Re: Astral/Out-of-Body Experience?
extra medium wrote:Difficult to say if it was simply a vivid dream or some form of a "reality." Anyone have experience with this phenomena?
I once dreamed that I was a bird. This was no ordinary flying dream with effortless floating, rather the detail level was absolute. I felt the actual air-currents, adjusted my wings even to the point of feeling muscle strain when I performed rapid turns and braking. Quite a remarkable experience which still remains with me several years after having the dream.
Described this way, the dream itself seems almost mystical. Perhaps I possessed a bird in the real world or regressed to a past life in which I was a bird.
If we zoom out a little though and look at the entire dream, in which I joined the animorphs to fight aliens who had taken over a giant K-mart store and ended by sleeping with Jake (I had a crush on Shawn Ashmore at the time), it becomes pretty clear that it was a dream.
Yes, sometimes the brain outdoes itself with fantastic creations in its dreams. Yet this doesn't mean some magical process is occuring. More likely the body is disturbed by an odd chemical balance or a bit of indigestion. One is reminded of the quote "there's more of gravy than of grave about you".
Whether it's near death experiences or astral projection, people have a long history of reading a form of reality into their dreams. The brain, as the director of this amazing film, goes as uncredited as a blacklisted communist in early hollywood history.