Thread: Questions for the Astral Traveler

1. Based on what exactly do you believe that astral travel and lucid dreaming aren't one and the same thing? "It feels different" is not an acceptable answer.

I think astral travel is best understood as a type of lucid dream. This is a misleading statement though, in that a lucid dream isn't a simple, indivisible experience. There are multiple things going on at the same time, and these aren't the same in every lucid dream.

In a typical lucid dream, if there is such a thing, a person imagines themselves operating a body in an environment projected by their imagination. This is much like waking life, except that when awake the imagined environment is projected more involuntarily, and the projection incorporates current sensory data. In waking life it is still an internal projection though. Missing data is filled in, the experience of color is approximately mapped to the wavelength spectra of sensed light (which does not have color), and this is integrated with data from other senses along with educated guesses about relationships between objects and how those are changing.

In a typical lucid dream, very little of the imagined scene is tied to current sense data. In a typical astral projection experience, the imagined scene is imagined to correspond to one's sleeping environment, and may or may not include more current sensate data than other lucid dreams do.

2. Have you ever done a digital clock reality check while astral projecting? If yes, what were the results, and if not, why not?

Though this sounds like a worthwhile test, I don't think that the outcome necessarily means what you suggest it means in later posts. My sense of time while asleep is somehow remarkably better than while awake, and I know what time it is to within a couple of seconds. By 'know' I mean that I'm capable of waking up at exactly a specified time, even though I don't know how that works, and don't know whether or not that awareness could be used to control a clock face. If I did your clock test and it passed, that still wouldn't imply that I'm not imagining the clock without aid of sensory data, I could just be remembering what time it should be. And if I did the clock test and it failed, all this would prove is that my projected 'external' environment is not true to how I would 'see' it if awake. That's the result you're interested in, but it doesn't really answer the question of whether astral projection is different from other lucid dreams, because there's more going on than that.

I agree that the imagined environment during astral projection mostly lacks sensory data, and most tests akin to the clock test will usually fail.

3. What can you do during astral projection that you can't do while lucid dreaming?

I very rarely imagine having a body when lucid dreaming. If there's a visual scene at all, I'm just a point in that scene, or on rare occasions multiple points simultaneously. During 'astral projection' I'm wide awake in my usual waking life tactile experience, except that my tactile model of my body's location is not synchronized with the sensory information I'm getting about where my body actually is. So I can separate the two, which is what the 'astral projection' is.

As far as things like being able to fly through the night and haunt astral projection skeptics, I can't do anything with astral projection that I can't do in any other lucid dream. But I haven't really explored that sort of thing. In general I never repeat dream experiences, and for a variety of reasons I don't cultivate either 'astral' or controlled 'lucid' experiences.

In one of my 'astral' experiences I inverted my spatial map, one hemisphere of my head at a time, so that inside was outside and outside was inside. That was pretty weird, and I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream.

4. What can you do in a lucid dream that you can't do during astral projection?

I visualized an imagined object from multiple directions at once. As far as I know that would be possible during astral projection also though. I've experienced things from other perspectives besides my own. This I think is easier during a lucid dream, because a person has more control over the sensate experience, which is metaphorically useful. I've had a lot of remarkably accurate premonitions, but that's another topic. Now that I think of it though, I did have one accurate premonition in an 'astral' type of dream, and its probably equally possible there, though the form it would have to take would generally be different, since the content of the experience is different. I have almost nothing in the way of a "mind's eye" while awake, and that would be true for me in an "astral" experience also.

5. Is there a difference between an OBE and astral projection?

Instead of warping my mental model of where my body is, I can project my first person visual standpoint to what would usually be a subconsciously imagined third person perspective. That kind of perspective is part of what gives a person an awareness of how they look from other points in their surrounding environment. But if the first person visual imagination is projected to it, this corresponds to an out of body experience. This is the distinction I make between AP and OBE, though experiences can blend aspects of both. To say that again, astral projection is when you warp your sense of where your physical body is, separating it from where your physical body actually is. When people describe out-of-body experiences, such as when near death, what they describe usually seems to me to be more like transferring one's subjective first-person visual standpoint to what would normally be a third person standpoint. In other words, it uses a different part of one's mostly involuntary model of one's environment, though its the same in other regards, and these different aspects can be blended.

6. How do astral beings behave differently from dream characters (or dream beings)?

There seems to be an implication in a lot of these questions, and in the subsequent comments, that something is only objectively real if it is seen in a way that is consistent with what other people see. I don't think this is a reasonable perspective. When you see that something is red, for instance, you actually don't know anything about the 'wavelengths of light', you're just assuming that there's a fairly accurate correspondence between the appearance and the actual radiated and reflected spectra. That may be a good assumption, but its still an assumption, and its not one that would necessarily be accepted by a member of a blind species, for instance. You may say "I knew the book was on fire because I saw it burning", and he might say "you have that impression, did you actually feel the heat?" You, in contrast, do not trust other people's feelings about things as being at all reliable. I don't see that its different in principle though, other than that the ability to accurately interpret visual and audial sensate impressions is much better developed in most people. "It feels different" is not a good answer only because its vague, and it would be better if a person could describe in more detail how it feels different. But the feeling, while subjective, is no more subjective than an experience of color, which as I mentioned earlier is almost arbitrarily mapped to light spectra. Different people map it mostly in the same way under similar circumstances, but the experience is still subjective. Similarly, though the 'feeling' of anything is subjective, there may be an objective reality to what is felt, just as there is with what is seen. If you can't see what they see, that doesn't mean that what they see is an invalid basis for them to draw conclusions about it. Likewise with feeling. So "it feels different" is in my view actually a pretty good reason for drawing a distinction between two things, even though a more extensive description would be a lot better. Sometimes the more extensive description isn't possible though, a large part of what generates the feeling is subconscious and beyond a person's access. As with a person who has poor communication between different hemispheres of their brain, they may "know" something, and be correct about it without be able to describe why.

I'm fairly strongly inclined to develop a detailed understanding for my perspectives though, so you're not going to hear "it feels different" as a complete explanation from me. Anyway, continuing in response to this specific question....

Behind any image in a dream there are impressions of thought, desire, and identity related to the image. I mentioned that my dreams aren't very visual or audial, its mostly impressions like that. End even where there is a clear 'dream character' the appearance of the character is a pretty small part of the experience. Most of the impression of the nature of what is being dreamed isn't in the appearance. And the 'dream character' doesn't represent a single person or personality, it expresses aspects of myself, several other people I know, and various abstract principles. There also aren't clear delineations between different characters. My first person perspective jumps around, the number of characters representing the different aspects of an interaction can change, and the genders can change from one second to the next as the content of my attention shifts slightly from one aspect of what is being represented to another. Its not very much like waking life in that regard, at least not on anything like the same timescale. So when you ask how dream characters behave....its really not quite like that. And yet I do often experience the presence of identity that is outside of what I would normally think of as 'myself', even though there aren't any clear lines that separate that from myself. I 'feel' the difference in identity, which isn't a description you like, but I often have objective checks on that feeling, and learn the extent to which I can trust it based on how the experiences connected with subsequent waking life experiences.

I realize this is sounding rather vague. Part of that is lack of sleep muddling my description, part of that is I don't have time for a more complete explanation, because I need to go sleep. It would take a lot of examples to make clearer, and even then the examples would be hard to describe to someone else in a way that they can make sense of in terms of their own experience, which is usually much different than mine.

In summary, I don't think the 'beings' in my dreams are going to be any different than the 'beings' in my astral experiences, because the distinction between the astral experiences and the other dream experiences is relatively superficial compared to the main content in regard to those 'beings'. But in either case, I don't divide things into strict categories like 'dream characters' or 'angels' or 'shadow people' or 'demons' or 'suppressed parts of my own personality', its all more fluid than that.

7. Have you ever thought you were astral projecting and then it turned out to be just a regular lucid dream? If yes, how did this happen?

I don't think this question makes any sense in the context of my thought of what astral projection is. And maybe it doesn't even make sense to other people who believe they have 'astral bodies' made up of "astral matter", since most of those people will attribute a similar kind of reality to what they think of as a "dream plane" during other lucid dreaming. Just like the name says, the experience is astral, its not a physical experience. The environment a person is aware of in that state has a connection to the physical environment, but its not the same thing. When they call the experience "astral", to distinguish it from other lucid dreams, they're saying something to characterize the nature of the experience. How can it not really be how they experience it? That's like asking "have you ever had a nightmare that turned out not to be a nightmare?" Or "have you ever seen a color that wasn't really a color?" Like I pointed out earlier, everything you experience, even during waking life, is in your imagination, even though there is usually a fairly direct connection between what you imagine your external environment to be and what your external environment actually is. If someone were to ask "have you ever imagined something then it turned out to be real", or "have you ever thought something was real then it turned out to be imagined", they're asking questions about how well what you imagined corresponded to reality. But in a sense they're being a little bit sloppy with words, because everything you experience is an internally generated cartoon of your surroundings, irrespective of how useful and accurate that cartoon may or may not be. In that same sense there's no difference at all between a lucid dream or astral projection. But then there's no difference between that or waking life either. And yet we can make distinctions between all three of these things, because the relationship with the reality behind the experience is different in each case.

A problem with astral projection is that none of us understand the relationship with the reality behind the experience. It seems that some people imagine that they do, and talk about higher worlds and vibrations. But I don't think what they're saying actually makes detailed sense, to them or to anyone else. Just because we don't understand the experience doesn't mean that there's nothing there though, that its unreal except for the "lucid dream" aspect of it. I tried to give an explanation of that aspect of it, when I described it in terms of distorting mental models. But that doesn't mean that's all that's going on there. In other words, I think there's a bit of a false premise in the question of whether astral projection is different from other lucid dreams. You said that you wanted specific answers, not just to be told that you don't understand it. But I think that really is the truth, that the questions don't really speak to the essence of what astral projection is, they only speak to the aspect that's a lucid dream. Its a little bit like how people have some idea in their mind about what "shared dreaming" is, then propose ways of proving or disproving it, when in fact their idea of "shared dreaming" is not what other people are actually talking about. And people do the same thing in relation to dream premonitions too, trying to come up with tests for it and speculating about possible fallacies, without understanding what people are really talking about. A difference here with astral projection is that it sounds like you may have significant experience with astral projection. But if you've only looked at the sensate-imagination aspect of it, like how I did when talking about mental models, then I think that doesn't really tell you the whole story either.

By saying this I'm not suggesting that I understand the whole story. I used to think I did, and I used to think that "astral projection" was "all in my head", based on the experiments I'd done. Then I had scores of other bizarre dream experiences that proved to me without a reasonable doubt that there is a lot to dreaming that is not "all in my head". So now I know that I probably don't understand astral projection either.

