Astral experience in full sound and colour, and with dialogue.

During a lucid experience last night (an astral projection by my definition), I was mindful enough to ask a bartender (well, he was the only one there), whether this whole environment was a construction by my mind, or whether it was created by others.

His answer came in loud and clear: it's made by others!

Now, this experience was unusual for two reasons. Beyond having imagery as clear as the physical world (which is always the case in my astral experiences), the sound was excellent too, so that I could hear my own voice, as well as the bartender's, clearly. My astral projections have almost invariably been into silent movie territory. Also, the bartender could actually speak sentences. I don't even get that in my lucid dreams, because the DC's speak only gibberish there. (This also means that they never lie to me).

Later, the bartender admonished me to not venture "out there" (meaning outside of the safe confines of the room we were in), because I "would never find my way out there". He then wanted to show me something, but I woke up before knowing what it was. Talk about poorly timed awakening! :)

This goes on my list of particularly thought provoking experiences.

Hosted worlds in the middle of the chaos storm. Sometimes a church sometimes a city. The creator (of that realm) has much of their energy out maintaining the features and stability of the area. Truly the lucid experience can be so much better in these areas. Side note: There are entities who when they are around everything gets more stable and even you own abilities may seem stronger by a measure.

I suppose, if you are in harmony with the overall intentions of those creating an environment, everything will be much easier to accomplish, than if you are at odds with those intentions. Maybe that should be on the astral traveller's mind: seeking out friendly neighbourhoods.

For sure! I have messed up many times grabbing at a sexy woman only to find out they react much as we would here. My go to when I am not sure is to sit down and look down then say out loud "I mean no harm, I am just confused" When things go right you can be a welcome guest and then you really can be amazed what things they have going on in their areas.

I still think all the imagery is metaphoric. There's an underlying reality to it, represented in the imagery, but what you see and hear is mostly made up.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sivason

There are entities who when they are around everything gets more stable and even you own abilities may seem stronger by a measure.

---

Do these entities eat? If so how? If not, how does entropy work for them?

Are they fundamentally different from dead people, or dead animals, or dead dragons?

I saw a video today of a man socially interacting with familiar hyenas, as if he were a hyena. They were affectionate and aggressive, sort of like wolves, but more so. Some strange experiences I have had might make sense if interpreted as dominance sparring from a disembodied and somewhat dangerous animal spirit. Much stronger than what I feel from physical animals, and expressing a very different kind of intelligence. Everything is way clearer and more stable when it is 'present'.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I still think all the imagery is metaphoric. There's an underlying reality to it, represented in the imagery, but what you see and hear is mostly made up.



Do these entities eat? If so how? If not, how does entropy work for them?

Are they fundamentally different from dead people, or dead animals, or dead dragons?

I saw a video today of a man socially interacting with familiar hyenas, as if he were a hyena. They were affectionate and aggressive, sort of like wolves, but more so. Some strange experiences I have had might make sense if interpreted as dominance sparring from a disembodied and somewhat dangerous animal spirit. Much stronger than what I feel from physical animals, and expressing a very different kind of intelligence. Everything is way clearer and more stable when it is 'present'.

---

Hi again! I am not sure what all you mean by eat. I have only been close with a couple of them, One guy who could cause me to reach profound levels of clarity in the astral dream was a monk. He took me to dine with a couple of his friends at some restaurant/tavern The four of us sat about a table and food was brought. Kind of a sample platter. At least one had some Gandalf pipe and was smoking. I could barely understand what was said. So my conclusion is that this one does eat. I have been offered food many time, so it seems they eat something.
This guy was a dead guy but was fundamentally different in that he claimed to be Dream Yogi from Earth who had been vacationing for 4 decades in the Astral. He took me under his wing for maybe ten years, then introducced me to a woman and made me show off my skills for her. then he disappeared. She told me he chose to get reborn on Earth as there was something he wanted to do. I have never seen him again.
As an aside I have spent years with this woman and her two daughters (occasionally) and they also eat and offer me food.

