My most recent lucid out-of-body experience
This was my longest lucid dream I've ever had. It seemed to last ~5 minutes.
I fell asleep really late with the light on. Right away, I felt myself slipping into hypnagogia.
I used to fight this feeling and start to panic, desperately trying to wake myself up. But this would usually result in what sometimes seemed like hours of nightmarish hypnagogia, including many false awakenings. Perhaps some of the awakenings were real; sometimes I couldn't tell.
Nowadays, I just relax and pass through the hypnagogic stage in a few seconds and then become lucid. It's always the same feeling: it feels like I'm squeezing through an extremely tight space and then I just float off of the bed. As this happens (and shortly after it happens) I get, at a minimum, a few seconds of nightmarish imagery and feelings of doom. Then I become (happily) lucid.
During the hypnagogic stage this particular time, I heard (hallucinated) footsteps outside my door and had a terrible feeling about it, like it was the grim reaper coming to get me. Then I quickly became fully lucid and all the fear disappeared.
I floated off my bed and towards the wall. I could control the floating to some degree, as if I were sort of swimming through the air. I started to twirl in circles in the air, as I've found this helps me stay lucid longer. I then floated through the wall and down the hallway. I could hear (hallucination) my father in the kitchen telling some sort of story.
I floated into the kitchen and saw him talking to my mother. My sister was standing there also, reading a postcard or something. It was christmas time (but summer time in the awake world). Everything was decorated green with a bit of red trim. I felt as if I were peering into the future. I could see them, but they couldn't see me. I felt like I was in a different time and place. The best way to describe it is it was like a parallel dimension that was slightly different from my world.
I realized at about this time that my sense of self felt completely disconnected from my body. I could picture it lying there motionless in the bed. I didn't feel like my body was a part of me. It was just a shell that I occupied while awake.
Eventually I felt compelled to go back to my body. I wasn't afraid at all. But I did feel concerned and obligated. I was concerned that my motionless body was helpless and vulnerable and that the footsteps I had heard outside my door were a potential threat to my body. Again, I wasn't afraid for myself. It was a different feeling... I was merely concerned about the physical well-being of the body I occupied when awake. I just felt like going back was something that I needed to do.
I floated back to my bedroom and laid down in the bed. I tried as hard as I could to break the lucid dream and wake up. But I couldn't do it. I grabbed a brown pillow that was on the bed and I stared at it for quite a while. The more I focused on it, the more intense it looked, but motion seemed to become choppy for some reason.
I then looked at my arms wondered what they would look like when I got older. I watched as my arms aged like a time-lapse video and became grey, and then I forced them to become young again.
I tried again to wake up, this time I succeeded , experiencing the same "squeezing through something" feeling that I felt when falling asleep.
When I woke up, I felt quite a bit freaked out and little bit scared, emotions that were completely absent while I was lucid.
I looked for the small brown pillow. It wasn't on the bed where I'd found it while lucid, but it was about four feet away resting on a chair. It's interesting to note that I was staying in a guest bedroom at my parent's house, a bedroom I'm not used to sleeping in, and I wasn't previously aware (consciously, anyways) that this brown pillow even existed.
This was one of the most insightful lucid dreams I've ever had, mainly because of the genuine feeling of being detached from my body. My new theory is that the hypnagogic stage is somehow related to our natural fear of death.
Sorry for such a long post. I'll enjoy reading all the threads here.
