and quickly drew floorplans of my home and of the station, smiling, laughing. I was totally certain of what had happened – there was forgetting, but there was no confusion: I had ‘gone’ somewhere; I had spoken to others. The presence of the guide was particularly stupefying – I hadn’t believed in ‘guides’ before this – hadn’t expected any of it…
I realized that I happily would have stayed in that place forever, and in this realization, understood, truly, what ‘eternity’ could mean. Eternity was no longer a sinister incomprehension but an imaginable ecstasy. How to fit this eternity between the bookends of my life? The sky had emptied itself into me, all that blue weight. What was left of Savannah Brown?
Later the bare nerve of me buzzed around the house; I made eggs for breakfast, found it completely ridiculous. Eggs – breakfast – ha! My life, my flat, my little goals and anxieties and games I play, bah, away with all of it, suddenly none of it mattered in the face of what I felt there, that love – could this place, this Earth, even host such a thing? Everywhere, question marks. How do I live now? Do I still have to pay bills? How do I get back? A claustrophobia settled, to be ‘stuck’ here, and not there. I checked my voicemail, just in case.
In moments I felt deep elastic longing for the guide. Pitiful; I was lovesick. But when the longing came an equal and obvious-seeming knowing told me: you’re not apart from him. He’s always here. He’s as here as the air, as here as your eyes are wet. He’s on top of you.
When I told an interested friend this story, he interjected to say, ‘If this was anyone else, I would think they’re insane or an egoist, but it’s you.’ So, there’s something.
A hallucination; a spontaneous DMT-like release at the edge of awakeness; an archetypically-shaped psychological break; a desperate fantasy, looking for expression. I did consider them all. None could fit my experience when dilated to its fullest extent. At best they hovered beside it, poked at elements of it. And if this was just some elaborate brain-based projection – then I argue, so, too, is this life, this state.
I now feel I’m supposed to make some kind of case for the reality of my experience – but this is boring to me, and somehow destructive, like rolling a blade of grass between my fingers until it disintegrates when we could be wrestling each other in the fields. The truth is that if you can hear me you will and if you can’t hear me you won’t. It doesn’t matter who I quote or how clever I am. The revelation stays put; only the seeker moves.
What I found had been unexpected and I needed orientation. Looking to situate myself I read all three of Robert Monroe’s books in one or two sittings each, completely enraptured. The luxury of these texts, the thoroughness of them, the familiarity! Yes, I was there – yes, I noticed that! I didn’t feel that I was simply reading his books but meeting myself. If I was crazy then so was he!
Monroe's work provided a framework for my experience; instead of some great, disorienting wilderness stretching out ahead, here was a hand to hold. According to Monroe I’d blasted past Focus 22 – the realm a little 'sideways' of the physical, that would have taken me to my flat and my cats – and gone straight to Focus 27, what he calls a ‘reception center’ for those transitioning from physical life, free from guilt, pain, or remorse.
The friend I mentioned earlier – he listened to my story, all the way through, politely – and at the end, he asked, ‘Do you think you went to heaven?’ which is a wonderful question to be asked, with gentleness and sincerity, in an only slightly busy pub garden.
I thought about it. Buzzing thresholds, guide beings, telepathic communion, that ineffable love – these appear in Buddhist jhanas, shamanic tradition, Islamic and Christian mysticism alike.
The materialist in me (who, miraculously, keeps rising from the dead) pokes its head out from the grave to say ‘default mode network!’; the philosopher in me sees perception unmediated by thought; and the mystical fool in me sees the marble swoon of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a sculpture drawn from one of Teresa of Ávila’s visions, that goes like this:
Beside me, on the left, appeared an angel in bodily form…He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire…In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times…when he pulled it out I felt that he took me with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God…the sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God.
We are all, it seems to me, segregated inside our symbolic cultural languages, using different words to describe the same events. As if dropped into a funnel, us seekers collapse, teary-eyed, onto the same central point.
When people ask me how I’ve been, I don’t know what to say.
I’ve only crossed over twice since, not for lack of trying. Briefer journeys to other places, not 27. I did make it to my flat, and I did see my cats – the younger one was afraid of me and the older one was loving it, purring like crazy. I also did see the shape of my body beneath the duvet, which was about as disconcerting as you might be imagining, but just wonderful, wonderful. Immediately before this projection I had the fantastic experience of directing the vibrations, bringing them from a simmer to their full intensity, with a sensation of back-and-forth movement inside me. I wrote this in my journal after: I felt I was wiggling my consciousness like a tooth.
Currently I’m working to access this state with more reliability and control. I have a lot of questions and curiosities. An understatement: there is a lot left to explore.
The hunger to return never leaves. I think of it every night. How could I not? This place is a dew drop in comparison. When I lay down there’s that wink of magic, that flutter. Maybe tonight.
Maybe now you see my urgency, why I wanted to ‘tell everyone’.
For the record – since I can't hand you my knowing any more than I can hand you my heart – it seems anyone can see what I saw, feel what I felt, get their own knowing. A willingness to release what you think you know, a willingness to overcome fear, plus openness, curiosity: these are your tickets in. See for yourself.
Functionally, not much is different about my life. Everything changes and nothing changes. I sit at my desk, and I walk to the park, and I feed my cats, and I read at the pub – but in all of this there is now a zoomed-out feeling, a sense of both acting in the play and being its audience. At my best I’m now navigating my life the way a lucid dreamer navigates a dream: lightly, playfully, in on the joke, not overly identifying with any of it. It is hugely enjoyable. It seems when death, instead of a terrifying hard stop, becomes another curiosity, one is able to truly develop a relationship with life – and in this relationship discover that life has never sought to punish, or hurt, but to tease, and play.
I keep forgetting and then remembering again. ‘Waking up’ is perhaps not a single threshold moment but an ongoing process populated by hundreds of small waking-ups. The addiction to life, its roles and its plays, is a real one – I drop into it, look into my closet and say, absurdly, 'Ugh, I have nothing to wear,' or get annoyed at a comment, or crave someone, not someone to know metaphysically but to grab with my actual hands. I don’t think these things are sins to be transcended but experiences to be had; ‘part’ of it. While I am a person I can only be a person.
Sometimes I am at the post office, where I am Savannah Brown who waits in line. My hair is cut short. My feet are in shoes. I am a woman, a little bored. Then suddenly the light oddens to that secret inside light. In my chest, a spark jumps a gap. From my own separate case I regard the others here and I think, sincerely, that I love them, I love them so much I could cry, I imagine kissing each one on the lips, and then I’m back onto the street. The sun finds my eyelids, my ears, its bright mouth. The street is full of dreamers going somewhere, and then home.
I’m still learning how to be the kind of person who this is happening to. No, this is backwards. I’m unlearning her. This is a process of exquisite subtraction. I am going away.
Listening to this felt like receiving a gift that will continue to unwrap itself. Thank you.
"Words would be crude in comparison, clumsy, downright offensive, like translating birdsong into Morse. My fascination becomes me." - this is beautiful