Having chatted to a rather obsessive atral traveller recently i am now totally confused between that and lucid dreaming which i always thought were two different things. What she was describing was most definitely advanced lucid dreaming hence (and totally understandably) the obsession (and my admiration for her committment). Unfortunately she has attached so much mystical and magickal nonsense to her experiences that it took a while to sort it out and i'm still not convinced exactly which bits fit where. I am not at all well up on the atral journeying thing so couldn't really tell if the two things were the same or different.
Any astral travellers out there care to help me out?

I'm not an astral traveler but I have had one lucid dream in my life, which I take to mean that I was dreaming, became aware that I was in a dream, and thereforth controlled my dream as if I were directing a film.

Astral traveling, as I understand it, is about removing your spiritual body from your physical body in order to have OBEs (outer body experiences). It supposedly takes a lot of study, whereas lucid dreaming on the other hand is something which I spontaneously experienced and was always very much a dream.

But as I've never really studied astral traveling, I may not be giving the best possible response...

In my own experience of astral travel, I can see events and situations and people external to me. I don't do it often and less often by will but have had confirmation by others of what I saw on more than one occasion, ie I described a room and event I wasn't actually in physically. The time scale can be contorted and not synchronous.

Lucid dreaming as a definition I am not sure about, I have a number of aware states I can experience including full on sensual experience the same as 'real life' that I know are not 'real' because of various cues and repeated happenings, including one when I sometimes meet an entity that has been shown to be what another person calls a spirit guide of theirs.
I have also experienced a cross over between the two when I have dreamt and recorded an event from a different (physical) position to how it actually unfolded later. I have also experienced some things from within another person (through their eyes) and that can be very freaky.

Astral travel feels different to that of lucid dreaming and its not uncommon to wake up feeling more tired than when you went to sleep or to wake up with a heavy head (like a bowlful of soup but not drink related lol). I think that like meditation it takes time to gain control of your astral body and consciously decide if / when / where you travel. Often I think people travel "by accident" i.e. they may not necessarily be aware at the time especially if asleep of having made a decision to travel but they are pulled or their sub conscious takes over.

I think we all have the ability to travel astrally but like meditation clarity of thought, and sustained unbroken thought through regular practise helps. I have been lucky enough once to have seen something on the astral that has later been confirmed to me in the physical world by a friend in another location which is as close as i could ever hope for proof if i needed it and i don't know how you determine if your friend is actually travelling or just dreaming.

If she is travelling is she aware, conscious, safe? I don't know anyone who travels "all the time" it seems to be an occasionally thing for me and for the other couple of people i know that do but its not unheard of. I think Dion Fortunes book on psychic self defence might have touched on it briefly but i'm sure there are other better information sources out there too.

BBs LL

Sorry, i missed the replies above until LL pulled it back.
I found it funny that my friend always does this travelling early morning just before she wakes which is usual with LD. It's never a concious thing with her. it happens because she tells herself she'll do it before she goes to sleep. However she claims and i have no reason to doubt her, that she also sees things that she can check after the event which i've never heard with LD.
Can you travel astrally through meditation or is it too a sleep thing?

Hi Woozle i too do this just before i wake or if i cannot sleep at night and am trying to sleep it can happen then, i astral travelled once and it was totally different, felt and saw myself go down a long wormhole, i remember i was asked if i would go first and it was right at the very beginning of my spiritual life, i was so scared and asked if he would bring me back which he said he would, i came back into my body with a jolt and boy was i ever glad to be back on Earth again. I wrote these things down in a journal at the time which is a good thing to do, this was around 8 years ago now, but i think the two are different certainly for me they were.

Hi Sunrise
I found it interesting about the worm hole, i always thought of astral travelling as up and at 'em sort of experience, not a down down deeper experience. I have this too and when i was less permanently tired i used to deliberately try to get down it, sometimes i could sometimes i couldn't. It was like going down a throat, colour vanished and i had to shoot off an opening in the side of the throat and i would be in another time usually rather than just another place, always the same time though, and in black and white. If i missed the opening i kept going down and ended up asleep. What surprised me was the clarity of detail and that nothing actually happened. it was jut like standing on the pavement and watching things go by. Maybe i watched Bill and Ted's excellent adventure too many times
Was your worm hole similar?