Oh yeh, you are totally right about the imagery. They hand me food and my brain fills in "chili dog" but it was metaphor stuff. Traveling in a new world that you don't understand so your brain creates images to help. Often the humans you think you are interacting with are not even a bit human, you just interoperate them that way.

Dead people or animals will dream of eating because they eat when they are alive. That doesn't mean they really eat.

Plants in the real world convert radient energy into chemical energy, and animals move around by converting chemical energy into heat energy. There's a sort of gradient of potential in the physical world, and we can do things because we're moving down the gradient. How does this work astrally?

Suppose I meet the ghost of an animal predator, and it attempts to eat me. My question is whether it is simply expressing its instinct as an animal, or whether its interaction with me is actually vampiristic in an energy sense.

I think that most if not all of these 'ghosts' can't really think on their own either, they're dependent on us for that, because we have brains and they don't. So the things they tell us, including the ideas they express about their own identities, are strongly dependent on the ideas we have or are capable of extracting psychically from other brains, past, present or (relatively near) future. Some seem highly intelligent in the way they can reach and relate many metaphorically connected experiences which are beyond what we can reach or wrap our minds around as humans. But their intelligence seems derivative to me at the same time. There's a presumption among many that there's a spiritual realm of knowledge that ghost masters draw on, but I think it is our own physical realm. So it is possible to learn a lot from such spirits for a time. But eventually, even if it takes years, the pool of human experience they can tap into is exhausted, and they don't have more to offer. There are always spirits who are willing to 'guide' us if that's what we want, but eventually they are following us, so it is like we are following our own shadows. When a dreamer interacts with such a spirit, it isn't easy to recognize the spirit's limitations, because from the standpoint of the the dreamer, the spirit's information pool exceeds the dreamer's, since it has access to both the dreamer's mind and to other minds. But if someone else who has less knowledge than you on some subject tells you what a 'master' or extra-terrestrial told them in a dream, the message is quite often ridiculous. And so the presumed identity of the teacher appears ridiculous also. The 'teacher' isn't necessarily to blame for this though, it may not know its own identity apart from what other people want to believe about it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

1)Dead people or animals will dream of eating because they eat when they are alive. That doesn't mean they really eat.



2)Suppose I meet the ghost of an animal predator, and it attempts to eat me. My question is whether it is simply expressing its instinct as an animal, or whether its interaction with me is actually vampiristic in an energy sense.

3)I think that most if not all of these 'ghosts' can't really think on their own either, they're dependent on us for that, because we have brains and they don't. .

---

1) I can accept that as likely. In fact many entities and the realms they choose to live in are basically creating dreamy versions of our world. That said, the monk has explained to me that a visitor like me has no "wealth" or "material" and everything I manifest is simply illusory. He also says there absolutely is a form of matter there that can be used to create "real" things. I talked with a woman once who was my first teacher and closely associated with the monk. I noticed that her magical looking green shawl radiated in the same way that allows me to distinguish between DCs and entities. She told me that was because unlike so much of what I see, the shawl was "real." I asked her if that meant I was naked. She laughed and told me I absolutely was naked, but no one cared. Many other lessons have been on trying to get me to understand and detect the difference between illusion on the astral and actual astral matter. Yet, I have no idea why they eat and how much of it is some form of matter and how much is them just liking to experience eating (illusion). Some of both I think as they often act protective of food which they would not if it was an illusion. For instance I can not simply take food off of someone's cart without getting in trouble.

2) There is some of each. Aggression happens there and often it is just actors playing at aggression or like you say animals acting out aggression. There also is some form of vampiric bad stuff that can happen. I was attacked once and whatever the literal ghost was doing was terrible and not illusory so I was forced to escape to this world and wake up.

3) I bet you are correct on many of the beasts and entities. However, it is one of the two core religious tenets I hold to that consciousness can exist with out the need for a physical form to create it. That does not make me correct, but as I only hold to two core principles 1: energies exist that we have no way of detecting and do not understand which can effect the physical world and 2: consciousness can exist with out a physical source, it is easy for me to believe the entities we run into can be very smart and perhaps god like.

