The RTZ that won’t go

It’s not easy to rely on external stimuli to get your consciousness awake in the middle of city noon. It’s not reliable to go OBE with your eyes fully open and plenty of people talking behind the walls. But hey, for me all that is one of the few 100% sure ways to get a ‘mind awake, body asleep’ state. Although it’s pretty difficult to maintain.

I intentionally sleep in. It’s way past the time I’m supposed to have gotten up, but I still hope for some sleep paralysis. And here it comes.

The feeling that precedes it is familiar. I start to lose the sense of vision. My eyes are open an can still see, but my brain stops processing the shapes and colours into something recognisable. As a result everything seems to get blurry.

At first I doubt. The feeling of helplessness that comes with SP is certainly not a comfortable one, but it’s been a while since I last went out and this is the only way I know to do it for sure. Before I can decide what to do, I hear a voice: “don’t you wanna see my pointy ears?”

Feeling too vulnerable to ascertain that this dweller is a product of my mind, I settle with a quick thought: “you are my friend”. The voice disappears and I relax. I can feel I’m able to move my arms. I put them in front of my eyes and don’t see them, so I get up in a perfect, inertia-less fashion.

I see myself in the mirror. I’m nude… and in perfect physical shape, fit as I’ve never been. Oh well, that’s what Morpheus called a ‘residual self-image’. I wonder what’s wrong with my physical body.

This time I don’t want RTZ. RTZ is all I have achieved so far in a fully conscious and voluntary OBE. This time I want the real thing, just like the ones that happen involuntarily in the middle of the night.

I can still see the light coming from outside the window, blurry. My point of view is fixed because my physical eyes are open and seeing, but I can feel my way around the room. I need to get out before I snap back to my body.

For some reason I can’t get through the wall, so I go for the door. The moment I get to the corridor I am finally able to ‘see’, and ‘move’ my ‘head’, but I’m still at home. This is still RTZ. I can still hear the same noises I heard before going out, and the image my real eyes are perceiving is still superimposed in top of everything. I head for the front door.

The moment I get to the stairs, the noises disappear, and my brain finally discards that burned out image of a window. Or perhaps I closed my eyes. I don’t care.

As to celebrate my newly gained freedom I go down the stairs with impossible acrobatics, but I forgot something. I set out without an objective! I was so anxious for an OBE that I forgot what OBEs are about. The stairs get infinitely and ridiculously long, everything starts to get dreamy… And I lose it. I snap back to my body with a violent shake.

I need to do this at night… somehow.

Still exploring the RTZ

After a rather rich and complex dreaming early in the evening, I found myself struggling against sleep paralysis within my dreams. I noticed it shortly afterwards and stopped fighting it, instead trying to embracing it.

As the times before this,  I was able to move my non-physical body short after that. I tried to sit on the bed, but as if I could not control my muscles properly I did not bend my body enough and ended up laying on my left side, watching my feet strobe ghostly in the dark. Surprised I noticed that even though I knew I was not using my real eyes, my surroundings were dark and almost colourless. I could see well though.

I regained control of my body and stood on my feet. Turned around to see my body (as I hadn’t been able to do so yet), and found that I had to turn what it felt like more than 360 degrees to attain the 180 needed to be facing directly backwards. My body is not what I saw. Instead there was a smeary trail of after-images of myself going all the way from the bed to where I was. I consider the objective of seeing my body as accomplished.

I continued to examine my surroundings, a highly distorted RTZ. Sitting on a chair, next to a table that is not on my room at all I saw a skeleton, kind of cartoonish, extending its hand. I was calm and acknowledged its presence as normal. Not because I was losing lucidity, but because I understood it was after all my own mind creating it, so there was no need to question anything I saw.

I grabbed the skeleton’s hand, and it grabbed mine with reassuring strength. I looked at its missing eyeballs and although we did not, I felt as if we both nodded in complicity.

I turned around once more and looked for the door. I was surprised at finding that where the door should have been, there was nothing, not even the wall, not even an empty space. It was as if the wall had shortened and swallowed the door. Then I realised I was looking at the wrong wall, and assumed all that turning around just after standing up had confused my sense of orientation.

I looked at the skeleton once more, and it gave me something sticky, like sticky sweets. At this point I was losing my concentration. I found the door, and proceeded to walk through it, but my sense of vision did not follow my body. An intense sexual urge started growing in me, and as I tried to control it, I woke up.

