Waking in the Astral

I've been on a night schedule lately, sleeping during the day. The past couple of days, I've been missing some sleep, and working out extra hard, making myself exhausted, and taking short naps afterward. Tonight, I took a long nap of a few hours, just seven hours after waking up.

At one point, I woke up, and started to get up, but as I did so, I noticed immediately that there was a double of me left behind as I moved. I was laying on my side. I had started to pull my upper body forward (sideways), and prop myself up, but the arm I could see was still there, unmoving, as "my arm" was moving away from it. I froze in that position as soon as I saw that, then realized with astonishment that I was having a very vivid astral experience. I've been reading a book on astral travel and thinking about the astral and similar things lately, and have had some major breakthroughs in letting go of the fears that keep most people from being able to do such things.

So I turned up my awareness, and I heard my body whimpering. To me at the time, it felt more like a dear friend than "me." "Me" was in the astral now. I thought, "it's probably feeling the missing spiritual energy, and is afraid it might die, or is feeling left alone." So I leaned back to comfort it. Some of me sank back into my body quickly, while my head actually stayed separated for a moment. I could feel my face touch my body's face, and I reached my hand behind its head, giving it a kind of hug, to reassure it. I was hoping I could carry on and get up in a moment, but as I "hugged" it, I snapped back into my body and instantly "woke up."

There were a lot of similarities here to an extremely vivid lucid dream, however there were also some striking differences, such as the awesome clarity of my perceptions, and the fact that when I "woke up," there was almost no transition at all in my consciousness from my state of thought during the experience and after it. There is a lot of crossover in dreams and the astral. Some things that people call dreams are actually astral trips. Unfortunately, most people are taught that their dreams are nearly meaningless, so they ignore them. Even the majority of those who are taught that their dreams have meaning believe that dreams are simply the product of their brains and nothing else. I think we'd all be better off paying more attention to our dreams.