'Consciousness' aside, if an entity has thoughts, that involves a kind of structure, and something like memory. That is almost synonymous with matter, even if it is 'astral' matter, and not common 'physical' matter.

I also think that 'physical' matter, so to speak, has properties which are outside of what is described by scientists. So some of the phenomena we regard as 'astral' may be physical in some sense.

One conjecture I had, which I posted before, is that there is some kind of exotic matter which interacts gravitationally with physical matter which is involved in 'psychic' experiences. Since it has mass in that sense, there's a lot of it in the gas an ice giants, which is why the positions of planets have some bearing on our experiences. There were alignments of massive planets a decade ago when shared dreaming seemed a lot easier for some people. If that is related somehow, it may start getting easier again soon. Anyway, my point is that if your astral entity acquaintances have their own minds, and live in an astral world in some objective sense, they should be able to tell us something more about this sort of thing. If none of them are scientists, they could still at least describe their perceptions of things that are outside of our experience.

One reason I suspect most of these masters are 'dead', is when I read people's descriptions of their interactions with them, they all seem to be drawing on the same humanly accessible pool of ideas. It's the same esoteric quasi-Theosophic stuff over and over again. Typically this repetition is taken as evidence that these ideas are 'truths'. However, these ideas also draw heavily on human scientific ideas as metaphors, particularly 19th century scientific ideas, and they involve fairly significant common misunderstandings of those scientific ideas. So to me they don't hold up as better than half truths, but in any case, true or not, they are definitely limited. On rare occasions when there appears to have been a new thought or insight obtained through any kind of 'channeling' or other dreamlike intuition, it appears to me to have originated in the human world in the near future. So it appears to me that if we're going to learn something new we have to figure it out ourselves - nobody else who knows anything seems to be talking to us about it.

One thing that I have noticed, is that the intelligence of our fates or muses behaves in some ways like a big neural network, and it sometimes makes what appear to be 'mistakes' of that nature, confusing things with other metaphorically similar things. That seems to imply something like a big brain, whether it is made of exotic matter or is a sort of subconscious hive-mind that uses our physical brains.

According to Leadbeater, the sides of a cube appear to be equal length 'astrally', not distorted by perspective like in the physical world. If that's true, then what we regard as physical must be literally some kind of projection from his 'astral', which would have a higher dimensionality than what we call physical. I'm using the word dimension here literally, not figuratively. If your experience is in the same realm as what he was talking about (assuming for the sake of the discussion that he knew what he was talking about), and if you're perceiving it to that extent, then maybe you could experience something like this. I had a dream once where I could see an object from all directions at once. It was a cartoon object, clearly imaginary, but my perspective on it was from everywhere around it at once. So I at least have the ability to imagine something like that for some reason.

I had another experience in a dream when I was about 17 which was topologically different than my waking life experience. I can't think about it clearly when outside of the experience. As a different example to show what I mean by a topological difference, imagine a world in which when you look forward you can see your back, and when you look up you can see the bottom of your feet, and when you look right you can see your left. This is a three dimensional torus. A two dimensional torus, which is a donut shape, can be embedded in a three dimensional 'Euclidean' topology, which is how we usually think about space, but a three dimensional one can not be. It could be embedded in a four dimensional space. In any case, the three dimensional torus is simple enough that I can at least think about it even if I can't place it inside our 'world'. But what I dreamed about back then is somehow more difficult, and I can not think about it. I guess the three dimensional torus is easier because it is merely three dimensional. My point here is that when trying to understand the 'astral' world, it might be necessary to go outside of the kind of topology that approximately describes our physical world. (I think physical space isn't exactly 3D either, but that's a different topic. I'm using the world topology to describe a structural difference, like the distinction between a donut and a ball. Stretching would be a geometric difference. So for example, the shape of a donut and a coffee cup are topologically equivalent but geometrically different.)

When I mostly lost my exotic dreaming ability a decade ago, it seemed to become increasingly abstract, and slipped away from me, as if it was still there but no longer projecting itself into something that I could grasp from my place in this world. Now I still have occasional paranormal experiences, maybe even as many as before, but not much going on in dreams.

