Not A Blog™

[Continued from Monday]

Having managed to get myself out of my body, I had become the very definition of the word flabbergasted. To this day, I still consider this to be the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. Of course, there’s always that part which says, “yeah, but”. Before you project, you’re always a little skeptical. It would be cool, but does it really happen? I know other people did it and wrote about it. Someone is making it happen. Yeah, but it just seems unlikely. Besides, wouldn’t it still seem like it was all in your head? Wouldn’t you be able to tell?

Quite honestly, no. The event is all-encompassing and very persuasive, and I never (in an OBE) encountered something that “didn’t make sense” in the way that dreams sometimes don’t make sense. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d like to draw a more comprehensive comparison between OBE’s, astral projections, and dreams.

Firstly, the difference between an OBE and an astral projection, in my experience, seems to be a matter of degree. I’ve only had one AP, which lasted a pretty short time, whereas I’ve had half a dozen or so OBEs. Now, I really need to put a huge disclaimer in front of my next sentence because, again, I know I promised yesterday that I wouldn’t do this, but I thought about it for a really long time and I can’t figure out a better way of putting it. The difference between an out of body experience and an astral projection is that the AP is at a higher level of vibration.

I know—I know that helps no one. It’s one of those things where you read it (or at least I did this when I read it, because I easily slip into mock-mode)—you read it and scoff and say, “oh, RIGHT. What the hell is that bullshit supposed to mean?” And nobody can explain it. But then after it happened to me, I came back and thought, “oh, um, actually, yeah. That’s probably the best way of describing it.”

Achieving an astral projection is like making yourself more excited, in a sense. Maybe this is a better comparison: hyperventilating. If you’ve ever breathed really hard and fast for a few minutes while laying down, and then stood up quickly, you get light-headed and sometimes see spots. You’ve drawn in a lot of energy via the air, saturating your blood with oxygen, and artificially elevated your heart rate. Then you stand and the blood drains from your head and you get dizzy because you’re simultaneously hyped up and short on blood.

AP is akin to hyperventilating in that you’re drawing energy from somewhere and making yourself more excited. Except instead of passing out, you move away from the usual solid-ness that characterizes whatever the place is where your meat-body resides. But doing this makes you kind of jitter around more, which is where the vibration part comes from. Maybe it would be like if you could actually feel all of the atoms and molecules that make up your body moving and bumping into each other. You’re aware of being some mysterious energy thing, and you can excite yourself and scoot off to somewhere else.

That’s a pretty terrible explanation, I’m afraid, and it’s really not helpful. Moving on.

Again, like I’ve mentioned, I rarely dream. I’ve started to more, recently, but as a child or teenager in school, I had very few dreams that I remember. I suppose, biologically speaking, everyone dreams, even you don’t remember them. But whatever sort of brain process happens during dreaming, I believe that it must be a different one that happens during an OBE because while I don’t remember my dreams, OBEs are clear like real memories. I can easily distinguish between OBEs and dreams; they’re not the same thing at all.

There are two big things that distinguish them. One, in dreams (at least the majority of the one’s I’ve had), you’re a passive observer, even of your own actions. Things appear and disappear and generally don’t make sense, and nobody—including you—thinks to question any of these strange goings-on. Even if you are lucid in a dream, it doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t try and pull a fast one. OBEs are not like this.

Secondly, dreams parallel real life. Even if shapes of things are weird, or there are inexplicable size differences or things aren’t in perspective, it still mimics the real world. OBE’s don’t. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense to say that the environment experienced in an OBE is “dreamlike”, because that’s not accurate in the slightest. OBEs are their own thing—which also makes them difficult to talk about because there are a lot of novel experiences involved for which we don’t have words.

Even more interesting: some aspects of OBEs I never experienced in a dream until after I experienced it in the OBE. Indeed, my first lucid dream came about this way. I was dreaming about having an OBE (this isn’t as complicated as it sounds), but the dream version of it was a lousy knock-off of the real McCoy, at which point I said to myself, “This isn’t like a real OBE! I must be dreaming.” And so realized I was. The experience of being out of body is very unique, to where the best thing I can do in the way of describing it is comparing it to other things, even though this is woefully inadequate. If you haven’t been there, you just haven’t been there.

After I had projected myself next to the bed, I took a few moments to just look around my room. One of those experiences unique to an OBE is “seeing”—or rather, not-seeing, because it’s completely different. It somewhat like a combination of high-contrast, posterized video and radar, or echolocation sensing. It’s also brown.[1] Or at least, the lower vibrating stuff seems to be brown, or sometimes grey, but not colorful, anyway. Astral projections, on the other hand, are extremely colorful—including the paradoxical idea of colors you haven’t seen before—but a run-of-the-mill OBE (if there is such a thing), is not a kaleidescope of hue. Well strictly speaking there are no hues at all, but you get the idea.

An interesting aspect of OBE-o-vision is that it seems to be range-finding as well as shape-defining. By that I mean, you get a “feel” for how far away things are. You don’t experience binocular vision, so maybe it’s a method of “seeing” distance without the dual input? However that works, I could feel that my far bookshelf was further away than my desk, even though I didn’t see either of them as distinctly as I did with regular vision, and I didn’t see them separated by space due to the parallax offset one gets from having two eyeballs.

Also, my field of view seemed to change depending on what I was focusing on. I’ve heard that people can make themselves see 360 degrees around, but I never tried to do this. While looking at my room, however, I saw from my closet to the back wall behind my bed—roughly 270 degrees of vision—which I clearly can’t do in real life. It didn’t seem awkward at the time, and I wasn’t disoriented by it, but it makes for some strange memories.

Objects were not necessarily seen as solid or ethereal. It doesn’t make sense to call anything “transparent” because that’s a characteristic of light. Things were either “solid” in that you looked at them, or they were indistinct if you looked past/through them. I didn’t test the limits of this “focusing through objects” ability, so I only saw it localized; e.g. seeing the entire bookcase itself despite all the books sitting on it, or seeing the books themselves, and not seeing the part of the bookcase behind them. It is also interesting to note that windows are solid unless you choose to look through them, at which point they defocus like any other object. They’re not inherently transparent.

Finally, it didn’t seem like any part of my field of view was more distinct than any other part. Regular eyes have a very small area of high detail right in the center, and everything else is sort of blurry and indistinct. With OBE-o-vision, everything seemed to be of about the same distinctness, unless you focused on one particular object, at which point it became very sharp and clear—moreso than you could see with regular eyes—and your field of view narrowed to encompass that single object.

I had three goals outlined for myself which I wanted to accomplish if I ever managed to successfully leave my body. I was rather pleased with myself that I managed to do all three, although as you’ll see in tomorrow’s entry, I didn’t necessarily get the results that I expected.

[Continued on Thursday]

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1. I didn’t hear the song Kashmir until after I had a few OBEs. When I heard the lyric “All I see turns to brown” I thought, “hey, they must be talking about an out of body experience!” Later I found out the song is about the desert—but I still think of it as describing an OBE. [Back]