list of "most lucid" experiences

This is a spin-off from the thread on why this forum is in a non-lucid thread. I said that astral projection was among my most-lucid experiences. So that made my wonder what my list of most lucid experiences would be. Please add your own lists also if you're inclined to.

At least 3/4 of this rehashes things I've posted before. Part of the reason for writing this down again, is if you want to imagine it along with me while reading, you can probably experience it for yourself more easily than you would be able to otherwise. Or if you have had similar such experience, you can remember your's while thinking about what I describe, and possibly recognize other aspects of the experience which weren't so obvious before, since everyone experiences such things differently.

My list is not going to exclude waking life experiences, since it would be less interesting if I did, and the distinctions break down a bit at the boundaries anyway.

The standard definition of lucidity in dreams is being aware that one is dreaming. I don't find that definition to be a very useful, since by that standard pretty much all my dreams are lucid, even though most of them are relatively vague and incoherent, and not very much like what 'lucid dreamers' are really talking about. The definition I'm going to use is how 'awake' I am during the experience. That definition is problematic too, since a person can be very vividly aware of superficial things like sights and sounds, or unusually aware of vague, deep psychological subjects that are can't be connected to a clear sensate experience. I'm going to include both kinds of experiences.

Out of body experience: My out of body experiences have all been while asleep, though I understand that people can experience this while awake. In what I'm calling an out of body experience, my point of perspective is outside my body. These experiences are not exceptionally lucid for me, and I'm including it mostly to contrast with what I'm calling astral projection. I think of it as a projection of first-person perspective to what would normally be a third person perspective. I think the capability of doing this is inherent in our ability to imagine ourselves in our environment. I think that a big part of why this experience is for me 'less lucid' than the astral projection experience, is our ability to imagine nearby perspectives is not as strong as our ability to imagine our tactile experience in our own body, and we're using that 'imagine nearby perspectives' capability, even though we're projecting our first person identity into it. Here are two examples:
1. I am asleep, and seem to be floating above my body in my room, semi-lucidly. I can see and hear, though I suspect that most of the informational content is imagined.
2. I am asleep, and lucidly looking at the kitchen of my childhood home from a position hovering near the ceiling over the kitchen sink. I guess this isn't what someone would normally call 'out of body', since it isn't set in my current environment, but the experience is far more striking and lucid. When dreaming, I often experience other perspectives in the first person. So if I were to interpret this experience in a conventionally New Age kind of way, I wouldn't say it was me out of my body, I'd say that I was experiencing the perspective of some other disembodied spirit.
Again, I don't consider these to be among my most lucid experiences, but they're explanatory context for two 'more lucid' experiences in my list.

Astral projection: This is like OBE, except I'm asleep and wide, wide awake in a cognitive sense. I feel as if I'm in my body, feeling every nerve in my body, except that my sense of place is out of focus somehow, so that my tactile feeling is not in sync with what my physical body is actually doing. If you meditate on your capacity to feel sensation, paying attention to what you're feeling in your whole body at once, the starting awareness somewhat like that but amplified, and with a strange sensation of being stripped out of my physical body. With what I'm calling the OBE experience, I'm simply a perspective hovering in the air. With this astral projection, in contrast, I have what feels like an electric body, and the sensation of that electric body being separated from of my physical body is very jarring. While I am out of my body, I seem to be able to see and hear my surroundings, but there's a weird, paranormal quality to it, as if I can see and hear all the usual things, plus other ghosts and whatnot which I can't normally see and hear. If you have ever noticed how old houses often feel creepier than new houses, its the same as that, except I'm seeing and hearing all of it instead of very vaguely feeling it. After the experience, while awake, I can still feel those other 'influences' even though I can't see or hear them any more. I assume that the whole 'astral' experience is 'imagined', the sights and sounds are an internally generated hallucination. At the same time, I think there's something real about it that I don't understand.

Mental projection: I just made that name up. While dreaming, I seem to wander around in a collective mental space, in which different people have overlapping thoughts and spheres of awareness. While doing this, I may see rooms or other scenery that describes it, but I know that what I see and hear is metaphors representing something else. These are probably my most common type of dream. From a sensory standpoint these dreams are not very lucid, but I have a heightened awareness of this other more psychological realm, so it is more lucid than a typical 'lucid dream' in that sense.

I'm out of time, and it is going to take a while to get through the other kinds of 'lucid' experiences I wanted to share, so I think I'll post what I have and continue later. Please feel welcome to share your thoughts in the meantime if you want to.