One thing I can say is that if the astral pseudo-Buddhist teacher dudes are 'dead', they at least care about this topic of trying to understand the nature of the astral realm. It gets their attention. What I'm interested in is if they can share any actual understanding which I don't already have. An argument against doing that, or an excuse, is that knowledge is power, and we have enough power already. An argument for it is that our 19th century metaphors are kind of lame, and it would be nice to have a more coherent understanding of what we're dealing with.

This question of how 'real' the so called 'astral plane' might be has held my attention for years now. I do not think of vibrant colors and quality of perception as the tipoff for when I cross into the next full dimensional demarcation. When I first roll out I see my house just as it is but often things are out of place. I might also see things that aren't physically there. For example I once felt so completely physical after a rollout I suspected that I had fallen out of bed but I looked over and saw my old basketball on the other side of the room. I knew then that I was OBE because that ball was 800 miles away in my parents' house. I then began floating and flew off to my destination.

I think of the roll out as entering the etheric realm which is a semi accurate reflection of physical Earth. I have to cross a portal in order to enter the realm I call "astral". I was reading Alistair Crowley's account of flying straight up like a rocket and entering the astral realm and it was so close to an experience that I had recorded at least a year earlier that I lent it special credence as a type of independent corroboration.

What I really wanted to do for a couple years was find another person who I could both talk to physically as well as on the Inner Realms. I actually went to family members at night and asked them if they would at least remember talking to me in a dream and the reactions ranged from nearly comatose, to calm denial, to outright fear. I widened my search to include the entire population of the city I lived in, hoping I could arrange for a physical meeting while in the dream state. Not one person turned up. One young person said that he would barely remember the conversation as a dream.

I agree that the Leadbetter stories are dated and more modern schema have emerged. I think the Robert Monroe, Castaneda, Tom Campbell type descriptions are better suited for modern purposes.

The reference to the "cartoon world" is fun to see. I have been there multiple times and I have read the teaching of one modern master who speaks about that place as a very real corner of the astral plane. The place I went to reminded me of a Dr. Seuss type world.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

One thing I can say is that if the astral pseudo-Buddhist teacher dudes are 'dead', they at least care about this topic of trying to understand the nature of the astral realm. It gets their attention. What I'm interested in is if they can share any actual understanding which I don't already have. An argument against doing that, or an excuse, is that knowledge is power, and we have enough power already. An argument for it is that our 19th century metaphors are kind of lame, and it would be nice to have a more coherent understanding of what we're dealing with.

---

What kind of things would you want to know? I must confess that much of what is taught to me or discussed with me does not seem to make it back into my waking head in clear words. I can listen to a teacher and we go over something for what seems like a half hour. I think I am getting it and that, yes, it all makes sense. Then when I awake the concepts are so disconnected from what reality is here I have no context to translate it into this frame work. Example: My more recent lessons are on a method of traveling through the swirling chaos between the areas that are stable (realms?). In the past it was a terrifying experience of casting myself into a current filled ocean with not more navigation than a swimmer would have in the ocean. The latest lessons are showing me: ??? There are layers like multiple sheets stacked that you can work your way between. It comes across much like layers of flesh that you must worm your way into so that you can travel along the fascia. Somehow you can travel between these sheets and will eventually get to the next stable area without throwing yourself into the sea??? I have tried and become fearful and claustrophobic and in no time had to return to my starting point. I am sure to those on that plane it makes sense, but to me it is so bizarre. I also have to give up my view of me as a physical being like a human and travel as a fluid???? The point being much of what I can learn there is so different from the reality I know here that it does not make the most sense translated here. Still, if you have questions, maybe they have already explained something to me that will help or I can ask them sometime.
It is also worth noting that when there I am deeply impaired as if I were drunk on at least 6 drinks. I assume some of this is because how though works with out the benefit of a human brain is very foreign to me, or that it is my human brain trying to think but doing so in a dream state which is rarely as functional as a waking brain.
A last thing worth mentioning is that I do not always get access to a teacher. In 35 years of this stuff I have maybe had 200-400 sessions of some sort, that comes out to maybe 1 a month, so not anything I can directly control or predict. Lately the lady just seems to want to hang out close to each other and talk in a normal non-teaching kind of way, like she is just lonely. That can fill me with fond emotions but seems unrelated to any kind of training or such.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sivason

