Strange Dreams

[Sir Taffsalot]

I don't believe this was a dream. More of a sleeping experience. In my early 20s I used to Astral Project. Usually about once a week I would leave my body in my sleep. I had never heard of Astral projection before. I had heard of people leaving their body during an accident but never voluntarily or during your sleep. I used to thrash about to try and get my body to move so I would wake up, thinking this would be a bad dream.

 

After a couple of months I stopped been scared of the experience firmly believing that no matter what happened I would eventually end up up back in my body safely. I even managed to control which direction I would hover/float in just by thinking of which direction I wanted to travel. I could float through walls and go into other peoples houses and even on to the street. The colour wasn't natural either. Everything was a shade of purple. There didn't appear to be a pattern to when this would happen either. it could happen any day of the week or more than once a week or sometimes it wouldn't happen for weeks.

 

After about a year it just stopped. I occasionally feel like I leave my body in my sleep now and again. But it feels different and not like before. I'm convinced these days they are just a dream. I'm just longing for a wonderful experience that seems to elude me these nights.

[betpet]

Strangely enough I've been having strange dreams myself over the last few days. I've not dreamed very much over the last few years but the last few days I've dreamt every night and they have both been vivid and fairly memorable. (The details are hazy but the gist is string).

 

Can't say I've astral projected myself but it's a fascinating concept. Did you go anywhere familiar?

Edited April 2, 2012 by betpet

[ungoliant]

seems like a good excuse to stay up late and sleep during the day. gotta be a womens locker room around somewhere, yeah?

[demagogue]

As I understand it, the main punchline with "projection" experiences isn't so much that your experience is really "leaving" your brain so much as it makes you realize just how much the "outside world" really is a mental construction in your brain all along. The feeling of "out-there-ness" of stuff is really a very calculated thing that's getting projected on all your experience all the time. That's why I don't like it when people say "Ah that's bullshit. You're not really leaving your body. Just a bunch of magic hocus pocus crap". And I want to reply, actually the description by the astral projection people is a lot more "real" and hard science than what they're assuming. Astral projections really are tapping into the "out there" experience and pushing their perception out there into it, as much as any other external object in their view. So it's more accurate to say they are "above their body" looking down on it because the mental construction of "above their body" is including the seat of consciousness literally out there with it when it's constructing that space.

 

Fun study: it's actually quite easy to move your "seat of consciousness" around: the ancients fully believed it was in your heart; we believe it's in our heads; astral projection is of course when it gets physically moved outside the body, and people that practice it are able to move it around & outside their body at will... all perfectly possible to sustain in experience, and all tapping into literal spatial perception. It's no "illusion" but the same spatial perception as rocks and flowers and shit out there. I usually just flip the traditional equation around though. The punchline isn't that you're really leaving your body to go out there, but that "out there" has really been part of "in here in the brain" all along (so of course you can go "out there" in here too) and the so-called "scientific" critics haven't fully appreciated that yet. That is, one way or another, you have to concede that the "seat of consciousness" and "rocks and flowers and shit" are "out there" in the same way in your perception (they're both invoking the same spatial perception that's oblivious to what's actually going on out there). It's just which bullet do you want to bite to come to terms with that? I say you have to bite the bullet that all spatial perception is a construction through & through.

 

Edit: Or to put it another way, it's not that our dreams are a lot more real than we realize, but reality is a lot more dream than we realize.

[jay pettitt]

Coo! I had my first ever sleep paralysis episode a few evenings ago which was quite exciting. Happily it wasn't a frightening one, just a dog, and it was over quickly, but kinda unsettling and weird all the same.

 

Also happily I knew that sleeping on one's back made you more susceptible, so I made sure I was curled up on my side - so no potentially scary repeats as I drifted back off. Phew.

 

But yeah, kinda awesome that the brain plays such wacky tricks and how hard it is to differentiate real from not when your head is mucking about. You can understand how people think that ghosts and other spooky visitors are the real deal.