Hi Woozle, yes it was though it wasn't down more horizontal and as i came out the other side i was couching behind a rock scared to death watching some sort of battle all in colour, why i was there i have no idea, unless it was connected to a past life, i only remember praying like mad at the time please let me get back home. Now of course if i ever experienced anything like that again i would enjoy the experience more. Lucid dreaming i seem to do occasionally and that seems so very real to me, but i am allways never really entirely sure why i am shown some of the things i see, i am starting to meditate again havn't done any for ages.

I'm not sure how you can determine in someone else which is which? I know for me I've got to know myself and i know it feels different to travel astally than to be in a lucid dream state. When i travel on the astral i can "feel" the air on my face, smell the night air and the woods or anything else familiar on the way, i know where i am and what i'm doing there and i feel conscious and attentive although i am aware that i have left my physical body in a deep meditative state.

I think it uses a lot of energy to travel like that certainly over a long period of time and when i have done i come back feeling tired (not so much physically but energy wise). Sounds like an odd question but do you see spirit? If you can and she can astrally project at will there is a good chance you would be able to see spirit leaving from the body and also later returning. I've seen a friend do it once about 4 years ago so i know its possible if a bit unusual. But then if we can't discuss the unusual here where can we? lol

The other thing is, is she grounded in her normal day to day life? One part of returning from astral travel is to spend time really grounding properly because otherwise it can leave you feeling a bit disconnected and "flaky" (best word i could think of).

Not sure if any of this is helpful but i hope so.
BBs LL

now that's interesting too. when lucid dreaming i use all my senses. I have been trying as someone else said, to observe remote events and check them later but i'm always too knackered and LD is therefore too rare for me to be tested rationally. My friend obviouly has the same level of 'lucitdity' but as you say it's difficult to know.

Nope, afaik i can't see spirit. Mind you i haven't had much opportunity to check.

flaky! most definitely flaky! I'll ask her about grounding.
cheers LL (and Sunrise)

edit: pity nobody is around to see it but i have managed finally to figure out the quote thingy. There's a button for it!!!! What a clever woozle i am. I have mastered technology!!!

Just a few questions from an interested reader.

For the people that travel via 'Astral Airlines' , do you do it when awake? (because that would answer the question about whether it was a lucid dream or not, yes?).

If so, does one just pop out the way one would go out to the shops?

Another thing I've wondered for awhile but found no answer to is 'time'. For instance, people speak about being in different places, and frequently being in 'past' times but what about the future? Wouldn't it be useful if one could travel on demand to check out next week for winning lotto numbers and such? Serious question. Also, is time the same 'out there' as one follows when not incorporeal? So if one pops out , is one gone for the same amount of time as it seems or not?

If one CAN do it on demand, are there any 'boundaries' to where and 'when' one goes to?

Marto

Yes it is possible to astrally project whilst awake, although its more common in sleep, but to do so consciously it takes practise to be in control and retain focus and clarity of thought. A bit like meditation does but the next progression from that. Lots of people project without necessarily being aware or conscious of the process. For me i usually have to relax into a meditative state, place protection in place as i would when going to sleep at night (safety net), make sure i leave a candle lit because it helps me regain focus on returning and then let higher consciousness take over to project to a specific destination or for a specific reason. I do have some days where i can't do this, probably because my concentration isn't strong enough at the time or sustainable.

The astral planes are linked with the spirit world and i think in the same way time and space are not necessarily how they are to us in the physical and can be transcended. I think many physical boundaries in the material world can be transcended, overcome, worked around on the astral which is one of the reasons it is so useful. There are other boundaries though, usually put there by other practitioners, the most obvious being that many of us here i think put protective measures around our homes etc and rightly so. I think these are boundaries on the astral, which hopefully will be respected by others, but then if they're not that's why its called protection.

Found a couple of links here i think the 2nd one's the more useful of the two because it separates different types, whys, wherefores etc.

wikipedia
astral projection

BBs LL x

I haven't actually 'astral traveled', but have had experience in out of body on a spontainious level. I find myself at times lifting up to my ceiling near the curtained window and coming back into my body. (Can't seem to go anywhere else yet) I wasn't asleep and I was able to do it again at will, because as this was my first experience with OBE, I was fascinated. It felt weird I must say. Felt a kind of 'buzzing' all around me.