One more closing comment....You suggested that people often lie about this stuff, and that you want honest answers. I agree with you about this, that people often aren't honest, and I want honest answers too. I try very hard to be completely objective, and to give a balanced and truthful impression in everything I say. If I seem evasive in relation to some specific example, it may be because I'm trying to protect someone else's privacy, or because I'm trying to avoid adding confusion by saying something that I know will be misunderstood and which I don't have time to explain adequately at the moment. (My posts are way longer than practically anyone has time to read as it is, and arguably longer than I have time for myself.) But I'm never trying to present a distorted picture, hiding information that doesn't support the argument I'm taking. I instead adjust my view to fit the information, to the best of my ability. I won't mislead someone to try to get them to believe what I think is true. If I did that, I'd be cultivating a habit of deception, and almost immediately I'd be deceiving myself as well. Plus it pisses me off when people try to do that to me. So if I say something that seems dishonest, you can be almost 100% certain that either you're misunderstanding me, or missing other context such as personal experience that's similar to mine. Call me on it anyway if it looks dishonest to you, that's the most direct thing you can do. I'm just saying this in hopes of saving time if we're on the same page about this.

Originally Posted by DarkFlatTop

I won't answer your the questions directly but i will tell you about my one and only OBE and i hope you can get answers from the experience.

This OBE happened when i was between the ages of 10 - 13 (the years just seem to blur together) . I was in the backseat of a jeep looking out the window and thinking about how anything can be anything. I was thinking about how anything could have ever come from nothing and how could nothing ever exist. Why wasn't every thing nothing?

Well one minute i was mentally dueling with these difficult concepts, in the backseat, and the next minute i was somewhere else. I was viewing what i felt was infinity, it wasn't a thing in the normal sense and i felt as if i could move into it, (i dont remember having a body) and leave from both the space where i was and from normal reality. It was only one step away (figuratively) but i was also satisfied and knew (100%) that this thing would always exist. I also came out of the experience knowing that death wasn't the end and no matter how things went it would be alright at the end. I'm a christian and the experience only strengthened my beliefs/

The experience was in actuality seconds long, and it felt to me to be less than 30 seconds. But i was glad that i had my one glimpse to sustain me for my whole life.
Now I know that was not a lucid dream because i was wide awake and it just spontaneously happened.

Im not sure if this would be considered "astral"; OBE really is a very general term. I mean you can OBE on drugs, in dreams or like the above. This is where i believe these things become one, because they are all experienced within in our minds, but the mind is ALOT deeper than our normal everyday awareness. Even this physical world is experienced with the mind so in a way all experiences are of the same make.

Also i find your near obsession with the digital clock RC kind of silly. Text is very stable in my dreams and i cant think of any occasion in which it has changed on me, both in lucid and non lucid dreams. Its all about expectation, i decided early on i wouldn't do RCs which could unconsciously lead to instability; such as finger through palm, and expecting clock/text to change upon looking back. I expect my body to be solid so i treat it that way, and the same goes for reading.

You are right about the clock, the only reason it changes because people believe that it will change, or they just read it somewhere.. I started lucid dreaming with only RC's and i never had anything weird with clock

Hi, I am pretty new to this site but find astral projection very fascinating.

I have recently started learning how to LD so that I can learn the difference between Ld and AP.

I am actually attending courses on this exact phenomenon and have recently just passed phase one. Due to my utmost interest and progress I have been invited to skip phase 2 and go onto phase 3 which entails deep meditation, and astral projection. and from what Ive heard from friends also attending these courses. They experienced the folowing:

An object was hidden in the back yard of a house close to the training center and nobody knew about this object, during their training that day they were shown a map from the training hall to the house as well as a picture of the house (without the object being in the picture of course). they were then told to astral project and go look at what object was behind the house. after 30 minutes of silence they were asked to write wat they saw behind the yard. All those who gave answers got it right. the few who didnt answer said they couldnt get that far away from their physical body due to fear etc.

I have however not had first hand experience and I hope this thread will be open by the time I am done so that i can give proper feedback. I am hoping that astral projection is real. because you can do so much with a skill like that. But I am not afraid to find out and post my honest answer, and being able to LD is all so new and I have still so much to learn that even that is awesum enough to be real.

Originally Posted by DarkFlatTop

Well one minute i was mentally dueling with these difficult concepts, in the backseat, and the next minute i was somewhere else. I was viewing what i felt was infinity, it wasn't a thing in the normal sense and i felt as if i could move into it, (i dont remember having a body) and leave from both the space where i was and from normal reality. It was only one step away (figuratively) but i was also satisfied and knew (100%) that this thing would always exist. I also came out of the experience knowing that death wasn't the end and no matter how things went it would be alright at the end. I'm a christian and the experience only strengthened my beliefs/

The experience was in actuality seconds long, and it felt to me to be less than 30 seconds. But i was glad that i had my one glimpse to sustain me for my whole life.
Now I know that was not a lucid dream because i was wide awake and it just spontaneously happened.

Although I'm not able to understand exactly what you saw/heard/felt, I do understand that this was some type of transcendental experience, which can also be part of a dream, both lucid and non-lucid. How you can be 100% sure that you were "wide awake" yet at the same time not remember having a body is a bit odd.

Im not sure if this would be considered "astral"; OBE really is a very general term. I mean you can OBE on drugs, in dreams or like the above. This is where i believe these things become one, because they are all experienced within in our minds, but the mind is ALOT deeper than our normal everyday awareness. Even this physical world is experienced with the mind so in a way all experiences are of the same make.

No they're not of the same make. Dreaming about being out of your body is not the same as actually being out of your body, and dreaming about moving through the astral plane is not the same thing as actually being in the astral plane (if such a thing exists).

Also i find your near obsession with the digital clock RC kind of silly. Text is very stable in my dreams and i cant think of any occasion in which it has changed on me, both in lucid and non lucid dreams. Its all about expectation, i decided early on i wouldn't do RCs which could unconsciously lead to instability; such as finger through palm, and expecting clock/text to change upon looking back. I expect my body to be solid so i treat it that way, and the same goes for reading.

My "obsession" with the digital clock RC is not silly at all. It is the perfect way to test your state when you are "out of your body", and the instability of text in dreams has absolutely nothing to do with expectation. There are parts of the brain that are much less active when we are asleep, and one of these parts is the one necessary for reading text. So unless you are a superhuman with special capabilities, text will always be unstable. Maybe not the second time you look at it, but surely the third time it will change. It is also interesting to note that those who propagate the AP/OBE "phenomenon" are always the ones claiming that text is completely stable in their dreams. There was not one single person on the old lucidity.com forums back in 2004 that claimed text was stable in his/her dream. I remember a huge thread about this, and not one person was able to read the same time off a digital clock three times. Not, one, person.

I also have to separate reading text from reading numbers, and that's because numbers are a much better reality check. Here is an example from one of my dream journal entries: I have had a simple word, "Monitor", change into "Moritor", "Monters", "Monique", and finally "Machine." This is all somewhat similar, and you can notice a sort of pattern... that the brain tries to make this particular word (Monitor) stable as much as it can, but it just fails, and mutates into something else slowly... whereas numbers show a much more drastic change without any pattern. I've had "02:04" change into "7:30" and then into "16:82", and then into strange symbols.

To cut to the chase: I appreciate a good and honest discussion, but whenever someone tells me that text and numbers are always completely stable in their dreams, I simply cannot take them seriously.

Expectation can only play a part when you wish the word to morph into another word of your choice. This is possible, and can also be used as an RC. Of course the more complex the word or sentence is, the more unstable it will be. So the word "Sky" will be much more stable as opposed to "Toshiba" or "Pineapple".

Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

You are right about the clock, the only reason it changes because people believe that it will change, or they just read it somewhere.. I started lucid dreaming with only RC's and i never had anything weird with clock

Again, same as I said above. Nothing to do with expectation. It has to do with your brain being able to comprehend things. Some are more active while asleep, while others are less active. That's why we act like complete idiots in our dreams many times, thinking that it is normal, or maybe just a "little odd" that a cat is talking to us, or that we have 6 or 7 toes.

Yes, reading is possible in dreams, but re-reading is an entirely different matter, for the reasons above. Sure, I myself was able to read sentences in an LD and remember them clearly. But looking back at those sentences they were already slightly changing. By the third and fourth time it was something completely different. Fact check: There is no text in your dreams, and there is no digital clock either. And the "finer", or more detailed your dream objects are, the more "fluid" they will be.

Next time you, flowofmysoul, become lucid in a dream... please stand in front of a digital clock. Remember the numbers, look away, look back. Repeat twice. Then let me hook you up on a polygraph and ask you if the numbers changed. Fair enough?

Originally Posted by MrDee

I am actually attending courses on this exact phenomenon and have recently just passed phase one. Due to my utmost interest and progress I have been invited to skip phase 2 and go onto phase 3 which entails deep meditation, and astral projection. and from what Ive heard from friends also attending these courses. They experienced the folowing:

Just to let you know, I also have friends who claim extraordinary things.

An object was hidden in the back yard of a house close to the training center and nobody knew about this object, during their training that day they were shown a map from the training hall to the house as well as a picture of the house (without the object being in the picture of course). they were then told to astral project and go look at what object was behind the house. after 30 minutes of silence they were asked to write wat they saw behind the yard. All those who gave answers got it right. the few who didnt answer said they couldnt get that far away from their physical body due to fear etc.

Yes, of course, this is the perfect scenario. A man/woman leaves his/her body and brings back information; a drawing, a hidden object, a secret message, etc. etc.

The problem is this: Where the heck can I read a successful study about such a thing? Where are the sources for the info you just posted here? Is there any link at all you can provide? Who directed the experiment? Was this a controlled study?

I have however not had first hand experience and I hope this thread will be open by the time I am done so that i can give proper feedback. I am hoping that astral projection is real. because you can do so much with a skill like that. But I am not afraid to find out and post my honest answer, and being able to LD is all so new and I have still so much to learn that even that is awesum enough to be real.

Well, even though it does sound awesum, I suggest taking a look at this: Challenge Info

So if your friends can repeat the things they claim they did at this "AP course", they will be able pick up 1 million dollars from the James Randi Foundation and become famous. Why not do it? (Now this is most likely where the "money is unimportant to them" part comes in.)

Now, shadowofwind, I think your post is great, and I appreciate you taking the time to write such a lengthy post. I will respond to you tonight when I have more time.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

Again, same as I said above. Nothing to do with expectation. It has to do with your brain being able to comprehend things. Some are more active while asleep, while others are less active. That's why we act like complete idiots in our dreams many times, thinking that it is normal, or maybe just a "little odd" that a cat is talking to us, or that we have 6 or 7 toes.

Yes, reading is possible in dreams, but re-reading is an entirely different matter, for the reasons above. Sure, I myself was able to read sentences in an LD and remember them clearly. But looking back at those sentences they were already slightly changing. By the third and fourth time it was something completely different. Fact check: There is no text in your dreams, and there is no digital clock either. And the "finer", or more detailed your dream objects are, the more "fluid" they will be.

Next time you, flowofmysoul, become lucid in a dream... please stand in front of a digital clock. Remember the numbers, look away, look back. Repeat twice. Then let me hook you up on a polygraph and ask you if the numbers changed. Fair enough?

I agree, you can connect polygraph, i will read same clock as many times as you want, numbers will be the ones that i want. Same for text in books, if i will be able to read them first time, then i would re-read it again easily if i turn away and look back.

