Astral Beginnings n.1

I am starting a series of podcast episodes where I am going to describe in detail what I was doing that led me to have my first out-of-body experience, and how I managed to keep them going, leading me into an incredible adventure. I haven’t been having them all my life so it wasn’t something that came naturally to me, I had to work at it. I have always been a dreamer though, I have always loved dreams, I had the occasional lucid dream but I wouldn’t have called myself a regular lucid dreamer.

It all started with one question ‘Who am I?’ I have repeated this on numerous occasions and will no doubt continue to do so. It is a question that is fundamental in discovering who we truly are, in order to discover you have to ask the question, if you don’t ask the question you won’t get an answer and you have to really want to know the answer, so badly that it hurts, as they say.

There is a longing in most of us for something more and we are not going to find that something more outside of us, only inside, with all of our distractions silenced. In one of my OBEs years ago I was guided towards the Lord’s Prayer, at the time I thought this was a bit strange. We had to repeat the prayer at school every morning to the point that we just knew it off by heart without even paying attention to the words.I have never been religious and the prayer to be honest didn’t really mean a lot to me. Anyway, somehow after following the advice of the OBE to look up the Lord’s prayer, I found myself listening to a YouTube video where the prayer was being sung in its original language of Aramaic. The version I was listening to was amazing and really moved me, I had to find out the true meaning of those words and I soon realised that the version I had been taught was in fact only one possible translation. So one day there I was with the book ‘Prayers of the Cosmos’ by Neil Douglas-Klotz in hand. I’m not going to go into the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer now except to say that there is one line that refers exactly to what I was saying earlier about the distractions in our Iives, the line we used to repeat as lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, can also be translated in many ways e.g. Don’t let surface things delude us, but free us from what holds us back….or deceived neither by the outer nor the inner – free us to walk your path. 

We will never find true satisfaction outside of ourselves, because we always carry that desire to connect to who we truly are, we will always feel that something is missing and that something that is missing is the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ 

When I asked this question I knew I would never find out the answer from someone else, it was something I had to discover for myself. So when should I start? I decided to start with my dreams as, if I was going to go deeper inside, that seemed the next logical step. So I started writing down my dreams in the hope that I would understand more about myself. Around this time every so often I would have a lucid dream and in these lucid dreams I would meet a former well-loved geography teacher from secondary school. I have talked about these meetings before, they say ask for help and a guide will appear, well this was certainly true in my case, I suspect my geography teacher was a representation of my higher self. When I had a lucid dream with my geography teacher there would always be wise words and things to learn, I wanted more of these dreams so I focused on lucid dreaming techniques, one of which was looking at my hands during the day every so often and asking myself ‘Am I dreaming?’ The idea is that if you do it often enough during the day you will then do it in a dream and the answer will be ‘yes I am dreaming’ and you will become lucid. It worked many times, the first time I had success with this technique I was so shocked with how suddenly focused I was, how suddenly I became lucid that I woke up lol. I wasn’t intending to have an out-of-body experience and I didn’t even know at the time that you can go into the astral from a lucid dream.

Another thing I was doing at the time was meditation, I had never really meditated before, I generally used guided meditations, basically to help me relax, they weren’t geared towards having lucid dreams or OBEs. One was called Power Nap and it was basically a run through the chairs, the other I used to listen to was a CD called Dreamers Journey. I would also burn incense. I dedicated a room to this meditation/relaxation process.

It also happened that my husband snored a lot and so I found myself having to change rooms in the middle of the night in order to get some sleep, so I would often end up sleeping have the night in the room, without knowing it I was doing the wake up and go back to sleep OBE technique, when I went to sleep in my meditation room I would intend to have a lucid dream, I would also try the keeping the mind awake while the body goes to sleep as I had read somewhere that you could go into a lucid dream straight away doing this. I had never managed to keep my mind awake while my body fell asleep, until one night……….

I had done the usual routine of getting woken up by snoring, going to the loo then going to sleep in a different room. I was trying to keep my mind awake while my body went to sleep. I imagined myself going down, down and down, I tried to feel what that would be like, like the feeling of going down in a lift, forever sinking down. After a while, not sure how long, I started to feel as if my body was electric, it was quite pleasant, as if I was all fizzy, and then I simply floated out of my body, it was amazing, I felt so full of joy as I now had proof, at least personal proof that we exist outside our physical body. I was aware that I was having an out-of-body experience. I had read a little bit about them so I wasn’t freaked out or panicking that I had died. I didn’t leave the room but I think I may have returned to my body and exited again maybe 3 times, I can’t really remember I’m sure I have it written down somewhere. The thing that stood out for me was the joy I was feeling. When I woke up in the morning I was over the moon, not that I could tell anyone, they would’ve thought I was crazy but wow, what an experience. 

It took a good few months of trying to lucid dream until I had this experience, I was constant in my practice and didn’t get despondent if I wasn’t successful, if not lucid there was always a dream or 2 to write down and reflect on. The OBE was a complete surprise but worth all the effort I had put in.

Having had one OBE obviously I didn’t want them to stop, I thought it might be a one-off and I so didn’t want it to be. I wanted to discover more to go deeper, it was all so exciting.

So I decided I had to up my game, I needed more information on OBEs, I needed to know more so I could keep them going, but that will be for th next episode. 

Remember if you have any questions you can find me at https://patreon.com/aliwings, membership is free, this week I added the audio of chapter 6 of my book ‘Astral Dancer’. I’d love to see you there. 

Thanks for listening, bye for now!