What kind of things would you want to know? I must confess that much of what is taught to me or discussed with me does not seem to make it back into my waking head in clear words. I can listen to a teacher and we go over something for what seems like a half hour. I think I am getting it and that, yes, it all makes sense. Then when I awake the concepts are so disconnected from what reality is here I have no context to translate it into this frame work. .

---

This is really close to what I experience. I am either in a group or standing solo in front of a Teacher and I am hearing a lesson being given but when I am back in physical consciousness the entire discourse is simply gone.

I have also gone on explorations where I find Great Truth concerning matters of popular interest in the earth world and I collect up an armload of "knowledge cylinders" much like what Robert Monroe calls a "rote" and I make a conscious decision to return to the body with all this good stuff but when I enter the body it is gone. I have even popped back out into the OBE state about four times to recollect the cylinders but the moment I enter the physical realm it is gone. I even paused a moment in the pre-physical staging area and verify my solid grasp of the info. Then the moment I enter the solid physical body I am holding nothing. The information is not there anymore.

It is like I reach into a cloud and grab a handful of steam but when I open my hands and try to show a friend there is nothing there.

The info is simply not stable in this world, or perhaps it is on a frequency above the ability of the heavy physical brain-receiver to tune into.

There's a lot to unpack there, but starting with the question of why it can be difficult to retain knowledge. I think there are multiple different causes of not being able to bring knowledge back to waking life:

1. You have a feeling of having knowledge without actual significant content to go with the feeling. The feeling is a delusion. You can't return with the knowledge because you never had any. You do return with it, but then when you think about it in a more intelligent state you see that what you have is trivial and stupid.
2. The knowledge is real but you can't bring it with you because having it would violate some kind of causality requirement.
3. The knowledge is connected to some other physical condition that's not sufficiently related to your physical brain.
4. The knowledge is incompatible with your human perspective and way of thinking.
5. Any combination of these or other issues

With regard to oceans with currents and claustrophobic strata....

You have your sense of identity, which typically is connected to thoughts related to your physical body. There are alternative ways to project those thoughts, other stories which represent the same underlying patterns in different ways. I think there are also alternative ways to project the physical world from the higher dimensional reality, so to speak, that it is related to. And there are other thoughts that are related to other people and groups of people which have connections with your own thoughts. For me, the topology of 'dream worlds' is not a description of a hierarchy of heavens or spiritual worlds, planes, and subplanes, it is a description of thoughts and their interrelations. Moving around in it is a matter of moving my identity in ways that are not directly connected with my human reality.

Since I can move my identity, I seem to also be able to vicariously experience things that others experience. For example, I think that flying in a dream is a metaphor that represents my ability to float my sense of presence around, but that it is also a shared experience with animals that physically fly or swim. As another example, once I dreamed of being inside some kind of cold, 3 dimensional lattice. I very much doubt that this is a place on a 'higher plane', but it wouldn't surprise me if there's some physical place like that, even if it is extremely small.

I think that a great many 'astral beings' appear to us as we expect them to be. They may be other dreamers, or confused minds of dead people, or entities which have a parasitic and somewhat fluid existence within our collective minds and which do not have their own particular animal bodies. Or they may be some combination of those things. They may represent themselves to us, and maybe even to themselves, as angels, or aliens, or ghosts, or ascended masters, or any number of other things, depending on our thoughts. I'm not saying that any person's experiences are definitely this thing or that thing. I don't know because they're not my experiences, and I expect that other people may experience things that are different from what I experience. But my impressions in general, based on my own experiences, and on other people's descriptions, is that most of our experiences are something like this.