Trust me its is your prepossession which makes your numbers change, if you try to read the same numbers - somewhere inside you will keep the idea that it will not be the same.

Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

I agree, you can connect polygraph, i will read same clock as many times as you want, numbers will be the ones that i want. Same for text in books, if i will be able to read them first time, then i would re-read it again easily if i turn away and look back.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to test you with a polygraph. Of course you know that too.

And of course you know that you would fail the test miserably.

Trust me its is your prepossession which makes your numbers change, if you try to read the same numbers - somewhere inside you will keep the idea that it will not be the same.

Perhaps you meant to say presupposition -- and no, it's not my presupposition that makes the numbers change. It's the fact that:

1.) parts of my brain (and yours) which are responsible for these tasks are much less active in dreams,
2.) there is no external input upon which this text is based,
3.) your brain has to re-create the numbers and/or word/sentence each time you "look back".

The reason why numbers on the clock change is not because of our expectation, but because of the fact that there is no clock, and there is no text. Your mind creates and re-creates it, everytime you look at it, and look back. The brain creates your "text" without any external source, without external input of visual information, and therefore this text is unstable. For some individuals it might be more stable than others, and also depending on how vivid the dream is, but to claim your dream text is completely stable and you that therefore you have difficulty using it as a realty test is pure and simply bull.

So thanks but not thanks, I will not "trust" you that it is my presupposition. I have noticed unstable text in my dreams long before I knew what reality tests are.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

Unfortunately, I won't be able to test you with a polygraph. Of course you know that too.

And of course you know that you would fail the test miserably.


Perhaps you meant to say presupposition -- and no, it's not my presupposition that makes the numbers change. It's the fact that:

1.) parts of my brain (and yours) which are responsible for these tasks are much less active in dreams,
2.) there is no external input upon which this text is based,
3.) your brain has to re-create the numbers and/or word/sentence each time you "look back".

The reason why numbers on the clock change is not because of our expectation, but because of the fact that there is no clock, and there is no text. Your mind creates and re-creates it, everytime you look at it, and look back. The brain creates your "text" without any external source, without external input of visual information, and therefore this text is unstable. For some individuals it might be more stable than others, and also depending on how vivid the dream is, but to claim your dream text is completely stable and you that therefore you have difficulty using it as a realty test is pure and simply bull.

So thanks but not thanks, I will not "trust" you that it is my presupposition. I have noticed unstable text in my dreams long before I knew what reality tests are.

I will stick to my understanding. What you are saying does not comply to what i experience, that is the only reason why i will not agree with you. I hope one day you will turn back and see the same time again and again, then come back to this conversation and try to find where you did mistake.

Hello shadowofwind, and thanks for making this lengthy and quality post. There are some things which we agree on, and other things on which we disagree. Allow me to comment on the following.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I think astral travel is best understood as a type of lucid dream. This is a misleading statement though, in that a lucid dream isn't a simple, indivisible experience. There are multiple things going on at the same time, and these aren't the same in every lucid dream.

But if that is truly so, then why use the term astral projection if it is only to describe a lucid dream? We know the definition of astral projection: "Astral projection or travel denotes the astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the astral plane." So for astral projection to exist, there must be an astral plane, and an astral body. In lucid dreaming these terms are unimportant.

In a typical lucid dream, if there is such a thing, a person imagines themselves operating a body in an environment projected by their imagination. This is much like waking life, except that when awake the imagined environment is projected more involuntarily, and the projection incorporates current sensory data. In waking life it is still an internal projection though. Missing data is filled in, the experience of color is approximately mapped to the wavelength spectra of sensed light (which does not have color), and this is integrated with data from other senses along with educated guesses about relationships between objects and how those are changing.

In a typical lucid dream, very little of the imagined scene is tied to current sense data. In a typical astral projection experience, the imagined scene is imagined to correspond to one's sleeping environment, and may or may not include more current sensate data than other lucid dreams do.

Hmm, I'm not sure I see a difference. I always operate a body in every dream. Have you ever pondered that you are simply having two different types lucid dreams? One that is with a body, and one without? I have had WILDs which are phenomenal, where I begin to see an almost exact replica of my bedroom through my eyelids. Then I just get up with my dream body. I just don't call it astral projection because I have no evidence that I am in any sort of astral plane or any other dimension. That's why I find the claim "astral projection" pretty out there, because I see absolutely no evidence that this is anything else than a dream.

My sense of time while asleep is somehow remarkably better than while awake, and I know what time it is to within a couple of seconds. By 'know' I mean that I'm capable of waking up at exactly a specified time, even though I don't know how that works, and don't know whether or not that awareness could be used to control a clock face. If I did your clock test and it passed, that still wouldn't imply that I'm not imagining the clock without aid of sensory data, I could just be remembering what time it should be. And if I did the clock test and it failed, all this would prove is that my projected 'external' environment is not true to how I would 'see' it if awake. That's the result you're interested in, but it doesn't really answer the question of whether astral projection is different from other lucid dreams, because there's more going on than that.

I agree that the imagined environment during astral projection mostly lacks sensory data, and most tests akin to the clock test will usually fail.

I agree with this last sentence, but not with what you wrote previously. It has nothing to do with your sense of time. The point is to find something smaller, something very fine, very detailed that will "stress" the brain so-to-speak. Because if text is unstable, and if fine details (such as hairs, buttons, complex logos, complex pictures etc.) are unstable... doesn't this tell you that your brain is having a hard time keeping them stable? It is only the smaller more detailed things that are changing. Why doesn't a chair turn into a leather couch when you look back at it? Doesn't it tell you that your environment is a construct of your mind?

Why would a word even be unstable on the astral plane, when we have people (such as in this very same thread) who claim that astral travelers can find hidden objects located in the real world, simply through astral travel?

I very rarely imagine having a body when lucid dreaming. If there's a visual scene at all, I'm just a point in that scene, or on rare occasions multiple points simultaneously. During 'astral projection' I'm wide awake in my usual waking life tactile experience, except that my tactile model of my body's location is not synchronized with the sensory information I'm getting about where my body actually is. So I can separate the two, which is what the 'astral projection' is.

I always have a body when lucid dreaming. I cannot even imagine the feeling to have a dream without a body. Even in my weakest most blurry and non-lucid dreams, I still have a body.

In my lucid dreams I always have a body from head to toe, except if I inspect my hands more clearly I will notice a 6th or 7th finger. This is a reality test that you could also use during your "AP" experiences. Why not?

As far as things like being able to fly through the night and haunt astral projection skeptics, I can't do anything with astral projection that I can't do in any other lucid dream. But I haven't really explored that sort of thing. In general I never repeat dream experiences, and for a variety of reasons I don't cultivate either 'astral' or controlled 'lucid' experiences.

Fair enough.

In one of my 'astral' experiences I inverted my spatial map, one hemisphere of my head at a time, so that inside was outside and outside was inside. That was pretty weird, and I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream.

Don't be too sure about that. People have been able to shapeshift into animals, literally feel they're a bird, a cat, or a dog. They've been able to grow more limbs, shrink themselves, make themselves into giants, and do lots of other things.

I visualized an imagined object from multiple directions at once. As far as I know that would be possible during astral projection also though. I've experienced things from other perspectives besides my own. This I think is easier during a lucid dream, because a person has more control over the sensate experience, which is metaphorically useful. I've had a lot of remarkably accurate premonitions, but that's another topic. Now that I think of it though, I did have one accurate premonition in an 'astral' type of dream, and its probably equally possible there, though the form it would have to take would generally be different, since the content of the experience is different. I have almost nothing in the way of a "mind's eye" while awake, and that would be true for me in an "astral" experience also.

Instead of warping my mental model of where my body is, I can project my first person visual standpoint to what would usually be a subconsciously imagined third person perspective. That kind of perspective is part of what gives a person an awareness of how they look from other points in their surrounding environment. But if the first person visual imagination is projected to it, this corresponds to an out of body experience. This is the distinction I make between AP and OBE, though experiences can blend aspects of both. To say that again, astral projection is when you warp your sense of where your physical body is, separating it from where your physical body actually is. When people describe out-of-body experiences, such as when near death, what they describe usually seems to me to be more like transferring one's subjective first-person visual standpoint to what would normally be a third person standpoint. In other words, it uses a different part of one's mostly involuntary model of one's environment, though its the same in other regards, and these different aspects can be blended.

I haven't tried this myself, but I've heard of people shifting their perspective and doing similar things like you describe. I don't see anything spectacular about this.

There seems to be an implication in a lot of these questions, and in the subsequent comments, that something is only objectively real if it is seen in a way that is consistent with what other people see. I don't think this is a reasonable perspective. When you see that something is red, for instance, you actually don't know anything about the 'wavelengths of light', you're just assuming that there's a fairly accurate correspondence between the appearance and the actual radiated and reflected spectra...

No the question is very simple actually. Have you noticed any difference in the behavior of dream characters vs. the behavior of characters during an AP experience? Because if we want to talk about astral projection vs. lucid dreaming, we first have to define what astral projection actually means. It should mean that there is an astral body and an astral plane, and consequently it would have to mean that our environment during an AP experience is definitely NOT the construct of our mind. So if characters during AP are not a construct of our mind, they would have to be other beings, perhaps astral beings. Surely there must be a difference in behavior between the two, or am I wrong?

Behind any image in a dream there are impressions of thought, desire, and identity related to the image. I mentioned that my dreams aren't very visual or audial, its mostly impressions like that. End even where there is a clear 'dream character' the appearance of the character is a pretty small part of the experience. Most of the impression of the nature of what is being dreamed isn't in the appearance. And the 'dream character' doesn't represent a single person or personality, it expresses aspects of myself, several other people I know, and various abstract principles. There also aren't clear delineations between different characters. My first person perspective jumps around, the number of characters representing the different aspects of an interaction can change, and the genders can change from one second to the next as the content of my attention shifts slightly from one aspect of what is being represented to another. Its not very much like waking life in that regard, at least not on anything like the same timescale. So when you ask how dream characters behave....its really not quite like that. And yet I do often experience the presence of identity that is outside of what I would normally think of as 'myself', even though there aren't any clear lines that separate that from myself. I 'feel' the difference in identity, which isn't a description you like, but I often have objective checks on that feeling, and learn the extent to which I can trust it based on how the experiences connected with subsequent waking life experiences.

My point is that an AP dream character would not be an aspect of yourself, or of several other people you know, because the AP world is not the dream world. But if you deny the existence of an astral plane, astral body, and astral "beings", then it makes no sense to call this experience astral projection. It would make sense to call it a lucid dream.

In summary, I don't think the 'beings' in my dreams are going to be any different than the 'beings' in my astral experiences, because the distinction between the astral experiences and the other dream experiences is relatively superficial compared to the main content in regard to those 'beings'. But in either case, I don't divide things into strict categories like 'dream characters' or 'angels' or 'shadow people' or 'demons' or 'suppressed parts of my own personality', its all more fluid than that.

