It starts in the void. I shift my feet to feel whether they are standing on something. I feel the ground, but nothing appears around me.
After a moment of waiting, still nothing happened. I tried reaching out instead to feel the things around me in another way. As I did so, the scene finally appeared, a dirt path up a forested mountain. Then I got lost in the dream.
I keep going to that type of void, sensing nothing but the spot of ground I’m on, and I wonder whether I should be using it as a way to get somewhere else. But I think my focus needs to be on changing my own state in that moment, meditating somehow, instead of looking around to try to perceive in my current state.
I don’t know how I would meditate there without having breath, and presumably already being in a meditative state to get there, but I guess I’ll just sit and become still and listen. The one time I did that in a dream I heard a roaring that sounded like the engine of a semi truck, similar to other noises I’ve heard.
Last night I meditated for 15 minutes an hour before going to bed. When I went to bed I set my alarm for 3am, giving me about 5 1/2 hours of sleep. I woke to the alarm, got up, went pee, blew my nose (I’m getting over a cold), drank a sip of water, and stood at the foot of my bed for a moment to breathe deeply and set my intention.
I mention these details for my own reference later, to help correlate procedures and times that worked best. I know you don’t want to read about me peeing.
I lied down in corpse position under my covers. As I often do, I imagined moving my astral body separately, reaching out with either arm, pulling myself away.
After lying there for maybe ten or twenty minutes, I hear a sound to my left, by the nightstand. A soft roaring sound, like air blowing, along with a rustling sound, like a large bird’s wings flapping or a blanket being whipped out.
At first I’m scared. What could that noise be?
I frequently hear noises in partially awake states like this, either this type or another, but they always catch me off guard. The rustling sound I’ve heard before too.
I can’t move. I notice my body feels shaky, unstable, with a panicky feeling. I take that as a sign that I can separate. I’m not worried about sleep paralysis, but I’m careful about taking advantage of it in the right way.
I carefully try moving myself out, sitting up with the right amount of force.
After about twenty seconds I physically sit up, look around, and confirm I’m awake. Oops.
I tried lying down again for a while but was too alert and stayed awake.
The mistake I made, I think, was sitting up instead of rolling. I needed to put more constant and intense energetic effort into pulling myself out. That has worked a number of times in the past when I felt the extreme sluggishness or what others call paralysis. I was being too gentle and hesitant with the action and lost my opportunity.
As I lied there I thought about the feeling I had when it happened. It physically felt like a panicky feeling, but I could recreate that portion of the feeling as I lied there, a surging feeling of energy in my abdomen. Maybe just adrenaline? I don’t know. I did it a few times. It felt very much like the feeling I had a moment before, but it was missing the shaking feeling, maybe from my astral and physical body becoming misaligned in preparation to separate. So I think it will help to get into a certain state before trying that again, and at that point it may be useful.
It makes me think: That panicky feeling is something that people have when they have sleep paralysis and are, I guess, ready to separate. But it’s a certain feeling, and I don’t know that it has to be fear. It’s just similar what fear feels like physically, an acute stress (fight-or-flight) feeling. That would make sense. It would need to be stressful for the astral body to be separating like that, because it’s set up to stay put if we’re paying attention physically so that it can keep operating the physical body. If it were too easy to separate consciously, it would happen by accident too often during the day, causing safety issues. So I don’t think it’s too hard. It’s probably just as hard as it needs to be.
Also, we say “I almost jumped out of my skin” when we get startled badly. We sense that energetically these things are related.