Continuing my list...

Recurring lucid nightmare of being attacked by flying V (not the Gibson guitar): I had these experiences when I was 4 years old. The dream was mostly indistinguishable from being wide awake. A whispering light which vaguely resembled a playing card spade moved slowly across the ceiling. It was terrifying to me. Eventually I learned to disengage emotionally, then it went away. Thirty years later, while standing in a K-Mart parking lot, I saw an F-117 (stealth fighter) fly overhead, and it was the same shape and sound. This change contributed to my getting out of the aerial 'defense' business, at the price of being separated from my kids for four years. Now I think that the dream is also how a rabbit or other small mammal feels when it freezes when an owl flies overhead. I think I experienced it through some combination of empathy and residual instinct. There were no air bases or even jet-capable airports within a couple hundred miles of where I lived as a child.

Lucid nightmare of formless evil: I've had this experience multiple times. I'm sleeping, and I feel a swirling cloud of hatred nearby - an aggressive spirit of extroverted fear. I deal with it in the same manner as I dealt with the airborne predator, by putting myself in a mental space where I could not feel that. I never felt afraid that the spirit would do something to me, as if it were dangerous, it felt like it was attacking me with the feeling itself, like an emotional scream. The reason I'm including this as a 'most lucid' experience is I'm at at least my waking-life level of lucidity, in addition to having a heightened sense of this evil. In some way my life is like a contra-positive proof of God. Even now I don't really believe in God, but I do feel that malice is real. Not real as a substance, but more as a mode of behavior. And the reality of true benevolence is implied as the opposite of that. I think that believing this doesn't require speculative faith in something outside of myself. I'm aware of evil in myself, and its negation, and to the extent that I'm able I simply affirm what I love and what I don't.

As an aside, I'm not sure I believe that the moral quality of a 'spirit' can be judged by how it feels. I think there are spirits that can project pretty much any impression they want to. On the other hand, all of these pseudo-psychic kinds of experiences seem to occur in a context that stands partly outside of time and sensation. You're not totally locked into a point in time, you can also feel what has happened before and what will happen later. And that makes it harder for something to successfully put a mask over its true nature. You can feel and see the mask, but also that its a mask. Point is that the mask doesn't necessarily tell you much about what is underneath.

I'll continue later.

Been busy and also somewhat lost interest. Here's another 'lucid' experience, and the one I had in mind when I started the thread, though unlike the others so far on this list this isn't from a dream. With all of these there's an initial experience, then I repeat it to a milder extent any time I think about....

A thought seems to me like a knot with a tiny bit of my mind bound up in it. My personality is a net of such knots, and if I think about them that way I feel them as a weight on me. When I form a thought, there's a momentary rush or thrill of discovery and creation, like a tiny torrent of glue that's quickly damned up by what it turns into. I'm addicted to that feeling, and also imprisoned by it, like an obsessive gardener who keep planting shrubs until his yard is a thicket. I need that life, but also need freedom, and can't seem to reconcile the two.

The thoughts are wrong, they don't do justice the reality they try to describe. Everything is replaced by a caricature. I try to force it to be right, and make it worse. Or is that not the problem at all? Maybe reality is monstrous, terrible, and I'm desperately trying to make it into something better that its not. Less horrifying, but also just less. Still an unsatisfying caricature. Twenty five years ago for an hour it seemed I was able to stop, as if some other mind stronger than mine held me in suspension for a while so I could experience what its like to think without tying myself up like that. I wanted to share this experience. At this moment I'm not even sure I believe in it myself, that its more than a temporary delusion, like love before it becomes heartbreak.

The more honest I get, the more alive I feel, and the darker I get. People don't want the darkness, it is poison. So I stifle it, cover it, imprison it. It suffers and rots in the darkness, and becomes malformed ugliness, hatred. I am a endless scream of silence, trying to drown out the wrongness that I know within. Trying to deny the crimes you're all hiding from, and that I have hidden from myself.

How to sustain joy in the face of the torrent of punishment that rains down, answering my siren song misery? Is the origin of all this in me, or am I a mostly a mirror? If there were a solution someone would have found it by now, instead of everyone hiding in toy half-truths.

That was not what I set out to write. I guess I'll put it out there anyway. One point is that if you want to have 'deep experiences', you can't be afraid of yourself. But mostly I wanted to share my experience of thinking without forming judgments, though I couldn't quite get there now. Part of getting there is to not try too hard to find it when you can't. You trust that its still there even when you can't see it or feel it.