I understand what you are saying, but my questions were really meant for those who believe in special astral beings and who view astral projection as another dimension which is completely different from a lucid dream. So if an astral plane does exist, then who is the neighbor you see on the balcony? Who is your sister who is sitting in the living room? Are they astral versions of these real people? What is the evidence that they aren't regular dream characters? I hope you see where I'm going with this.

I don't think this question makes any sense in the context of my thought of what astral projection is. And maybe it doesn't even make sense to other people who believe they have 'astral bodies' made up of "astral matter", since most of those people will attribute a similar kind of reality to what they think of as a "dream plane" during other lucid dreaming. Just like the name says, the experience is astral, its not a physical experience.

You are right, but only if you view AP as a "sort of" lucid dream or different type of lucid dream. Most other people unfortunately don't see it that way. We even have a person in this thread who claims that people can find hidden objects in reality through astral projection. We have people who claim they talk to otherworldy beings during AP. We have people who claim LDs have absolutely nothing to do with AP.

The environment a person is aware of in that state has a connection to the physical environment, but its not the same thing. When they call the experience "astral", to distinguish it from other lucid dreams, they're saying something to characterize the nature of the experience. How can it not really be how they experience it? That's like asking "have you ever had a nightmare that turned out not to be a nightmare?" Or "have you ever seen a color that wasn't really a color?" Like I pointed out earlier, everything you experience, even during waking life, is in your imagination, even though there is usually a fairly direct connection between what you imagine your external environment to be and what your external environment actually is. If someone were to ask "have you ever imagined something then it turned out to be real", or "have you ever thought something was real then it turned out to be imagined", they're asking questions about how well what you imagined corresponded to reality. But in a sense they're being a little bit sloppy with words, because everything you experience is an internally generated cartoon of your surroundings, irrespective of how useful and accurate that cartoon may or may not be. In that same sense there's no difference at all between a lucid dream or astral projection. But then there's no difference between that or waking life either. And yet we can make distinctions between all three of these things, because the relationship with the reality behind the experience is different in each case.

No, I will have to completely disagree here. We can differentiate between waking life and dream by doing simple tests which trick the brain, make it work hard to do some things, and then see the result and conclude if we are awake or asleep. Analyzing your fingers, re-reading text, looking at digital clocks, etc. can show you if you are sleeping or awake. Now what tests can we do to determine if we are located on the astral plane? Why does the astral plane have to be just as unstable as a lucid dream?

We have scientific evidence of lucid dreaming. Stephen LaBerge made people send eye-signals during REM sleep after gaining lucidity. We have controlled studies where LaBerge documented these things, as well as the fact that dream time is very close to real time as well. But what studies do we have as far as astral projection goes? Waking life is fact. Dreaming is fact. Lucid dreaming is fact as well. But what about astral beings, the astral plane and the astral body? What studies do we have on these things? A person in this thread talks about a course in which his friends participated, where people were able to find hidden objects through astral projection. So why do we only read about these spectacular tales on an internet forum? What is your comment about these claims? It seems to me that in this case, the astral plane is completely different from a lucid dream environment and is actually connected to the physical world. How else would someone be able to find a hidden object through this experience?

A problem with astral projection is that none of us understand the relationship with the reality behind the experience. It seems that some people imagine that they do, and talk about higher worlds and vibrations. But I don't think what they're saying actually makes detailed sense, to them or to anyone else. Just because we don't understand the experience doesn't mean that there's nothing there though, that its unreal except for the "lucid dream" aspect of it.

I view it very differently. I personally think that AP lovers are fascinated with the idea about there being a special world that is different from the normal dream world. This idea gives you many things to wonder about and fantasize, and it just sounds "cool." It is just cooler to leave your body and walk around than dream about leaving your body and walking around.

By saying this I'm not suggesting that I understand the whole story. I used to think I did, and I used to think that "astral projection" was "all in my head", based on the experiments I'd done. Then I had scores of other bizarre dream experiences that proved to me without a reasonable doubt that there is a lot to dreaming that is not "all in my head". So now I know that I probably don't understand astral projection either.

I respect your opinion, and I thank you for writing so much and making this great and honest post. I just think that you underestimate the power of dreams. They can really fool you and make you think you are experiencing something that is "above" a dream.

One more closing comment....You suggested that people often lie about this stuff, and that you want honest answers. I agree with you about this, that people often aren't honest, and I want honest answers too.

Yes, for example digital clock RCs and text is something that people frequently lie about, and it's mostly people who are AP/OBE-lovers. They do it I suppose only for one reason, and that is to make astral projection something "untestable". Because text is completely stable in their dreams, they cannot use it as a reliable test in AP. This kind of dishonesty makes me wanna puke. Text can be "more" or "less" stable, depending on how much you focus, how vivid the dream is, and how you are performing the test. But to claim it is completely stable all the time, and that you cannot use it as a reliable check... this is dishonesty, pure and simple. There is no external stimuli, there is no text, there is no clock. Your mind creates it and re-creates it everytime you look, and parts of the brain which are responsible for reading text are less active. So unless you are a superhuman, a digital clock will not read "14:47" three times you look at it.

I try very hard to be completely objective, and to give a balanced and truthful impression in everything I say. If I seem evasive in relation to some specific example, it may be because I'm trying to protect someone else's privacy, or because I'm trying to avoid adding confusion by saying something that I know will be misunderstood and which I don't have time to explain adequately at the moment. (My posts are way longer than practically anyone has time to read as it is, and arguably longer than I have time for myself.) But I'm never trying to present a distorted picture, hiding information that doesn't support the argument I'm taking. I instead adjust my view to fit the information, to the best of my ability. I won't mislead someone to try to get them to believe what I think is true. If I did that, I'd be cultivating a habit of deception, and almost immediately I'd be deceiving myself as well. Plus it pisses me off when people try to do that to me. So if I say something that seems dishonest, you can be almost 100% certain that either you're misunderstanding me, or missing other context such as personal experience that's similar to mine. Call me on it anyway if it looks dishonest to you, that's the most direct thing you can do. I'm just saying this in hopes of saving time if we're on the same page about this.

I thank you wholeheartedly for making such a long, wonderful post. I don't think it is dishonest at all, and I think the major difference between you and I is that we view astral projection differently. When I think AP I think "astral plane completely different than dream environment", "astral beings completely different from dream characters", and "astral body completely different than a dream body". I base my views upon books I've read, articles, and stories about AP on this very forum. You seem to view AP as a type of lucid dream. You don't talk much about astral beings or the astral plane, nor do you seem to believe that there is a connection between the astrale plane and the physical world. So your position doesn't seem to be the popular one that is circulating everywhere. That being said, I don't see any evidence that astral projection is anything other than a completely regular dream in which you dream you have separated from your body and that you're exploring another dimension. The purpose of this thread was to ask the questions to those who believe in the classic definition of astral projection. You don't seem to fit in this group, but I think your post was insightful nonetheless.

Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

I will stick to my understanding. What you are saying does not comply to what i experience, that is the only reason why i will not agree with you. I hope one day you will turn back and see the same time again and again, then come back to this conversation and try to find where you did mistake.

I have made no mistake, and neither did Stephen LaBerge in his findings regarding visual information in dreams. Text and numbers are unstable because of the reasons I cited, and not because of expectation.

And no text is the same. There is simple text and complex sentences. You are able to modify simple text using your expectation, ex: transform "Memo" into "Mama", but to keep text or numbers completely stable after looking back 3 times or more, this will not be possible. At least not for the 98% of "normal" people. For superhumans like yourself, it might be a different story.

In any case, please let's not divert this discussion into talk about RCs. Let's keep it on-topic, and the topic is the existence of the astral plane, astral body, and astral beings.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

I have made no mistake, and neither did Stephen LaBerge in his findings regarding visual information in dreams. Text and numbers are unstable because of the reasons I cited, and not because of expectation.

And no text is the same. There is simple text and complex sentences. You are able to modify simple text using your expectation, ex: transform "Memo" into "Mama", but to keep text or numbers completely stable after looking back 3 times or more, this will not be possible. At least not for the 98% of "normal" people. For superhumans like yourself, it might be a different story.

In any case, please let's not divert this discussion into talk about RCs. Let's keep it on-topic, and the topic is the existence of the astral plane, astral body, and astral beings.

Thanks.

As you wish, its your topic

Originally Posted by MrDee

Hi, I am pretty new to this site but find astral projection very fascinating.

I have recently started learning how to LD so that I can learn the difference between Ld and AP.

I am actually attending courses on this exact phenomenon and have recently just passed phase one. Due to my utmost interest and progress I have been invited to skip phase 2 and go onto phase 3 which entails deep meditation, and astral projection. and from what Ive heard from friends also attending these courses. They experienced the folowing:

An object was hidden in the back yard of a house close to the training center and nobody knew about this object, during their training that day they were shown a map from the training hall to the house as well as a picture of the house (without the object being in the picture of course). they were then told to astral project and go look at what object was behind the house. after 30 minutes of silence they were asked to write wat they saw behind the yard. All those who gave answers got it right. the few who didnt answer said they couldnt get that far away from their physical body due to fear etc.

I have however not had first hand experience and I hope this thread will be open by the time I am done so that i can give proper feedback. I am hoping that astral projection is real. because you can do so much with a skill like that. But I am not afraid to find out and post my honest answer, and being able to LD is all so new and I have still so much to learn that even that is awesum enough to be real.

So according to your input.
If I hide an object in my garden, then you - on the other side of the world - guess correctly, the astral realm exists.
Would this be proof enough for the original poster ?
Or is this just a lucky guess.

Originally Posted by TiredPhil

So according to your input.
If I hide an object in my garden, then you - on the other side of the world - guess correctly, the astral realm exists.
Would this be proof enough for the original poster ?
Or is this just a lucky guess.

For me that would demonstrate knowledge at a distance, but would not tell us anything about the existence of an astral realm. I'm already completely convinced about knowledge at a distance, but have no knowledge of anything astral.

By way of analogy, in former times, non-visible light was thought by many to be 'astral'. Demonstrating the existence of non-visible light did not demonstrate anything about other realms.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

For me that would demonstrate knowledge at a distance, but would not tell us anything about the existence of an astral realm. I'm already completely convinced about knowledge at a distance, but have no knowledge of anything astral.

By way of analogy, in former times, non-visible light was thought by many to be 'astral'. Demonstrating the existence of non-visible light did not demonstrate anything about other realms.

Hypothetical situation
So, tonight I go into the Astral Plane for real.
What piece of information could I bring back that would prove to you the Astral Plane exists.

Originally Posted by TiredPhil

So according to your input.
If I hide an object in my garden, then you - on the other side of the world - guess correctly, the astral realm exists.
Would this be proof enough for the original poster ?
Or is this just a lucky guess.

It would be enough to demonstrate psychic phenomena and get 1 million dollars offered by the James Randi Foundation.

And yes, it would be enough evidence for me.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

It would be enough to demonstrate psychic phenomena and get 1 million dollars offered by the James Randi Foundation.

And yes, it would be enough evidence for me.

Actually that's not even remotely good enough to satisfy the requirements for the Randi challenge, if you read the fine print.

