2008/01/16
I thought I felt an earthquake at first, but from that apartment earthquakes feel more like swaying-- we'd had them before. This was more like earthquakes you see on movies. Not quite what I would call "vibrations". More like someone grabbed the bars of my bed's headboard or footboard, thrust against the frame, pulled back, and thrust again in quick succession, to shake the frame violently.* Thudthudthud, went the world around me, but I still decided to feel that I didn't care what happened next. I'd had too many "Am I close?" OBE signs before, to be excited.
(To aspiring projectors, I'd advise against wondering if a stage you experience is near an OBE. In the meditation itself, it's usually a sign that you're not even deep enough in a mindstate, and if asked after the practice session... well, the only real way to tell is to get to that stage again next time and take it further. To keep wondering if you're close to an OBE, or considering yourself an almost-projector, eventually gets kind of tiring and counterproductive.)
Then, my vision swam in, without me feeling my eyelids flutter open, vision faded in... I could see with a viewpoint too similar to the one I have with physical eyes (Hey, I thought that astral projections let you see all 8 corners of a room.+) I saw my feet, my legs, floating above the footboard of the bed— and presumed that the rest of my body floated level with them; the effect was that of an X-Files alien abduction but without the special effects. No blinding lights, just the view of my room at night like it looks at night. No little green men, just levitation and that pulse of the air that had a sort of sound, too, like the MRI of Doom on House, M.D.
Thudthudthud the air went, and leftleftleft I went. The air that carried me felt denser, somehow, like the space between two magnets of the same charge as they're forced together. Or, like… "gumminess" without the gum.
Then I saw legs lying below my legs that were floating, and wondered why the sight of "my" floating legs were covered in cuffed blue jeans while the legs on the bed wore the lavender pajama bottoms that I fell asleep in. The waves of gummy electromagnetic-feeling force pulled at my legs, pushed at what I felt were my “other” arms, so I turned a slow somersault and faced the bed. The force lowered me, and I saw my first face and only pillows parting like clouds.
I awoke in a room full of steam, a distorted view of it, because the cornea of my left eye protruded a few centimeters over the normal curve— yes, cornea, because I was in a body. Go figure, upon initiating an out of my body experience, the first thing I do is get me plopped inside somebody else's.
What, it wasn't mine, I'm female. My mind rode a male body. A drunk, or seriously beaten up, male body. I couldn't float out, but, to my growing panic, had to stay with his stumbling over glazed terracotta tiles. This place was far too large to be a bathroom-- a sauna, maybe.
These are just words to me, now. When I try to remember what it really looked like, my visual becomes a collage of bathrooms I've been in and tiles I've seen in waking life-- but I know it's not what I really saw in this experience. It was fresher when I wrote it down right after this OBE/dreaming session. So, I guess keeping dream journals diligently all that time, really did help, in keeping the memory of an altered state from fading too soon.
We— the boy, and I who was forced to follow the boy— halted by one of the frosted sliding doors, his pulse quickening with fright, and he thought, No, please don't come in. I shared his mental image of a tall, pale, heavy-set man, who looked just over middle age. I shared his terror of being hurt by this man.
The boy I was in, came up to a steamed-up mirror, supported himself by bracing his forearms against the sink and his forehead to the glass, caught his breath and some sense of balance, and we both asked "Who am I?" Meaning, who was he, because he didn't seem to remember. Your nightmare, another, mournful female voice answered, (and I strained to look around but couldn't, because he kept his bleak gaze at the mirror.) You've made it real.
He started to cry.
I squinched up my awareness, to send a thought to the voice, asking if she was a spirit guide. If so, could I please be brought to a more pleasant place? (Not that I didn't feel for this guy, it's just this was obviously a very personal moment he was having.) Like this Akashic Library that I kept hearing about?
