Second OBE: Empathic Overload

2008/01/18

With no vibrations at all this time, I sat up instead of floated out. It almost felt physical, like the surface tension between water and dry skin as one wades slowly into a stagnant lukewarm swimming pool, except with the whole upper body and much quicker. For a moment, it was like I was seeing through two sets of eyes: one that was astral vision, and the other view through sleepy half-closed physical eyes. Weirded out by the double vision, I lay back down into my body.
Sibling and Cecilia were at their college while I did this meditation. I thought I'd drop by. I can't recall or describe exactly how I thought it, that was different than my first OBE's teleportation attempt, but I found myself hovering over the campus grounds parking lot... and, ruining the feeling of achievement, a kind of "creeped out" feeling.
Information was just spilling into my mind about everyone I saw. This one person I saw getting out of his car. He was well-dressed and pretty groomed but I felt this sleaziness coming off him, and he was worried over something being printed or written down.
A girl walked by the parking lot, skipped backwards a bit, ripples of surprise and joy bubbling all around her. I felt like I was intruding because I knew exactly what it was about. I can't recall now, but I knew then in such volume and detail in just the few moments I saw her.
This other girl... come to think of it, I actually didn't see her, but I felt like her life history had been dumped into my mind— in a moment I knew how everybody only cared about how she looked growing up, how bad they made her feel about being just a little overweight once in her early teens, and most painfully how they were proven right and she was only succeeding now that her appearance was a top priority. I felt her surrender her right to any opinion, deciding she'd do everything They said from now on.
I found myself getting alarmingly overwhelmed by all this, even though there weren't that many people. I felt full of life and the pain of life, full to bleeding. Not caring anymore that I hadn't seen Sibling or our roommate— I desperately willed myself back, and felt like a pretzel for the rest of the evening. My head felt cramped all over the skull, my body as if my "subtle, astral" feet had been put back in back-to-front, and generally imbalanced and twisted up and awful.

There was nothing fantastical about anything I saw, so this may be my only OBE so far that was fully in the real world. On the other hand, I actually went back into my body, and there wasn't even a little bit of shaking, which some psychic standards mark it as a dream.
Back to the first hand. My very first lucid dream where I split in two wasn’t nearly as vivid as this splitting, but I don’t get the sense that it’s necessarily about vividness. Another lucid dream I had, was as detailed, solid-seeming, and surprising as waking life. If it were a matter of vividness, then an OBE should fall within the spectrum of dreaming— but I just don't feel it's that quality that makes the distinction. That vagueness annoys me, the classic psychic’s answer of, “I just… knew, and you’ll ‘just know’ too,” has always annoyed me, because I’d thought the purpose of speaking out or writing should be to connect even the most ambient ideas with something practical and sensory. There should be no description beyond the grasp of a sharp enough observer, so I’ll just have to surrender to the fact that I’m not that observer.