If you want evidence of paranormal phenomena we could try sharing something in a dream. I've had about a 30% success rate with this with people on Dreamviews. I'll send a private message later.

I'm not ignoring your other post, I'm still at work and will read it later.

Originally Posted by TiredPhil

Hypothetical situation
So, tonight I go into the Astral Plane for real.
What piece of information could I bring back that would prove to you the Astral Plane exists.

Some kind of result that aids understanding of what the astral plane actually is. I have no idea what that might be. Remote viewing or accurate premonition doesn't do that, unless the result has some peculiar characteristic that sheds new light on how it works. Ask for help I guess.

About 6 months ago it was suggested to me in a dream that I should think about why my impression from the narrator isn't time reversed, and that this would aid my understanding of 'astral'. Not knowing what else to do about that, I thought about why an image is reversed in a mirror, since the astral plane is said to be a mirror of the physical plane and also of the 'thought' plane. The result of my thinking about that is I now understand that objects aren't actually reversed by a mirror. (The print on a book, for example, is reversed because you turn the book around to face the mirror. Its reversed because you turned it around, not by the mirror. If the words are printed on a transparent piece of plastic and you hold that up, then they look exactly the same in the mirror as they do to you.) So now I'm marginally less stupid about mirrors, but as far as I know I don't understand the 'astral plane' any better.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

why use the term astral projection if it is only to describe a lucid dream? We know the definition of astral projection: "Astral projection or travel denotes the astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the astral plane." So for astral projection to exist, there must be an astral plane, and an astral body.

I don't think that's a very meaningful definition, it has too many implied assumptions built into it. People have taken the experience at face value without understanding it and built a whole theological fantasy out of it. The experience they're referring to isn't just like another lucid dream though. I'll say a little bit more about this. I also think that your thought about what an 'astral plane' would be is really a lot different than what other people are talking about, and that accounts for a lot of misunderstanding. I'll say more about that later.

Some of my lucid dreams are more visually vivid than in waking life, and my cognitive abilities are pretty good too in those dreams, though the range of things that it can occur to me to think about is typically more restricted. The easiest way for me to tell that those are 'dreams' is my peripheral vision is never as good as in waking life, even though the vision straight ahead may be better than in waking life.

During astral projection, I can feel my so-called 'astral' body separating from my physical body. Its a remarkable feeling, hard to describe because there's nothing else to compare it to. I could suggest imagining your astral and physical bodies are stuck together at every atom by van der Waals forces, and you feel the separation in every bit of you. But of course that's not a very good description because we don't know what that would feel like, and it probably doesn't make much sense anyway. But as I experience it its not very much like flying around a lucid dream replica of my room. So irrespective of the true nature of what is happening, whether its "really just a type of lucid dream" or whatever, we need some kind of phrase to describe the experience, to distinguish it from those other experiences. So we call it astral projection. The experience is definitely a kind of projection, and we can define the subjective 'body' that we project as "astral", even though we don't have any idea what that means. The assumptions of there being some kind of "astral matter" or "astral plane" don't necessarily follow from that.

Despite the extreme visual clarity of a lucid dream, for me there's still something discernibly fake about the experience. It may look real and even feel real to the sense of touch, and there may be powerful emotions, but in a way it doesn't seem real. Its as if I know the story in the dream isn't true. Actually waking life is like this for me too. When I look around my desk here I don't merely intellectually understand that my image of it is a mental projection, it seems that way to me to, it doesn't seem like the real thing. With astral projection its the opposite. Its as if I'm not looking at an embellished cartoon image of my surroundings any more, its as if that layer of insulation has been stripped away and I'm in more direct contact with it. Like I'm seeing it directly, not something reconstructed from what passed through a lens. This is by far the most remarkable aspect of the experience, and that aspect is there even if I don't separate the two bodies. I can hear too in that state, but its not like hearing in any other lucid dream, or in waking life. Its as if I can hear the unseen spirit of the house that normally I would just feel. Very creepy, particularly in an old house. And it never completely goes away afterwards, because afterwards you can recognize the feeling more clearly in waking life also, even though the astral sights and sounds are no longer present, irrespective of what reality you may or may not attribute to it. I'll say more later on what I mean by 'astral sights'.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

Hmm, I'm not sure I see a difference. I always operate a body in every dream. Have you ever pondered that you are simply having two different types lucid dreams? One that is with a body, and one without? I have had WILDs which are phenomenal, where I begin to see an almost exact replica of my bedroom through my eyelids. Then I just get up with my dream body. I just don't call it astral projection because I have no evidence that I am in any sort of astral plane or any other dimension. That's why I find the claim "astral projection" pretty out there, because I see absolutely no evidence that this is anything else than a dream.

It doesn't sound to me like we're talking about the same thing. I think that if you had the kind of astral projection experience that I'm talking about, you might still understand it as a form of lucid dream, but you would also understand why many other people don't regard it as a lucid dream.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

I agree with this last sentence, but not with what you wrote previously. It has nothing to do with your sense of time. The point is to find something smaller, something very fine, very detailed that will "stress" the brain so-to-speak. Because if text is unstable, and if fine details (such as hairs, buttons, complex logos, complex pictures etc.) are unstable... doesn't this tell you that your brain is having a hard time keeping them stable? It is only the smaller more detailed things that are changing. Why doesn't a chair turn into a leather couch when you look back at it? Doesn't it tell you that your environment is a construct of your mind?

I think you're making a lot of assumptions about how other people lucid dream. Its not necessarily very much like what you experience, or very much the people some credentialed dreaming experts somewhere have gotten hold of.

Also, in my experience there's another notable difference between how I experience the room in an 'astral' dream, and how I would experience it in a lucid dream. In a lucid dream, it looks just like the real room, but with bad peripheral vision as I mentioned. I also can't sustain that degree of visual lucidity for very long, it seems some crucial chemical in my brain runs out or something. In the astral experience, its not the room that seems 'astral'. The image of the room itself is like that of a lucid dream, or of a waking life experience. But there's other wispy stuff superimposed on it, almost like everything has an aura, and you can see and hear things that might vaguely remind you of 'energy life forms' in a Star Trek show or something, but with even less substance and form than that. At night I guess this would be all shadowy, but my experiences have been during the day. Again, the room itself seems like the room of a lucid dream, but then there's that other stuff too. And it seems remarkably real, like the story is true, not like a dream.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

Why would a word even be unstable on the astral plane, when we have people (such as in this very same thread) who claim that astral travelers can find hidden objects located in the real world, simply through astral travel?

What I'm calling astral, in whatever sense its real, is like a different kind of realm, or maybe a very different way of seeing in the physical realm. If you're talking about a word being stable or unstable, that's not the same kind of realm. This 'astral' plane is not the same as what people call the 'dream plane', and the astral body is not what people call the dream body. I've never even encountered anyone who regards them as the same. Even in waking life, right now, if I think about them within my own physical body, they don't feel the same. The dream body is more mental, in the imagination, even though spatially you imagine it to be where you imagine your body to be. It sort of floats. The astral body is more like something that is deeply a part of the physical body, in your nerves, but you're not aware of it because your mind is turned away from it somehow. If it could be suddenly gone you would notice the difference though. Note that I'm not attempting to interpret what any of this means, I'm just trying to describe the experience.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

I always have a body when lucid dreaming. I cannot even imagine the feeling to have a dream without a body. Even in my weakest most blurry and non-lucid dreams, I still have a body.

So we've established a way in which your lucid dreams are notably different from mine, so we shouldn't be surprised if there are other differences too, such as with clock experiments.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

In my lucid dreams I always have a body from head to toe, except if I inspect my hands more clearly I will notice a 6th or 7th finger. This is a reality test that you could also use during your "AP" experiences. Why not?

My experiences are largely involuntary. I ask a question, and my subconscious constructs an experience that attempts to answer the question. Though this might almost sound schizophrenic, the respect I have for that process is part of what has enabled me to have experiences that most people haven't had. We're not doing astral projection experiences right now, we're not interested, and I can't really force that interest. (I actually don't think that repeated astral projection is a very good idea for my development, though I don't want to get sidetracked onto that right now, since this is a complex enough discussion already. It would be like training as a contortionist when your goal is to play basketball at a high level.) I can say with some confidence though that if I ever had more than five fingers in a dream, there would be a definite reason for it, that it wouldn't just drift around like that without being tightly tied into my thought process in the dream. It also doesn't seem to fit the astral projection experience. The feeling of the astral body is deeply precise and intimate. Having an extra finger just wouldn't fit at all. The experience isn't vague enough for something like that to randomly drift about like that.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

Don't be too sure about that. People have been able to shapeshift into animals, literally feel they're a bird, a cat, or a dog. They've been able to grow more limbs, shrink themselves, make themselves into giants, and do lots of other things.

What I said was "I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream". I didn't say I couldn't do it, and wasn't trying to make a point about how astral projection is or is not fundamentally different from lucid dreaming, I was just answering the question. But shapeshifting is a notably different type of transformation than reversing 'inside' and 'outside', even though both are transformations. And given that I almost never even experience having a body in a lucid dream, I think that I'm a better judge than you of what I can do in a lucid dream than you are, which is all I was talking about.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

I haven't tried this myself, but I've heard of people shifting their perspective and doing similar things like you describe. I don't see anything spectacular about this.

I didn't go into very much detail about what I mean by shifting perspective, since its a bit off topic. Its possible to get actual extra-sensory information that way, and from what you've said you would regard that as spectacular.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

No the question is very simple actually. Have you noticed any difference in the behavior of dream characters vs. the behavior of characters during an AP experience? Because if we want to talk about astral projection vs. lucid dreaming, we first have to define what astral projection actually means. It should mean that there is an astral body and an astral plane, and consequently it would have to mean that our environment during an AP experience is definitely NOT the construct of our mind. So if characters during AP are not a construct of our mind, they would have to be other beings, perhaps astral beings. Surely there must be a difference in behavior between the two, or am I wrong?

I think that there are assumptions here about what it means for something to be a construct of the mind, and assumptions of similarity between astral planes and dream planes, so that we may compare the 'characters' of each. I don't think that the 'astral plane' has 'characters'. That would be sort of like thinking that the "color plane" has characters, or the "electromagnetic plane" has characters. The word "plane" is actually a terrible analogy I think. Years ago everyone learned geometry in high school, so when theosophists constructed their half-plagiarized cosmogony, they built it out of spheres and planes because those are the ideas they had available for visualization. But in my experience I can't find anything that's even remotely like a higher 'plane'. So I can't discuss differences in behavior because there are not astral "characters" that I'm aware of. I have had some remarkable experiences with entities that seem not to exist as fixed individuals or in any particular place. But these aren't "astral", and I think it goes quite a bit beyond the distinctions made between astral and lucid dream. It would be like arguing who is or who isn't a great mind based on what clothes they are wearing.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

My point is that an AP dream character would not be an aspect of yourself, or of several other people you know, because the AP world is not the dream world. But if you deny the existence of an astral plane, astral body, and astral "beings", then it makes no sense to call this experience astral projection. It would make sense to call it a lucid dream.