At that, my perspective seemed to loose itself from the grip of this mysterious boy’s point of view. Warm water filled the space around me, and a white scarf snaked around my neck and billowed. I broke the surface of the water-feeling stuff, and was back in my body but my body was still. The air shook, just like when I first got out, and every "thud" was like a weak blast of energy prodding me out again. This time, I tried to "surf" it in the opposite direction. Thudthudthudthudthud the air went, and rightrightright I tried to go.
My attention snapped to the window, or the thing peeking in through the window: a metallic red-eyed figure, similar to the boss at the Tomb of Raithwall, except this was blue-black instead of brass-gold in color and more humanoid in body. Also, it had to be more than 20 stories tall.
He said he was looking for Rob. "Rob's not here!" I thought back at him, while I dived behind the bed. "Darn," and a shrug. was the last thing I heard from the demon thing, and I noticed that (because this was a telepathic communication) the thing that looked like a demon had thoughts that felt like they came from a human. Who on earth was he?
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The rest became far more dreamlike.
I phased into a bookstore reading black square paper napkins. The napkins were bound together like a book, and I was thinking that I would buy these books just to make something with the napkins until a maternal figure passed by and tried to converse with me about them. I shyly excused myself and went to browse the other shelves. Nothing interesting, but I could have sworn that I saw an Archie&Jughead "political issue" (it said below the title) with Veronica on the cover dressed like a French maid.
If this is the Akashic Records, I thought, It is such a total drag.
Then I was back in the apartment. Cecilia had somehow become an item with an old classmate of mine named Noel. In waking/physical life, they've never met. Anjie's cat was in the apartment, too, which the cat is not in waking/physical life, and as all these characters retreated to the dining room I moved forward to the computer at the corner of the room. I wanted to download a video of Firebird to see who the guy in the sauna was. Then, I woke up.
Or thought that I woke up, to see that I didn't download Firebird after all-- but somebody else did while I was asleep. I realized that I was still dreaming, or projecting, and asked surrounding guides again if I could visit the Library or Temples. A necklace appeared around my neck. It was strung with chunks of smokey quartz, big round beads of milky quartz, and sea-urchin like formations of some aquamarine crystal. Three women in a jealous rage appeared around me and tried to take the necklace, because they were magic prayer beads. I tried to move away from them, and realized that I had worlds of difficulty merely walking to the other side of the bed. My legs seemed to have disappeared, so I was floating, but floating through air that wasn’t made to be moved around in. I thought it was an excess of some subtle energy that made the air around me crackle so force(field)-fully, so I asked the crystal beads to absorb this excess, and the three women disappeared.
Looking around, the apartment's furniture was scrambled again. What was supposed to be a brass bed was a four-poster. I realized it was night, and the lights were off, but it wasn't dark. I tried to turn the lights on anyway but realized none of them worked. I moved, still with difficulty, to the door, to ask if we'd used up all the electricity or juice (don't know why I would ask in exactly those words.) Everyone I'd met that past year, it seemed, burst into the bedroom from the dining room and yelled, "Surprise!"
And then, the projection truly ended. Or I woke up, depending on how you look at it.
The first few seconds that I was out of body convinced me very deeply about the astral plane interpretation, but the rest was just so dreamlike in reasoning and texture that I wonder if there’s a link between dreams and extradimensional experience.
Those who say, "Of course there is! Whenever you dream of flying, you're APing! Whenever you visualize the room around you, and what you remember it looking like beyond, you're APing!" — I still disagree with. I have daydreamed, and I have night-dreamed, vividly at that, and before this I’ve even lucid-dreamed, and I’ve had hallucinatory sleep paralysis… but this OBE had such a different quality from any of those. On the other hand, it doesn’t help the distinction that a sense of both came one after the other and even seemed to meld, and all in the same meditation session.
* I later a found a much better description than mine, for this: “like… lying in a car that is driving across a bumpy road.” I don’t like to call this vibration. My electric toothbrush vibrates. It goes “buzzzzz”. This is not vibration, this is THUDDing. ^
+ Signpost #45 on C.C. Goodin's Astral Projection website ^
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