So here's a question....Imagine there's some kind of exotic matter which is mostly distinct from physical matter but which interacts with physical matter both gravitationally and through some other subtle effects relevant to our dreaming. Does such matter exist, and what can we tell about its properties? I want to distinguish it if possible from the virtual reality which springs out of what we do with that matter and with physical matter. By way of analogy, our brains have a structure, with a lot of connections and resonances, so to speak, and there are patterns in that network. But any experiences of that don't tell us very much about the physics of the atoms that make up the brain.

Or, to approach the question in the opposite way, if we can't get any information about the physics of such 'astral' matter, what else can we know about the pseudo-collective mind that's made up of all of our minds, based in 'physical' matter or not, that's different from the same rehashed material that people have been kicking around for the past 150 years? Show me something new. Maybe they don't show me because they don't have anything new, or maybe its because my "I'm bored" motivation isn't a good enough reason. But that's what I'm asking for anyway.

"4. The knowledge is incompatible with your human perspective and way of thinking."

This suggestion comes close. The knowledge that can't be brought back is incompatible with *any* human capacity for perception or way of thinking.

When you ask, "Show me something new" I am reminded of the fish asking the frog to show him proof of the existence of this dry desert he speaks of. The frog wanders off just beyond the beach and grabs a handful of dry sand and carries it back to the fish, opens his hand to show him the dry sand which is immediately drenched in H2O and now means nothing to the fish who never bothers to leave the ocean.

In order to encounter something new one might need to move the identity beyond the human limitations. {Warning -- Super Human Perception may require Super Human Effort}

Point 3 seems to be missing something. Basically all physical conditions are well enough related to your physical brain to be sufficiently recognized and comprehended at some rudimentary level.

Finally, If you think you can "move your identity" your "identity" has become a thing that has its essence based in time and space. If you identify with your physical body you are going to be very surprised with what happens when the physical body dies and disintegrates and yet you still have some semblance of awareness and ability to perceive the universe beyond physical reality.

I agree with the stuff about things representing themselves or us imposing our interpretation on what we experience.
For whatever reason I have not heard anything about a collective mind that is very scientific. Much of it fits inside the context of what others have been saying. However, the following description that was given to me is perhaps a little different. According to the entities I have discussed it with there is a fabric similar to the fabric of space/time but it is separate. In the same way that science now thinks an object with mass/gravity causes the fabric of space time to dimple and stretch (like placing an object onto a stretch sheet causes the sheet to dimple) this other fabric (ether/astral/spirit?) does the same thing when an object (spirit/ entity/ life force?) has sufficient mass. The fabric deforms under the mass of a spirit like they show how black holes warp space time. This forms a pocket in the fabric that pulls closed in a sphincter type way. What you end up with is bubbles on the surface of the fabric that are attached to the fabric at the constricted point. They are not rigidly stuck in place on the fabric but can move about just like a planet deforms space/time but can move about.
The pocket is the realm we explore in our basic consciousness and standard dreams. I do not understand how, but the masses that cause these pockets can extend outside there bubbles and interact to a limited extent with things near them on the fabric. I do not understand this part exactly, but have been shown it as if part of the mass can be extruded as a string past the pinched area and into the general fabric perhaps interacting with other extensions of various masses and even inserting themselves into other pockets. So they say at first an entity can worm its way into your bubble, which is the Dream Guide idea. Something projects part of its consciousness into your bubble/ pocket and can interact with your dreams. If you learn how to extend something like a feeler out through the pinched area and along the fabric you are in what we would call the astral. Things swirl around much like the colors swirling on the surface of a soap bubble. There are massive bubbles far larger than my own personal space caused by some great masses. These are the various realms you can explore. I have seen in the sky of one of these an image of a Hindu god that also filled me with overwhelming awe when I looked at it. I say image because as we discussed I am probably creating all the visuals to reflect what I sense I am seeing in accordance with my own expectations. Is the mass that caused such large bubbles god like entities or are those entities merely manipulating natural masses into realms? I do not know.
Is any of this true? I can't say for sure, but it seems to match my experiences. Could someone extend a feeler from their own bubble and enter another humans bubble? maybe, but I have never seen anything that looks like an entrance to a pocket of the sort I imagine that may be, in fact I have yet to see anything to help me understand how the Dream Guides enter my own pocket/ bubble.
I don't imagine any of that helps. I honestly do not think these entities are versed in science and as I said before, most of what they teach me does not seem to translate into anything I can grasp in waking life.