It seems to me that you're trying to draw conclusions based on a logical manipulation of definitions that are inappropriate for what other people experience and are trying to talk about. Like I tried to say earlier, the dream character is the tip of an iceberg. The astral experience is distinct from other lucid experiences, but is also the tip of an iceberg. If we start talking about shared identity or archetypes or something, that doesn't really mean anything in either context. The lucid dream character is just an image, just a moving picture. The astral experience is limited in similar ways too.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

I understand what you are saying, but my questions were really meant for those who believe in special astral beings and who view astral projection as another dimension which is completely different from a lucid dream. So if an astral plane does exist, then who is the neighbor you see on the balcony? Who is your sister who is sitting in the living room? Are they astral versions of these real people? What is the evidence that they aren't regular dream characters? I hope you see where I'm going with this.

I think these comparisons are between incomparably different classes of things. "Astral entity" and "lucid dream character" really aren't two different things that can be conflated, as if one looks like the other but they behave differently somehow. The "dream plane" and the "astral plane" are almost as different as algebra and geometry. The reason I said that astral projection is like a kind of lucid dream, is because the mental faculty, so to speak, that you use to make the movie-like touch and sight and sound experience is largely the same. But the underlying ideas and experiences are different, just as the physical world is quite distinct from the "dream world" even though you use your imagination, voluntarily and involuntarily, to represent both of them.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

You are right, but only if you view AP as a "sort of" lucid dream or different type of lucid dream. Most other people unfortunately don't see it that way. We even have a person in this thread who claims that people can find hidden objects in reality through astral projection. We have people who claim they talk to otherworldy beings during AP. We have people who claim LDs have absolutely nothing to do with AP.

Although I disagree with all of those people about all kinds of things, I don't think that their claims are as unreasonable as they appear to be though your current set of assumptions about what all these things mean and how they might work.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

No, I will have to completely disagree here. We can differentiate between waking life and dream by doing simple tests which trick the brain, make it work hard to do some things, and then see the result and conclude if we are awake or asleep. Analyzing your fingers, re-reading text, looking at digital clocks, etc. can show you if you are sleeping or awake. Now what tests can we do to determine if we are located on the astral plane? Why does the astral plane have to be just as unstable as a lucid dream?

You are never "located" on the astral plane, it is not that kind of thing. The words we're using here were all invented to describe things in the physical world. Applied to other subjects, they're at best very bad metaphors. Its a different kind of problem, requiring different kinds of tests. Few of the tests that distinguish between "dreaming" and "awake" are very useful here. Most of those tests will tell you that you're dreaming, but then you're missing the point, because the difference between "dreaming" and "awake" is a fairly superficial distinction between what you're doing with one part of your mind and your senses. The "physical" part of the astral experience resembles a lucid dream because you don't in fact have information coming in through your eyes that you can use, so you're apt to project it in almost exactly the same manner. But that's only one aspect of the experience.

I said that I've experienced a reversal of "inside" and "outside", and also that I've seen something from several sides at once, focused as a single unified visual experience of group of objects seen from no particular vantagepoint. If you think about what that really says, I don't see why you wouldn't find it remarkable, it takes your mind into a space that's topologically different than our external world as we usually perceive it. When you're not as locked into your former assumptions about objects and space and objectivity and subjectivity, then you can have experiences that weren't possible earlier. This is why I can't understand "astral", I'm too locked into my own box that way. But I've taken some steps in that direction, so I try to share some of the ideas that were steps towards other experiences for me, and sometimes you can repeat something after you've heard about it and you've thought about it.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

We have scientific evidence of lucid dreaming. Stephen LaBerge made people send eye-signals during REM sleep after gaining lucidity. We have controlled studies where LaBerge documented these things, as well as the fact that dream time is very close to real time as well. But what studies do we have as far as astral projection goes? Waking life is fact. Dreaming is fact. Lucid dreaming is fact as well. But what about astral beings, the astral plane and the astral body? What studies do we have on these things? A person in this thread talks about a course in which his friends participated, where people were able to find hidden objects through astral projection. So why do we only read about these spectacular tales on an internet forum? What is your comment about these claims? It seems to me that in this case, the astral plane is completely different from a lucid dream environment and is actually connected to the physical world. How else would someone be able to find a hidden object through this experience?

So you wouldn't believe in lucid dreaming unless there had been a scientific study? It wouldn't be a "fact"? Of course you shouldn't believe it if you have no evidence for it, but you have a lot of evidence besides those scientific studies. A generation ago, if you were a lucid dreamer, and other people didn't believe you, you'd be in almost exactly the same situation as the "astral projection" people are in.

I have actually sent e-mails to numerous academic dream experts, but couldn't find anyone interested in studying the dream phenomena I know something about. These phenomena are very difficult to set up controlled experiments for. So even academics who believe in them don't study them, because it doesn't support a line of research that they can get sustained funding for. They have to pay their bills just like everyone else.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

I view it very differently. I personally think that AP lovers are fascinated with the idea about there being a special world that is different from the normal dream world. This idea gives you many things to wonder about and fantasize, and it just sounds "cool." It is just cooler to leave your body and walk around than dream about leaving your body and walking around.

I think there's an element of truth in your hypothesis there, but its not the whole truth. Hopefully I can demolish it by helping provide you with additional facts that don't support it.

[Chopping some stuff out from here on to save time.]

Originally Posted by Empedocles

Yes, for example digital clock RCs and text is something that people frequently lie about, and it's mostly people who are AP/OBE-lovers. They do it I suppose only for one reason, and that is to make astral projection something "untestable". Because text is completely stable in their dreams, they cannot use it as a reliable test in AP. This kind of dishonesty makes me wanna puke.

I think your educated guess about their motivations is failing you a bit here. Maybe some people are doing what you say. They aren't all doing that though. Your lucid dream experiences are very much different from mine, we've only scratched the surface of how different they are. The clock experiment doesn't actually make much sense in my world. That doesn't mean that its a bad idea. But there's really a lot of variation in people's experiences, and you can't transfer what makes sense in your dream world to other people's.

The reason the test doesn't work well for me, is I put almost all of my "lucidity" effort into intuitive and abstract cognitive awareness. I almost completely ignore the video-game aspect of the dream, I don't even bother to support it. And I don't try to control any of it. If I was controlling it, I wouldn't be able to have cool experiences like seeing things from several directions at once, because I would have no idea how to go about doing something like that. My subconscious controls that stuff. And my subconscious is strong enough that I'd be absolutely shocked if it can't stabilize a clock face. That doesn't even make sense to me. Have you ever looked at a mountain peak several kilometers away or so, behind another peak slightly closer? Both look comparably far away, but they're far enough from each other that if you move your head back and forth you can see one moving against the other, eclipsing individual trees and rocks. My lucid dreams are stable enough that I've been able to do that experiment, back and forth and back and forth, without any discernible shift in the scene. Aside from nature and urban scenes, I've also done something similar with the crosswork of steel beams on a suspension bridge, moving against each other as I walk. There's just no way that a clock face won't stay still. Everything in these kinds of dreams is stable like that. But "I", as the first person witness in the dream, am not keeping it still, I'm trusting that other more mysterious part of myself to do it. My astral projection experiences were all created in this manner also. Most people don't have that kind of approach to dreams, they control the dream "themselves" from their first person vantagepoint. But I find it completely plausible that other people can keep a clock face stable, even people who don't believe in astral projection. There will tend to be consistent dream capability differences between astral projection people and lucid dreamers more like yourself though, because those are the same differences that produce the astral projection experience for them and not for you. I'm not saying that one is "better" than the other, just that there are tradeoffs. My way, which is different from their way or your way, is bad for dream control, but good for producing a fairly wide range of exotic experiences to think about. So we learn different kinds of things.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

There is no external stimuli, there is no text, there is no clock. Your mind creates it and re-creates it everytime you look, and parts of the brain which are responsible for reading text are less active. So unless you are a superhuman, a digital clock will not read "14:47" three times you look at it.

My mind creates it ahead of time, almost like playing a recording, though the 'ahead of time' and 'concurrent' concepts break down for many of my experiences also. Most of my "lucidity" goes into watching and thinking about the recording. If I try to control the story I'll mess up the most interesting parts of it. For me the clock will say 14:47 each time because that number has some essential significance to that particular dream, or it wouldn't even be in the dream. The visually precise dreams I described a minute ago were demonstrations of what my mind is capable of in terms of detail and stability. Other dreams wouldn't have a clock in them at all unless its important to the story being told. This is part of why I almost never have a body, its rarely relevant to the ideas I'm thinking about. Maybe if I took a more active role I'd be able to learn some new things, but somehow I just don't feel like it. That "active role" part of me is resting, and if I wanted to do something I'd just be awake so I could bring more of my faculties to bear on it. Actually most of the "carefully scripted story" aspect of the dream is gone now too, probably for a similar reason, I just don't do as much while asleep as I used to. It would seem sort of unnatural, like prying one part of my mind away from the other part, rather than bringing all my intelligence and will to bear on making my life work. Though I'm still a fool for mile long internet forum posts, apparently.

Originally Posted by Empedocles

When I think AP I think "astral plane completely different than dream environment", "astral beings completely different from dream characters", and "astral body completely different than a dream body". I base my views upon books I've read, articles, and stories about AP on this very forum.

Yeah you have to throw away most of that stuff. Suppose, by way of analogy, that an "astral realm" were a part of your everyday experience, and you wanted to find if that could tell you anything about natural history. Going and spending your time arguing with Christians about whether the earth is 6000 years old just wouldn't help you very much. They may be right about some things, but not the things you care about. Or even if they do know something relevant, its attached to other crap or obstacles that keep you from digesting it. Sometimes you have to focus on the ideas and interactions that you seem to be getting some traction with.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I don't think that's a very meaningful definition, it has too many implied assumptions built into it. People have taken the experience at face value without understanding it and built a whole theological fantasy out of it. The experience they're referring to isn't just like another lucid dream though. I'll say a little bit more about this. I also think that your thought about what an 'astral plane' would be is really a lot different than what other people are talking about, and that accounts for a lot of misunderstanding. I'll say more about that later.

I think this is the problem in our discussion. We simply cannot discuss astral projection if your definition differs so much from the standard popular one. However I'll respond to some things you said.

Some of my lucid dreams are more visually vivid than in waking life, and my cognitive abilities are pretty good too in those dreams, though the range of things that it can occur to me to think about is typically more restricted. The easiest way for me to tell that those are 'dreams' is my peripheral vision is never as good as in waking life, even though the vision straight ahead may be better than in waking life.

During astral projection, I can feel my so-called 'astral' body separating from my physical body. Its a remarkable feeling, hard to describe because there's nothing else to compare it to.

But there you go again with the "astral" body, yet at the same time you claim your definition of astral projection is different. Now my question is, have you ever thought that this remarkable hard-to-describe feeling is simply something that the dream creates? I mean, why the word astral? Why can't a dream produce these sensations? These spectacular sensations are part of the majority of my WILDs, if not 90% of them.

