Fourth OBE: Mischief

2008/03/18
This time I "breathed" myself out: it was like I had to try to harmonize my dream or astral body's breathing with my physical body's breathing, because every time it went off-sync, it felt like an invisible ebb of a tide would pull me down into my body. So, I was out, but I felt somehow that I wasn't fully out.
The air around me felt like the undertow of a slow wave, so I was floating up to the lattice above my bed... then back in... then floating out, conscious body feeling like a blob of fluid in outer space... then back in...
I think this bobbing beginning comes from Robert Peterson’s exercise I was doing before the OBE, even though I gave up on it before the visualized cube was supposed to pull me out. I don't usually go for visualizations, since I thought that if you have to actively imagine it then it's definitively not real, but this particular exercise (step 4 on the website, onwards)... well... it seems to have had some effect.
There was somebody specific I wanted to stalk— uhh, I mean, pay a friendly visit to without paying air fare, and once I knew I was out, I focused on the country, then a possible city, then that person... and I found myself in some kind of space that was pitch-black and rainy. I couldn't see a thing, I just felt the raindroplets go right through me in the void and felt all cold-spackled when I willed myself back into my room (out of curiosity I checked the weather report in the city I thought to teleport to, and they were having rains the day I projected. It could be merely coincidental, of course.)

As I tread the space (did I mention that my out-of-body body's legs don't work like they're supposed to? I was trying to practice walking...) the world around me seemed to fade in to my sophomore high school English teacher's kitchen. Actually, I've never physically been in her kitchen and can't compare if they have a windowsill of blonde wood and potted flowers, but that was my conclusion. Strangely, I didn't will myself there.

This could be fun! I think I'll stay, I thought with uncharacteristic mischief. Somehow I then found myself lying down on this kitchen's stove, while Sibling's cat glowered at me from the kitchen table. Huh? What... what's Marmalade doing here? Is she projecting, too? But that's not supposed to happen!

But whatever. I willed my astral body, or dream body, into a Morticia Addams dress and blood speckles on my face, (like a lucid dream, which was another reason this was weird-- except for the astral blue jeans in my first OBE, I don't actually see my astral body... let alone accessorize! And I was thinking and acting completely out of character...) and I posed on that stove like a sleeping vampire, willing myself to be visible, at least enough that my teacher could see me being a horror-movie ghostly apparition. She didn't... at least, she just walked on by.

And that's when Marmalade sat on my head.

... ... ...

I can keep wondering about the smooth transition Marmalade made to her new location, or why we had bodies when we were supposed to be out of body, (even... why do we have bodies when we're supposed to be in our minds, like in dreams? Maybe that's for another entry), was Marmalade really sitting on my head or was it the "concept" of sitting, on the "idea" of my head? Whatever-- it can never become dignified.

Faced with astral cat-butt on my astral face, I gave up on haunting and willed us to drift back into my room.

I still have such a difficult time walking without my body. Approaching the computer table, every step I took in the air seemed to make the sky darken into the evening -- when I was projecting in the afternoon. But I still couldn't approach the bedpost. It was like walking through time, not space.


The next thing I remember, I was at a wall made out of knotted wood, a giant tree root, in a forest of giant trees. I met with these people, who took me to their home. It was dreamlike again, in the way I just knew these were merpeople.

One room in the merpeople's home looked exactly like mine, exactly like the room I meditated and phased in and out of this journey. For a while the family looked like ordinary landlubbering human people-- the child of the family even looked like a classmate of mine-- but outside the window, instead of the usual view outside my apartment, I could see the sunbeams dancing through the the waves and casting sinewy threads of light onto the corals and sea cucumbers.

We went out to the "backyard" which was really a tidal pool at midnight. I seemed to have a retinal burn or something so the tiny moon in the sky above would have an automatic eclipse each time I looked at it... a "blind spot" shadow circle, that turned into a green after-image, and we screamed joyfully at the moon (hey, it seemed The Thing To Do) and raced each other to catch the shoreline. Then I woke up.

Every night that week and the next, I dreamed of nothing but oceans and beaches.