It's possibly your spirit body or possibly it could be something called twilight sleep, where you are not exactly awake and not exactly asleep. I don't know as I haven't 'experiemented' with it lately. It was almost like what happened when I first tried meditation. I was actully focusing on a spot on a wall when suddenly I felt that I was no longer 'here'. That feeling scared the hell out of me until someone told me to just go with it as unless you are laying in the path of a train, it doesn't hurt and you can 'go back' anytime you want. That proved to be true as I enjoy meditation now and do when I need to relax.

Thanks for the links LL but now i really am confused I'm going to have to read it all a couple of times.

Thanks for the links. I am aware of the info. in the first and the second is a bit dodgy for me because it uses a religious perspective to explain a phenomenon. Sort of like using 'ghosts' to explain 'haunting', if you see what I mean .

I was wondering more about it as a 'stand alone' phenomenon which could happen for anybody, atheist and all. If it requires a pre-belief in something 'spiritual', that (in my opinion) muddies the water. I realize you put it up for description purposes , but any belief system may describe the same experience in a different way as another one.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Lots of people project without necessarily being aware or conscious of the process" because if they were not aware, how would they know ANYTHING had happened? Daydreams and Petite Mal seizures can be like that, but they aren't usually put in the 'astral' event category.

I would also like to put aside what happens in dreams here. That is a whole different experience ( I believe) and again can muddy the waters. People dream of all kinds of things - deciding what's 'real' and what's not would be tricky. So I'd like more information on conscious, waking Astral traveling.

You do say that boundaries can be transcended, so I'll go back to just one part of my original question: can you transcend time and place? Can you go into the future to bring back information? Or, even more simply, of what use can this be put to other than relaxation and the exercise of imagination? ( not that that isn't extremely useful for say, stress reduction or trying to remember something, but people who make claims to travel the 'Astral' never seem to have gained anything by it other than to say they do -NOT implying that of you! ).


Thanks,

Marto

[quote=Lantern_Light,Mar 3 2009, 03:43 PM]

I don't think some people are aware of what their spirit / soul is doing regardless of whether they are asleep or awake, travelling or not. I think some people walk through the whole of their lives in the material world without ever giving a second thought to their soul or the spirit world. Some people are just not sensitive or aware or conscious not necessarily through any fault of their own. Why would that be different if they're asleep or travelling? And no, some may not know anything has happened except they woke up feeling tired or with a heavy head?
Then there are other people (many here i'm sure) who are aware, who see spirit, who remember significant dreams, who are able to scry or read or gain information because they are linked to the spirit world. These people are for more likely to remember if they do astrally travel or project and far more likely to be able to learn (or relearn -depending on viewpoint ) to astrally project at will because they have more knowledge of the spirit world and have more self control in that sense.   

So, you are postulating two kinds of people? Those who are 'capable' and 'spiritual' and those who are "not sensitive or aware or conscious?" And these who lack the sensitivity and awarness are somehow blind to this other world that others may freely take for granted and come and go on? ( and can apparently go into the future and pick winning lottery tickets. Strange there doesn't seem to be more people winning. )

Interesting.

Of course another answer to account for those who don't experience such things is there is no such thing as 'spirit or 'astral travel', yes? Then it becomes a matter of personal opinion and does not seek nor act to divide people between 'those that have and those that don't'.

How much have you won on the lottery so far?

Marto

All i said was that some people are more aware than others and that i think this makes a difference. And no i haven't won any money on the lottery even if i could it wouldn't be ethical imo which is why i told you to do it yourself!

I don't want to argue with you and whilst conversing with others here has always previously been an enjoyable and useful passtime i'm finding this stressful and far from enjoyable. You and I clearly have different opinions on most subjects so lets just leave it at that please if that's alright with you. All i did was give an opinion on a subject and although i don't agree with you i do recognise your opinion is just as valid and i respect your right to express it. Sorry if any of my thoughts have upset or offended this is certainly not how they were intended.

LL

Marto, do you always have to turn everything into a personal crusade - your view vs. the rest of the world?
The question here is not whether it is true or not. I was asking about a difference in two techniques and to do that it is necessary to take as read that the two techniques actually exist. Lots, if not most of the things in the pagan world can be pulled to bits with great ease but it all boils down to whether you believe or not. I am actually finding LL's and others posts interesting and helpfull, yours not.
So, you are totally right Marto, and everyone else is wrong. Now do you mind if we continue to discuss the OP?