I could suggest imagining your astral and physical bodies are stuck together at every atom by van der Waals forces, and you feel the separation in every bit of you. But of course that's not a very good description because we don't know what that would feel like, and it probably doesn't make much sense anyway. But as I experience it its not very much like flying around a lucid dream replica of my room. So irrespective of the true nature of what is happening, whether its "really just a type of lucid dream" or whatever, we need some kind of phrase to describe the experience, to distinguish it from those other experiences. So we call it astral projection. The experience is definitely a kind of projection, and we can define the subjective 'body' that we project as "astral", even though we don't have any idea what that means. The assumptions of there being some kind of "astral matter" or "astral plane" don't necessarily follow from that.

But books about astral projection talk about an "astral plane". Or am I wrong? Isn't this in the majority of AP literature? So if we keep re-defining what AP actually is, then we can't really discuss it. When I talk about AP I mean the standard definition which is widely accepted: There is an astral plane into which we project our astral body.

Despite the extreme visual clarity of a lucid dream, for me there's still something discernibly fake about the experience. It may look real and even feel real to the sense of touch, and there may be powerful emotions, but in a way it doesn't seem real. Its as if I know the story in the dream isn't true. Actually waking life is like this for me too. When I look around my desk here I don't merely intellectually understand that my image of it is a mental projection, it seems that way to me to, it doesn't seem like the real thing. With astral projection its the opposite. Its as if I'm not looking at an embellished cartoon image of my surroundings any more, its as if that layer of insulation has been stripped away and I'm in more direct contact with it. Like I'm seeing it directly, not something reconstructed from what passed through a lens. This is by far the most remarkable aspect of the experience, and that aspect is there even if I don't separate the two bodies. I can hear too in that state, but its not like hearing in any other lucid dream, or in waking life.

But why not take into consideration that this is simply a more vivid lucid dream? I've had lucid dreams that are very blurry and unreal, and others which feel almost identical to waking life, then again others which seem somehow ABOVE the reality of waking life. I just don't feel the need to separate the more powerful dreams from the other ones and call them something other than dreams. They are simply better quality dreams - definitely not astral projection.

It doesn't sound to me like we're talking about the same thing. I think that if you had the kind of astral projection experience that I'm talking about, you might still understand it as a form of lucid dream, but you would also understand why many other people don't regard it as a lucid dream.

It's sort of like Occam's razor to me. If I am sleeping and experiencing something during the REM stage of sleep, however powerful or vivid it may seem, I am more likely to accept the simpler explanation - that it's nothing more than a dream.

I think you're making a lot of assumptions about how other people lucid dream. Its not necessarily very much like what you experience, or very much the people some credentialed dreaming experts somewhere have gotten hold of.

No, I just see a major difference as far as AP/OBE-fans are concerned. They are always the ones whose clocks never change in dreams. They're the ones who are 100% sure they talk to otherworldly beings and not regular dream characters, and they're the ones whose text is always completely stable in dreams.

Also, in my experience there's another notable difference between how I experience the room in an 'astral' dream, and how I would experience it in a lucid dream. In a lucid dream, it looks just like the real room, but with bad peripheral vision as I mentioned. I also can't sustain that degree of visual lucidity for very long, it seems some crucial chemical in my brain runs out or something. In the astral experience, its not the room that seems 'astral'. The image of the room itself is like that of a lucid dream, or of a waking life experience.

Again I have to point out that you seem to separate "lucid dream" and "astral experience" based on nothing but the feeling inside the dream. There is no good reason for you to accept that this is anything more than a dream, except for... as I said many times... the "it feels different" argument.

What I'm calling astral, in whatever sense its real, is like a different kind of realm, or maybe a very different way of seeing in the physical realm. If you're talking about a word being stable or unstable, that's not the same kind of realm. This 'astral' plane is not the same as what people call the 'dream plane', and the astral body is not what people call the dream body. I've never even encountered anyone who regards them as the same. Even in waking life, right now, if I think about them within my own physical body, they don't feel the same. The dream body is more mental, in the imagination, even though spatially you imagine it to be where you imagine your body to be. It sort of floats. The astral body is more like something that is deeply a part of the physical body, in your nerves, but you're not aware of it because your mind is turned away from it somehow. If it could be suddenly gone you would notice the difference though. Note that I'm not attempting to interpret what any of this means, I'm just trying to describe the experience.

But I have had experiences too in which my dreams seem MORE real than waking life. I just don't see any reason whatsoever to label them "astral".

So we've established a way in which your lucid dreams are notably different from mine, so we shouldn't be surprised if there are other differences too, such as with clock experiments.

I stand by what I said regarding digital clocks and text. I just don't buy it, sorry. I say what I say based on research and discussions with hundreds of experienced lucid dreamers through the last 12 years or so. Perhaps your clocks are more stable, but they are not completely stable. Not in a million years. No offense.

The feeling of the astral body is deeply precise and intimate.

Hmm, let me try it this way... what is an astral body?

What I said was "I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream". I didn't say I couldn't do it, and wasn't trying to make a point about how astral projection is or is not fundamentally different from lucid dreaming, I was just answering the question. But shapeshifting is a notably different type of transformation than reversing 'inside' and 'outside', even though both are transformations. And given that I almost never even experience having a body in a lucid dream, I think that I'm a better judge than you of what I can do in a lucid dream than you are, which is all I was talking about.

You seem to be thinking in reverse. You have somehow established the existence of some astral realm, or else you wouldn't be saying "I almost never even experience having a body in a lucid dream." I mean surely you don't think the brain can't create a dream in which you don't have a body? This seems to be your argument...

Lucid dream without a body = Lucid dream without body
Lucid dream with a body = Astral projection

But why can't "lucid dream with a body" be simply a "lucid dream with a body"? Why the word astral?

I don't like the fact that you play around too much with the definition of the word "astral". We cannot simply define it as something "odd" or "different feeling", when the widely understood definition simply means what it means. It does involve an astral body and it does involve an astral plane. How would you be able to discuss with someone the existence of God if that person defined God as not being the creator of the universe, but something totally different, using a vague definition that isn't really a definition at all? You wouldn't be able to discuss it normally.

I didn't go into very much detail about what I mean by shifting perspective, since its a bit off topic. Its possible to get actual extra-sensory information that way, and from what you've said you would regard that as spectacular.

If astral projection can be used to do remote viewing, of course I would regard it as spectacular. It would prove psychic abilities and would convince me personally of the existence of an astral realm, which is somehow connected to the physical realm.

I think that there are assumptions here about what it means for something to be a construct of the mind, and assumptions of similarity between astral planes and dream planes, so that we may compare the 'characters' of each. I don't think that the 'astral plane' has 'characters'. That would be sort of like thinking that the "color plane" has characters, or the "electromagnetic plane" has characters. The word "plane" is actually a terrible analogy I think.

But unfortunately it is what it is. Google astral projection, astral realm, astral plane, and astral body. I am talking about AP just as it is discussed in literature. If we define it to be something vague and hard-to-define, then we can't have a normal discussion.

It seems to me that you're trying to draw conclusions based on a logical manipulation of definitions that are inappropriate for what other people experience and are trying to talk about. Like I tried to say earlier, the dream character is the tip of an iceberg. The astral experience is distinct from other lucid experiences, but is also the tip of an iceberg. If we start talking about shared identity or archetypes or something, that doesn't really mean anything in either context. The lucid dream character is just an image, just a moving picture. The astral experience is limited in similar ways too.

But I don't see based on what do you believe that the so-called astral experience isn't simply a lucid experience? I think it is a huge stretch to call something "astral" simply because it feels more vivid, powerful, or transcendental.

You are never "located" on the astral plane, it is not that kind of thing.

If it is not a location, then how can someone on the astral plane allegedly gather information about hidden objects and similar things? Those are some of the spectacular tales I have read on this very forum.

I said that I've experienced a reversal of "inside" and "outside", and also that I've seen something from several sides at once, focused as a single unified visual experience of group of objects seen from no particular vantagepoint. If you think about what that really says, I don't see why you wouldn't find it remarkable, it takes your mind into a space that's topologically different than our external world as we usually perceive it. When you're not as locked into your former assumptions about objects and space and objectivity and subjectivity, then you can have experiences that weren't possible earlier. This is why I can't understand "astral", I'm too locked into my own box that way. But I've taken some steps in that direction, so I try to share some of the ideas that were steps towards other experiences for me, and sometimes you can repeat something after you've heard about it and you've thought about it.

I think a simple dream can re-create those same experiences and feelings. In fact I see absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.

So you wouldn't believe in lucid dreaming unless there had been a scientific study? It wouldn't be a "fact"? Of course you shouldn't believe it if you have no evidence for it, but you have a lot of evidence besides those scientific studies. A generation ago, if you were a lucid dreamer, and other people didn't believe you, you'd be in almost exactly the same situation as the "astral projection" people are in.

This is a different situation entirely. I read fantastic stories about astral travelers locating hidden object A located in room B, but don't see one controlled study where this is demonstrated. I am not ruling out it's existence, but I am simply not seeing anything that makes me believe in it. As far as astral projection without remote viewing goes, all I see is people describing lucid dreams I have been having for years. They just don't call them lucid dreams - they call them astral projection or OBEs.

The reason the test doesn't work well for me, is I put almost all of my "lucidity" effort into intuitive and abstract cognitive awareness. I almost completely ignore the video-game aspect of the dream, I don't even bother to support it. And I don't try to control any of it. If I was controlling it, I wouldn't be able to have cool experiences like seeing things from several directions at once, because I would have no idea how to go about doing something like that. My subconscious controls that stuff. And my subconscious is strong enough that I'd be absolutely shocked if it can't stabilize a clock face. That doesn't even make sense to me.

Your subconscious has nothing to do with stabilizing a clock face. It has to do with limits of your brain. Sure I can somewhat stabilize a clock face if I focus and look at it two times, but it will be harder and harder each time I look back it. By the fourth or fifth time I will not be able to keep the same numbers on it. The same goes for the hundreds if not thousands of lucid dreamers who participated in the old lucidity.com forums. People from as early as 1962 (Oliver Fox) have described that they have difficulties keeping text stable. Surely, as I've said many times, it will be more stable and less stable depending on the person and the dream, but to claim it is always completely stable in is pure and utter nonsense.

My mind creates it ahead of time, almost like playing a recording, though the 'ahead of time' and 'concurrent' concepts break down for many of my experiences also. Most of my "lucidity" goes into watching and thinking about the recording. If I try to control the story I'll mess up the most interesting parts of it. For me the clock will say 14:47 each time because that number has some essential significance to that particular dream, or it wouldn't even be in the dream. The visually precise dreams I described a minute ago were demonstrations of what my mind is capable of in terms of detail and stability. Other dreams wouldn't have a clock in them at all unless its important to the story being told.

I am starting to think you never even experimented with dream text to begin with. No matter how "visually precise", the finer and more detailed an object is, the more fluid it will be. I tell you again that there is no clock, there is no clock face, and there is no "14:47" displayed on the face. There is no external stimuli on which upon the 14:47 is based, and I guarantee you even if you wouldn't look away... just zoom in, get close to the clock and analyze the numbers. They will change without you even wanting them to. The brain simply has a hard time keeping up with this, for obvious reasons. But then again, maybe I'm wrong and you and the other astral travelers have different brain capabilities than 98% of lucid dreamers.

