Our Other Self

Dreams, typically, are fun and exciting. I've always looked forward to nighttime when I was a child because that meant it was almost time to drift off into the dream world. I could be riding on top of an airplane, flying through the sky. I could be climbing a huge mountain, or getting a new doll on Christmas Day. The possibilities are, literally, endless.

When I got a little older, out of high school, and just beginning married life as a young woman finding her way in the world, I began studying dreams and their meanings. I once had a dream in which I was standing in my bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth, and they all started growing and growing until they just fell out! It was so shocking that I woke up touching my mouth to make sure my teeth were still in my jaw! I looked up the meaning of "teeth falling out" in my handy dandy book and found out that the meaning of my dream was that I was "supposed to" be coming into money. It turns out, I actually did. I received a check in the mail a couple weeks later for my school pell grant for college.

The fact that the meaning of this particular dream and my reality were actually intersecting, for me, validated my desire to continue on this journey of studying the subconscious mind and how this can be woven into self-discovery and my life's path.

This experience encouraged me to look more in-depth at what I could find out about the brain and what it's capable of doing...which led me to learning about lucid dreaming, and even more exciting, astral projection, or astral travel.

Lucid dreaming is the act of dreaming while being aware that you're dreaming, and having the ability to control what happens in your dream. Astral projection, also called astral travel, however, is sort of an out-of-body experience. It is your spiritual body being separated from your physical body...and your spiritual body goes out on spectacular adventures throughout the universe and throughout every dimension (if you believe in that sort of thing) while your physical body stays comfortably asleep in your bed in your home.

To be able to astral project during your sleep takes quite a bit of practice. You have to practice meditation at bedtime so you can eventually learn to separate your astral self from your physical self...and that's when the real fun begins.

It's been said that your astral self can travel the world in real time. You can travel across the world and see someone on the other side of the planet, or you can travel through the astral plane among angels and spirits.

Have you ever had a dream in which you're falling from a high place like a cliff, an airplane, or a staircase? You can actually feel the butterflies in your stomach. Just as you are getting close to hitting the ground, you hear a loud explosion, a clap, or some sort of loud noise, and you suddenly wake up feeling very flustered. That loud BOOM! you heard as you were approaching the "ground" and then woke up was actually the sound of your astral self and your physical self connecting back together in a sort of high-powered reunion.

We may not always be able to remember where we traveled during these small "astral" events, but we certainly remember the loud noise and feeling as if we're falling back into the bed. With practice, complete astral projection can be achieved. However, just be sure you don't wander so far that your astral body is unable to reunite with your physical body. I don't know what would happen to you...