Sivason,

I had an intuition a year or so ago that says the intersections between my desires and other people's desires are like tiny black holes. Maybe I even posted that here. I don't know how true that is, but it agrees with what you're saying.

I think it is definitely possible to enter another person's bubble. I seem to spend most of my time consciously partway out of my own bubble, and occasionally in someone else's bubble. I don't "see" anything when I do that though, all the imagery in my mind is clearly metaphorical. I'll work with your gravity well description a bit more though.

Since my sense of presence is fluid in this way, I have persisting confusion about who is me and who is not me. A few days ago something that seemed to be 'not me' seemed to go out of my body, spoke a couple of words to me, then went back into my body. I was awake when that happened. I find it a bit unsettling. It's as if I'm that cyclops jelly blob in the Pixar Monsters movie who can spit out his own eyeball. Except in my case its a blind eyeball, all I do is feel.

I think there is no clear line between me and not me, I think the lines are poorly defined as a natural consequence of my ability to move around like that. But I think that part of what is going on is a kind of disassociation because I'm not completely comfortable with parts of myself. And to some extent its natural even if I am at peace with myself, sort of like how a sci-fi computer creates a fragmentary clone of its own mind to send away on a mission. It is like having a multiple personality disorder except the fragmentary parts are largely subconscious and they can reach outside of my local bubble.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Sivason,

I had an intuition a year or so ago that says the intersections between my desires and other people's desires are like tiny black holes. Maybe I even posted that here. I don't know how true that is, but it agrees with what you're saying.

I think it is definitely possible to enter another person's bubble. I seem to spend most of my time consciously partway out of my own bubble, and occasionally in someone else's bubble. I don't "see" anything when I do that though, all the imagery in my mind is clearly metaphorical. I'll work with your gravity well description a bit more though.

Since my sense of presence is fluid in this way, I have persisting confusion about who is me and who is not me. A few days ago something that seemed to be 'not me' seemed to go out of my body, spoke a couple of words to me, then went back into my body. I was awake when that happened. I find it a bit unsettling. It's as if I'm that cyclops jelly blob in the Pixar Monsters movie who can spit out his own eyeball. Except in my case its a blind eyeball, all I do is feel.

I think there is no clear line between me and not me, I think the lines are poorly defined as a natural consequence of my ability to move around like that. But I think that part of what is going on is a kind of disassociation because I'm not completely comfortable with parts of myself. And to some extent its natural even if I am at peace with myself, sort of like how a sci-fi computer creates a fragmentary clone of its own mind to send away on a mission. It is like having a multiple personality disorder except the fragmentary parts are largely subconscious and they can reach outside of my local bubble.

---

large souls can extend tendrils to occupy more than a few bodies at the same time. The thing inside the body will feel as if it is a soul and will mostly be unaware of the rest of itself outside the body and perhaps running other bodies. The frag clone thing here seems to be possible and fit. I have no idea what to do with this, but if the you that you perceive is part of one of these it may explain some of your experience. On the plus side the combined entity would be very powerful and aware and perhaps could extend more of its (your) mass into the bubble your identity is in.

I'm definitely not part of a 'large soul' extended through several people. I can extend pretty much anywhere where there's a synergy or intersection in intent. Also, identity is not mutually exclusive. If I experience something from someone else's first person perspective, that does not mean that they don't have their own identity or that we're part of the same 'large soul'. It's more like we're all leaves on the same tree, and I can move my standpoint of reference up the branch a bit, but the tree includes everything.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I'm definitely not part of a 'large soul' extended through several people. I can extend pretty much anywhere where there's a synergy or intersection in intent. Also, identity is not mutually exclusive. If I experience something from someone else's first person perspective, that does not mean that they don't have their own identity or that we're part of the same 'large soul'. It's more like we're all leaves on the same tree, and I can move my standpoint of reference up the branch a bit, but the tree includes everything.