 

As far as I heard the out of body, astrally projected self stuff is triggered when the brain gets conflicting signals about which way the body is orientated. How you'd go about gaming it to encourage repeats I don't know though.

 

--edit--

If I remember right, there's some stuff about out of body experiences in this fascinating vid:

Edited March 30, 2012 by jay pettitt

[demagogue]

I got it once when I was lying on my back, on the floor (tatami mats), fan going, mid-afternoon, pretty lucid. I remember "looking around the room", and then up at the ceiling and not really being sure if it was the actual ceiling or not, and then passing my hand in front of my face until I realized I could see the ceiling through my hand. That's the only way I knew for sure. Very weird and very cool while it lasted.

[jay pettitt]

Also possibly related and just as barmy: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/you-are-here/

Edited March 30, 2012 by jay pettitt

[Springheel]

That's why I don't like it when people say "Ah that's bullshit. You're not really leaving your body. Just a bunch of magic hocus pocus crap".

 

I think the skepticism comes less from the idea that your consciousness can to be "located" outside your body and more from the claims that you are actually seeing and perceiving from this new vantage point. Studies where people have been asked to visit a room and read a specific card or message while astrally projecting have constantly failed.

[jay pettitt]

Plainly you can't actually be not in your head, but your head can get very confused as to where it actually is.

[demagogue]

I think the skepticism comes less from the idea that your consciousness can to be "located" outside your body and more from the claims that you are actually seeing and perceiving from this new vantage point. Studies where people have been asked to visit a room and read a specific card or message while astrally projecting have constantly failed.

 

That's the rub though. If the brain has enough information, there are legit interpretations of the studies that it can and does let you "see and perceive from this new vantage point". The feeling of your seat of consciousness being outside your body isn't an illusion, it's a mental construction of the world out there that happens to include its own "vantage point" in external space. Or to give an awesome example from V.S. Ramachandran's book, when you see a "hand" that's not your own, even an artificial one, under certain conditions you can perceive it as literally one's own hand "out there", and in one case he documented a situation where a person felt another person's hand across a room as "his own", so when the other person's hand was touched, the subject felt the touch as if it were is own hand out there. Of course we're not talking about ESP or magic projections, the brain still has to get the information the old fashioned "local" way that Einstein insisted on. But it's not being fair to the studies either to say the vantage point isn't literally being constructed as "outside the body" (in the construction of exterior space), when I think in some cases that's the best interpretation.

 

I guess my point is, in some skeptics' zeal to make the case that a perception of experience isn't "actually coming from out there", they may over-state their case and leave out the possibility that the brain may regularly flub the construction of the line between internal and external space, and as we actually experience them, there isn't as fine of a distinction as their arguments would make it seem like. Or maybe to put it another way, when we say we live "in the world" and talk about how that world works, what most people usually mean by "in the world" isn't the world of subatomic particles but the mental construction of it with chairs and rooms and doors and their body, and the brain projects as much mental constructions "out" onto it as it receives from the outside world. And in *that* world, the one we actually "live in", the line between external and internal space can get flubbed all the time.

 

Edit: Anyway, I find most skeptics concede they aren't disagreeing when we all agree everything we know about physics can perfectly explain what's going on, then they get bored with the argument and move on to other things. But to me, the idea that the external world could be a very fragile construction in our experience is sensational and deserves a lot of serious reflection on just how radical its implications could be in the way we actually live in it. And I can get down when that sensational part gets glossed over by people more interested in countering the kooks than thinking about how weird consciousness really is. Just my bias though.

[jay pettitt]

I think it's definitely one of those truth is stranger than fiction things.

 

More awesome weirdness.

 

--edit--

 

You have to wonder what the possible implications for things like video games could be here - if you can convince the brain to take conscious ownership of a virtual self with some fairly simple feedback trickery.

Edited March 31, 2012 by jay pettitt

[SeriousToni]

seems like a good excuse to stay up late and sleep during the day.

 

Hah! I would sleep all day AND night and try to move chairs or open doors to scare people off