quasi-astral stuff, dim reflections of cuthulu
About 25 years ago I had my first 'astral projection' experience during an afternoon nap while staying at a friend's house. It was a somewhat old house, and most old houses feel kind of creepy to me, as if they're slightly haunted. I doubt that most of the 'ghosts' in old houses are connected to people who died in the house, because there are so many of them. Maybe they're connected to traumas or regrets of people who used to live there. Anyway, when I was "out of my body", it seemed as if I could see and hear those things that I usually only feel. I found it a bit disturbing. Afterwards, because I had that memory, my attention was drawn to those feelings more, and I no longer felt comfortable enough that I wanted to continue living in that house.
In some way I don't really believe in 'astral projection', I think that what seems to be happening in such an experience isn't necessarily what is really happening. It's a mental projection, like how a sound seems to be coming from inside your head when you have headphones on, even though it is not. Yet it still seems to me that there's something about the experience that is real, even if I don't understand it.
Currently I rent a room in someone else's house for part of the week because I work very far away from my house. Occasionally, someone in the adjacent room cries out in their sleep at night, long extended wails, as if tormented by demons or long ago bad memories. Sometimes it is one person, sometimes the other. This happened again last night. In my dreams, I felt a sort of spirit of fear like I sometimes experienced as a child. It is as if the spirit is something outside of myself, and it projects the fear at me almost as a kind of attack, like a hysteria inducing vibration or something. If I'm in the right space mentally, the 'attack' doesn't work, but if I buy into it and resonate with it, it almost seems as if there's some kind of vampirism or psychological rape that occurs. I've never felt like I understand this, and I don't know to what extent the 'spirit' is a part of myself that I'm trying to avoid, or something outside of me.
Last night I also dreamed of an animal like a centaur, but with a longer body with more legs. It wanted blood, but would accept wine as a substitute. So in the dream I'm looking in the mess of my house for some wine, since I think there are a couple somewhere that were gifts. It occurs to me that my house is not a very good place for the man-horse-centipede-thing to look for wine. And actually the reason for that is I feel that way about alcohol as I do about the vampiristic dream spirit, it almost seems to be possessed by something that I prefer not to be in relation with.
Are these 'spirits' parts of ourselves? They feel to me like they get very close to our true selves, but are actually distinct from us, and they feed off of our confusion about our own identity somehow. Its as if they're dead, but they can be alive a little bit if we feel like they're us, and think and act as if they're subconsciously a part of us. It also feels as if they're like us in some sense, but they're in the wrong place somehow, like they should have lived long ago, or a long time in the future, but not now. It feels "wrong" to me, and I think it feels "wrong" to them also, but their choice or their nature is to be or do what is wrong, rather than give up what it gives them.
Anyway, now my goal for the year is to find some way to change my working conditions so that I can get out of that house. I'd rather get back to my own house and deal more with my own pseudo-demonic bullshit, rather than dwell in someone else's that's none of my business. The devil that I know, so to speak. I have other, better reasons for wanting to do that also.