Well I myself found Marto's questions quite helpful to gaining a better understanding of what you're getting at with this thread. I'm sorry LL found it stressful, although I'm a little confused as to why but I'm grateful for her answers, not being terribly convinced of astral travel myself.

In my teens I was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, the effects of which you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference from what a lot of people describe as astral travel including the 'hangover' but when it happened to me, it happened when I was wide awake, sometimes in the middle of conversations. I've heard of people suffering from the attacks in their sleep too, although I don't recall ever doing it myself. I can see how easy it would be to misconstrue the fit if it had happened while sleeping or just waking though, my goodness yes! I can also see how it would be possible to glean information that you 'couldn't otherwise know' as in, you already knew it, or suspected it because the brain picks up and files a lot more information that we're often aware of. If something got thrown up during a fit, then something very similar was mentioned some time after, I'd be quite convinced I'd seen the future.

I've heard of other people though who claimed to meet and talk to each other while 'on the astral'. Has anyone else done this? It's got the makings of a facinating experiment if so.

No, I don't always turn everything into a 'personal crusade'. First, I don't KNOW you or LL or many other people here so how can it be 'personal'? It's just my brain responding to what it reads on-line. Also, if I 'crusade' at all it's for things I think matter more: the pain in this world I may be able to help alleviate in some small way.

I come to the forum to relax and think and learn things. And if you think the questions I ask only pertain to myself in the world only, I would suggest you are very wrong.

This: ++The question here is not whether it is true or not. I was asking about a difference in two techniques and to do that it is necessary to take as read that the two techniques actually exist. ++

Makes no sense to myself at...all. Or it does in the way people might discuss the various attributes of say, different kinds of Aliens that may have been captured. Or people exchanging views on what characters in movies or books 'did next' or think or so on and so on.

But I thought this post was put on the concept known as 'Astral travel' , not as an exchange of make-believe views, but as an exploration of actual events.

And here comes this person who says they can transcend the ideas of physics as we know them. Don't you think I or anyone else would be curious? Great discoveries are made by those that don't necessarily accept 'received' wisdom but who push the boundaries of knowledge.

If ( and everyone knows this story) someone noticed in Victorian times that more children and mothers died in childbirth when surgeons came straight to the birthing room from the dissecting rooms but someone who washed their hands and changed their clothes in between had less deaths, should the investigation of this important event run thus?:

"He washes up and changes and less of his patients get sepsis and die"

" Well, they do say cleanliness is next to godliness so I guess God favours him, yes?"

" Oh, O.K. . That must be the answer. What we should do know is try and get better with God and those NOT in his favour will lose more patients".

I am always interested in new ideas nor do I reject an idea for it's novelty or because it hasn't yet been explored fully. And THAT ...is what I try to do: explore an idea more fully. Nowt wrong with that and there is no 'judgment' inherent in such a position. It's merely a further investigation. I thought that was a good thing?

If someone tells me they can fly, I don't say " No you can't", I say "Cool, show me". If they then can't fly and attribute this failure to my lack of belief in their ability, then doubt starts to creep in.

My 'big' doubt started to creep in here when LL said it was 'unethical' to travel to the future to discover a winning lottery number. Unethical? The last lottery draw here was for 43 Million. Can you IMAGINE how many people that could feed, clothe, educate and give medical care to? How many friends struggling with debt. , mortgages and child raising that could help? And it's UNETHICAL? .

Please.

I happen to find the notion of O.B.E.s and such very interesting. Further, if I just flat out didn't care, I wouldn't ask.

Asking for clarification is not disbelief. It is not disrespect. It is not 'negative'. It's simply asking for further information , Period.

Pagans are the first to complain they aren't taken seriously: that there are wonders to behold but people are too 'close minded' to explore those ideas. Yet if someone tries to explore those ideas: Kaboom!

However, since you've now explained you were just exchanging fantasy beliefs, pray continue and I'll not interfere.

Marto

Marto

I have hidden your last post as it addresses a Mod decision and is therefore up for discussion by the Mods only rather than the forum as a whole.

In addition to which the post is off-this-particular-topic.

Astral travel is akin to Astral projection and with a wee bit of practise conversations can be made

but conversations between two people who both remember the details of the conversations?

Aye indeed true

word for word

Good point. this is as big problem too in reincarnation studies.

I paid a friend of mine a wee visit on the Astral I saw the time the room heard the conversation which was then recalled word for word the next morning between us both

I always hae to hae proof

it helps