---

I like that.

Regarding the claustrophobic feeling you mentioned....

As I understand it, what we call the 'physical world' has spatial relationships defined by the way gravity and electromagnetics work. It has '3 dimensions' and the common sense of distance when we're concerned about those kinds of interactions between ourselves and our environment. Psychic interactions don't work that way, so the topology of the 'psychic world' is very different. This is one reason I'm not sure there is actually a distinct psychic world or 'plane'. Maybe its all physical, but it seems very different to us when we're thinking about interactions that don't work over the common physical concept of distance.

But whether there is a distinct astral plane or type of matter or not, its undeniable that we commonly try to think of it in the context of the familiar 'physical' dimensions. That's how we know how to think about relationships between things, so we project it onto that kind of experiential framework when we dream about it.

By way of analogy, our physical sense of sight is two dimensional. We imagine we live in three dimensional space, but when we look at it we see a two dimensional projection of it. We infer three dimensions from context, and the small amount of stereoscopic information that comes with having two eyes, but what we literally see is like a big pop-up book. If you just look at that, and intentionally forget that you know its a projection, everything seems flat. Then if you imagine you live in that flat projection, it seems confining. That's how I feel about 3 dimensions also. If I think of myself as if I'm inside of that, I feel like a bug squashed under glass. I speculate that the confined feeling you describe when navigating between astral strata is similar. Or maybe not, I'm just guessing, but maybe that's part of it.

When I dream, I almost never dream of specific people. Usually my dreams do not contain imagery suggestive of waking life, but if they do, and if I dream of people, they are composites of many different people, and the mix drifts and changes during the course of the dream. It's as if I'm aware of everyone at once, and I filter it based on what kinds of qualities I'm concerned with at the moment, and project that into life-like human images.

Am I as a human a projection like this also? Is my spirit everyone's spirit, and its filtered and expressed according to the nature of my brain? I don't know, but its something to think about.

In any case, these interrelationships that I'm describing that are defined by people's psychological similarities and differences, and intersections between different people's desires, don't map onto 3 dimensional space very well at all. There's no 'distance' in the common physical sense, and the topology is very different also. It is not 2, or 3, or n-dimensional. Everything has everything else in it, and the shape of the space, so to speak, it is defined by the connections between the 'thoughts'. So if we experience something of that in a lucid dream, we're not going to be able interpret it through our usual sensory metaphors very well at all. This is sort of what happened to me as I began to lucid dream less often. Everything got so weird that I didn't know how to process it.

In this 'astral space', so to speak, there are subjects which we might try to hold our focus on, some of which can fairly be thought of as objects. And there are other 'objects' that are moving relative to those objects, they're getting closer or further away in terms of their interactions. But like I said, those interactions are very much unlike the interactions between physical objects. So if we try to 'hold onto' one of those objects, it can feel like we're being violently torn away from it, like clinging to a rock in a river. A lot of that chaos and stress is a result of holding onto the object though. To push the analogy further, you can let go of the object and float down the river. But astrally, you also may have to let go of even the usual concept of an object. I speculate that some of the chaos you describe is of this nature - it seems like chaos because it's chaotic relative to some other frame of reference you're thinking about it through, but it might not seem that way otherwise. Again, I don't know, its just an idea I had based on your description. Since I'm mostly blind and deaf when I dream, and tend to think about everything in terms of identity, I experience it a lot differently. But I still think that I'm missing most of what's there due to the way I think about it.

As a side note, is it possible to see color in 3D, instead of projected onto a surface? I said that I have been able to imagine an object viewed from all directions at once, but the image is still a two dimensional projection, even though its not projected from a point of perspective. I feel like I have also seen color three dimensionally, but I can not remember it now. Imagine a solid object, and being able to see the entire inside of it at once, even though it is solid and not transparent or translucent. I don't mean seeing into or through something, which is still a two dimensional projection. It would be like tactile spatial sense, but visual.