This is part of why I almost never have a body, its rarely relevant to the ideas I'm thinking about. Maybe if I took a more active role I'd be able to learn some new things, but somehow I just don't feel like it. That "active role" part of me is resting, and if I wanted to do something I'd just be awake so I could bring more of my faculties to bear on it. Actually most of the "carefully scripted story" aspect of the dream is gone now too, probably for a similar reason, I just don't do as much while asleep as I used to. It would seem sort of unnatural, like prying one part of my mind away from the other part, rather than bringing all my intelligence and will to bear on making my life work. Though I'm still a fool for mile long internet forum posts, apparently.

It seems to me that you have two types of dreams. One with a body, one without a body. One with an active role, one with a passive role. Isn't this pure logic? Why feel the need to slap the label "astral" on anything here? Especially when you don't even believe in the popular definition.

Yeah you have to throw away most of that stuff. Suppose, by way of analogy, that an "astral realm" were a part of your everyday experience, and you wanted to find if that could tell you anything about natural history. Going and spending your time arguing with Christians about whether the earth is 6000 years old just wouldn't help you very much. They may be right about some things, but not the things you care about. Or even if they do know something relevant, its attached to other crap or obstacles that keep you from digesting it. Sometimes you have to focus on the ideas and interactions that you seem to be getting some traction with.

Although it might seem that way here on DreamViews, but I am really not a closed-minded person at all. I just need something more than people telling me they are experiencing a special feeling. Especially when it comes to the dream state where you brain can trick you in millions of ways, I just can't simply accept that people are truly separating from their body because it feels unlike anything they have felt before. Dreams fool us every night into thinking we are in reality, which is exactly why natural/spontaneous lucid dreaming on a day-to-day basis is very rare. So if a dream can create extraordinary emotions of love, the feeling that you met your soul-mate, or the feeling that you are flying through the air superman style at 300 km/h, an amazing feeling of transformation/shape-shifting, or the perfect sensation of strong wind blowing on your face... why shouldn't a dream be able to produce a very convincing feeling of separating from your body?

The problem with our discussion is not only that, but the fact that your definition of astral projection is very vague, and doesn't seem to have much (if anything) in common with the regular definition that has been used and discussed in literature for many many years. Well not only in literature, but also on these forums. So unless you can tell me exactly what you think astral projection is, this discussion is pretty much pointless. It would be like talking about sex as something that feels "good", without giving any details about it whatsoever, and without clearly defining it. That being said, I have much more reason to believe in the existence of telepathy, remote viewing, or even telekinesis, than believing that astral projection and OBE are anything other than dreams.

Alright, enough of the kilometer posts. Let's put things simple. Stephen laBerge made an experiment where he PROVES, objectively, with waking life results, that Lucid dreaming exists. He brought something from the dream into the real life. Now. Do you, as ATraveler, claim that you can bring something more into the real life than you can from LD? Memories do not count, as they aren't objective results. You would have to do something like: "I hide the object in my house here in croatia, and you from wherever you are, next morning, tell me where I hid it"(I understand that this is memory too, but it has to do with real life, meaning its not imaginary). Otherwise you have no proof of successful astral travel.

I will try to explain you this in a different way.

It is all only theories but lets think that our body and soul are here in this particular world/reality/dimension (call it as you wish). Our power of intention is very weak in this reality when we are awake, but when we sleep our intention has unlimited powers, our soul can travel from one reality to another. Everything - past, present and future is located in one place where you do not need to travel to find some information, you only need access there. You are having all the information at once.

What is astral projection / OBE / remote viewing ? In mechanics - It is all the same thing, you simply get access to other realities. There is unlimited amount of those realities where everything is possible. The feeling of getting there is what you call astral projection or OBE. Remote viewing is the same, you look into one of those possible realities. The most important thing is that you do not go anywhere, if you let your soul go there you will be at any possible scenario.

Think of it as a huge infinite coordinate plane where every box is a reality, our home reality (reality where we live now) is in the middle, every time you do an action you move to another reality which is very close to our home reality, you cannot leap into further realities because when you are awake you have power to move only to realities which are next to our home reality. By moving i mean you are focusing on a particular reality (scenario). In your dream you can leap in any reality that you wish and observe anything you want there, but remember - everything might be different from our home reality there. The further you leap the more difference you will find. This is the exact reason why you always look different in your mirror when you dream!

When you are in your OBE/Astral/Remote View you are dreaming and your soul can access any of possible realities, it will focus on one and read/see all the information there. Information might be correct or incorrect, depends how far from home reality are you.

Why do we have a feeling that we are leaving our body? I cannot answer you this question for sure. But i have several ideas - we all heard or saw somewhere that our soul can separate from our body, so when we are experiencing something like astral/obe/remove viewing in our dream we find the closest thing that we know, simply to comprehend it somehow, because it is something new and unknown to us. The other idea is that process of doing it might actually look something like what we are feeling.



Sorry if this does not make sense for you.

Empedocles:

I don't have time for this today, but very briefly:

No I am not saying that the body in a dream in which I have a body is an astral body. In fact I think I was pretty clear about that, the dream body and astral body are not the same. I experience both, and the experience is very different, hence the distinction.

I am also not claiming anything about what the astral body is or implies, other than what I said from the beginning that its an aspect of a mental model of where the physical body is believed to be. I'm not treating it as if its anything else besides that, though it might be. That 'mental model' I refer too has a lot of different facets to it, for instance there is a sense of inertia, which is more closely related to what is typically called the dream body. That sense of intertia is a model, you don't have direct information about that, its inferred.

If a bunch of people are trying to derive theorems from a set of definitions that contains a contradiction, then they won't be successful until they change the definition. If you insist on sticking with a definition of 'astral' that doesn't make sense, then almost anything you say about it won't make sense. Whether or not that's the 'standard definition' among a large segment of New Age mystics doesn't change that.

Deluksic:

This is a difficult subject. If you propose naive experiments that reflect a poor understanding of the subject being discussed, those experiments aren't going to yield useful results. If you want to understand what little some people know about astral projection, you have to wade through some long messages and think about them carefully and ask questions. Otherwise you're just ignorant. You could go back and look at the long threads about shared dreaming, its the same thing. People suggest unworkable experiments, without understanding why they're unworkable. Then the people who are patient and listen come to understand what is really being discussed, and the conversation changes. You're not required to care about astral projection, there are a lot of other more worthwhile things in life to be interested in. But if you don't care enough to educate yourself, then you're not going to be able to say much on the subject that's very intelligent either. The experiment you propose is very difficult, and will almost certainly fail, for a variety of reasons that could be discussed at length. I don't have time for that now though, and won't for at least a few more days. Its looking a bit futile though, I've spent a lot of time already, and don't seem to be getting through to you guys that the definitions and assumptions you're working with aren't adequate for the subject you've taken on. Yes most if not all people who presume to write books on astral projection are knaves and idiots, we're in agreement with that. But that's not at all the whole story.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Empedocles:

I don't have time for this today, but very briefly:

No I am not saying that the body in a dream in which I have a body is an astral body. In fact I think I was pretty clear about that, the dream body and astral body are not the same. I experience both, and the experience is very different, hence the distinction.

I am also not implying anything about what the astral body is or implies. I said from the beginning that its an aspect of a mental model of where the physical body is believed to be. I'm not treating it as if its anything else besides that, though it might be. That 'mental model' I refer too has a lot of different facets to it, for instance there is a sense of inertia, which is more closely related to what is typically called the dream body. That sense of intertia is a model, you don't have direct information about that, its inferred.

If a bunch of people are trying to derive theorems from a set of definitions that contains a contradiction, then they won't be successful until they change the definition. If you insist on sticking with a definition of 'astral' that doesn't make sense, then almost anything you say about it won't make sense. Whether or not that's the 'standard definition' among a large segment of New Age mystics doesn't change that.

Deluksic:

This is a difficult subject. If you propose naive experiments that reflect a poor understanding of the subject being discussed, those experiments aren't going to yield useful results. If you want to understand what little some people know about astral projection, you have to wade through some long messages and think about them carefully and ask questions. Otherwise you're just ignorant. You could go back and look at the long threads about shared dreaming, its the same thing. People suggest unworkable experiments, without understanding why they're unworkable. Then the people who are patient and listen come to understand what is really being discussed, and the conversation changes. You're not required to care about astral projection, there are a lot of other more worthwhile things in life to be interested in. But if you don't care enough to educate yourself, then you're not going to be able to say much on the subject that's very intelligent either. The experiment you propose is very difficult, and will almost certainly fail, for a variety of reasons that could be discussed at length. I don't have time for that now though, and won't for at least a few more days. Its looking a bit futile though, I've spent a lot of time already, and don't seem to be getting through to you guys that the definitions and assumptions you're working with aren't adequate for the subject you've taken on. Yes most if not all people who presume to write books on astral projection are knaves and idiots, we're in agreement with that. But that's not at all the whole story.

This experiment is possible only if both people very well know the place where that item will be buried. Same for dream sharing, you can meet only in a place that both people know very well, if possible at all.

And you are right, long text conversations is the only way to come closer to understanding.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Deluksic:

This is a difficult subject. If you propose naive experiments that reflect a poor understanding of the subject being discussed, those experiments aren't going to yield useful results. If you want to understand what little some people know about astral projection, you have to wade through some long messages and think about them carefully and ask questions. Otherwise you're just ignorant. You could go back and look at the long threads about shared dreaming, its the same thing.

I'm sorry if I seem ignorant, that was not my goal.

I know it is a difficult subject and yes I have read pretty much every word of your and Empedocle's posts (and most other too). I'm still not sure where we're getting at. I really didn't think of my experiment naive because there was a similar 'already done' experiment in this thread. Well, do you have an experiment that would prove existance of astral projection as a separate experience (not retorical, Im actually asking you)? I honestly would love to believe that there is such thing. If you cannot prove it, then this thread will go on forever. Some people will hold on to their belief and some people will deny it. Its an opinion against an opinion.

Originally Posted by Deluksic

I'm sorry if I seem ignorant, that was not my goal.

I know it is a difficult subject and yes I have read pretty much every word of your and Empedocle's posts (and most other too). I'm still not sure where we're getting at. I really didn't think of my experiment naive because there was a similar 'already done' experiment in this thread. Well, do you have an experiment that would prove existance of astral projection as a separate experience (not retorical, Im actually asking you)? I honestly would love to believe that there is such thing. If you cannot prove it, then this thread will go on forever. Some people will hold on to their belief and some people will deny it. Its an opinion against an opinion.

I think we should all start from something small, something that we all can do alone at home.

For example: get a random number generator, do not look at it and click to change number, lets say 3 digit number. Then go to sleep in other room and in your dream or astral projection try to come back to your random number generator and see the number, if you at least once get the same number you can say you have a proof for your self that astral projection does exist.