The Body Electric 2: Spiritual Paradigms

To me, astral projection is the paranormal interpretation of an out-of-body experience-- unassisted, that is, by physical trauma, hallucinogens, or mechanical items. A guided meditation with visuals isn't an astral projection, a daydream about flying isn't an astral projection, and neither is the REM part of the sleep cycle even if you are lucid.

It's uncompromising, and not really less silly than stretching the term to cover, well, anything. That's still where I stand, until I find reason enough to stand somewhere else.

My taking for granted that shared dreams can be done, and reliably too, if only we could figure out the mechanics and the methods... isn't reason. That I don't meditate while hooked up to an MEG machine to see if perhaps I am in REM sleep when I think that I'm having an OBE, is reason (but I think that acts more like an omission reason.) That my friend Mahadevi appeared to react to my shift in mind-state, though, got me shuffling around a bit.

"It's like static electricity on a frosty day. I feel it in the back of my head," he'd explained when I asked about the 'crackling'. (This was much later after the wedding. Last week. How we got to this topic, I vaguely remember.)

"And that's how you know you're projecting?" I wanted to clarify.

"That's how I know that someone is projecting." This wasn't a pointed statement, for which I would have to give Mahadevi a sheepish grin. He'd made the rounds in paranormal communities in the past, and didn't much appreciate when he sensed members of that community were trying to make rounds on him. My OBE's are much less disciplined, always off-target, meandering, distracted, or outright chaotic. When I can manage them, that is.

I thought that was interesting, and said so. "See, I didn't consider that a projection. Merely developing a body of awareness, seems to give off the same signal as extending that body. I mean, just from religion I always thought that what makes us -- awareness, soul, corresponding astral body -- was always 'in there' somehow. Speaking metaphysically, what if this astral body doesn't even exist until we reflect upon it? So there is a phase of construction..."

"That's possible," Mahadevi said. "Think of totems. For some people, that's more than a symbol. That's the form of their soul. There's some diversion from a standard mold there, that comes from power of thought. Or think of gods on the astral plane with, like, the form of a man's body with an owl's head."

I wondered, though, at the lack of construction. Am I soulless when I'm not in a certain state of mind? -- Reflecting, critiquing, or just being aware? There's a kind of mechanism put into default action to live at all, but I recall it feeling so differently from what I'd consider awareness that perhaps all the time I affected to be smart and soulful and individual, I only thought I was.

Of course, I could still be merely presuming that I'm ensouled, say... now... and still not be.

We continued chatting, eventually turning to the topic of dreams as paranormal phenomenon.

I'd kept a record of my dreams for years until the guilt of wasting paper got to me. This was because with almost all of my dreams, I'd be able to take apart and mark each image as a memory from waking life. When I tried to figure out how shared dreaming could work, without forming another body or traveling through some sort of independent common-ground realm/plane... I ended up with a model of dreaming the same thing as a target and in the same way, say, in first person-- in their first person, if they're dreaming in first person. In such a setup, if I want the target to dream of seeing me and meeting up with me... then I would have to use my own lucidity to make a form of myself, which I (sharing the target's point of view) will see-- not be. I might even have to puppeteer it from the target's perception, too.

"Don't think of dreams as isolated bubbles," said Mahadevi. "Think of it more as an ocean."

"So dreams are a kind of sub-astral plane, after all?"

"If you like. Anyway, when I walk into someone else's mindscape, it's like being flushed down the toilet and out into this ocean... Ugh!" He shuddered. "I really hate dreaming! Give me earth magic, that's grounded right here in this world and this body. I try to get the dreamwalking over with as quickly as I can, but then the Goddess says, 'Hey, you're good and efficient! Let's send you on another mission.'"

I laughed. "It sounds to me like a neat way to network while saving on waking hours!"

"Oh, no. It's very rare that I walk into a dream belonging to someone I know. I don't even see the person, most of the time. People forget, in their dreams, that they are that world. They're the landscape."