I have to say that on my first lucid dream, back when I was a child, I encountered a skeleton to whom I asked if I was indeed dreaming. He acknowledged it and offered a cigarette. I refused it politely and woke up with a big smile on my face. I have remembered that skeleton every now and then during the years, but not in a long time, and today not but after analysing this last projection for a long half and hour.

Also, I’m sure there is no connection to that childhood experience because this time, upon waking up I instantly recognized the pattern on a shirt of mine hanging on a chair as having influenced my subconscious. It is not uncommon for me to have my real eyes open or half-open during a projection. How scary is that?

Amnesia

OK, my brain is having fun without me. Last night I had at least two lucid dreams, but I remember almost nothing about them.

One of them was in a restaurant. The moment I entered and noticed the lights were out, I became lucid. I started to add lighting and people, and then I got distracted and it went back to being a normal dream. The problem is I barely remember the lucid part, although I do remember being distinctively lucid.

The other was in my home town, where I was flying around watching a multicoloured sky and being dragged around by “wind”.

Now I love Sundays, they’re a perfect chance to sleep in and experiment. All I have to do is learn to remember this stuff.

Signals

This night I had three dreams I could remember. They were pretty crazy ones but nothing unusual. In one of them, though, I think there was something I should have noticed earlier.

Just before going to sleep, I did some meditation just for the sake of it. Minutes after starting, I began to feel my body vibrating, and soon after, I felt my arms had moved into an unnatural position. My elbows were both above my shoulders, both arms hanging down the sides of my head. There was nothing else to it though. The sensation faded rapidly. I went to sleep.

In this dream, a group of friends and I ran a club. We were either preparing to open or closing, I can’t remember. At one point, I was outside, talking with a friend in a park nearby. We were talking about some drugs she needed to get rid of when three guys appeared. One of them seemed to know us and wanted to start a fight for some reason I can’t remember.

Just as we got on our feet, one of them confronted me and looked straight into my eyes while swinging to the sides. He moved weirdly, and his elbows were bended just above his shoulders, arms hanging to the sides of his head. He just stood there, waiting.

I punched him in the face and woke up just as my fist hit the night table.

Not until late in the afternoon I realised that could’ve been my subconscious signalling me, giving me the chance to become lucid. And I punched it in the face.

Memories

It seems the harder you try, the least results you get.

The same as yesterday, I have overslept way beyond what I should, but this time I’ve had 10 hours of sound sleep and I don’t even remember what I dreamt about. I have to stop trying at night and start taking short naps.

As I was lying in bed this morning trying to remember tonight’s dreams, something else has come to my mind. It was when I was 8 or 9. Many times I would wake up and find that as I moved, my vision wouldn’t follow. If I got up and walked, I would still see the ceiling above my bed. Some other time my vision would follow, but it was blurry and unresponsive, and worst of all, my body would not respond as I intended. Where these OBEs?

I don’t know how much of these memories have been influenced by yesterday’s events, but I do remember one very similar to yesterday’s OBE. I woke up during an evening nap and found I could drop to the floor and walk clumsily. I couldn’t see at all, but I could feel where the objects were around me in the room. Something was wrong, however, as sometimes I knew I was standing in the same spot as some piece of furniture. When that happened I felt very confused and snapped back to the couch.

I quickly suspected it was some strange dream. In one last attempt for science, I tried to move a plant pot to check it out later when I would woke up. Either my guessing of its location was wrong, or my “hand” was passing through it. Confusion again snapped me back and I finally woke up.

First OBE and a furry bastard

I first posted this in the Astral Pulse forums, here, but I thought if this is going to be any kind of diary, I might as well edit and post it.

Well, I think I may have finally made some progress trying to OBE. Actually it was while NOT trying to, but whatever.

I usually become conscious during sleep paralysis, specially during naps or in the morning when I irresponsibly over-sleep and end up procrastinating other important stuff. It is something I’ve been used to since I was a child. It’s no longer scary, just plain annoying. It has happened in sofas, trains, bus stations and sometimes in bed. Every time it happened I would start struggling without further consideration and finally wake up completely.

I have been thinking lately that I might be able to use that state to my advantage, seeing as it is part of being asleep, and this morning it happened again. At first, I followed my instinct and tried to shake it off. I stopped, however, when I realised it was an opportunity. I stopped fighting and thought “OK embrace this, c’mon”.

It was late morning, it was bright and I could see clearly. I relaxed and started to feel a gentle wavy sensation right away. Then it stopped. I tried to move my arms and surprisingly I could. Only I would not see them moving in front of me, just a faint after-image of them, like a trail of light. Time to leave my body, I thought.

OK, what techniques do I know? At first I tried the rope thing. I’ve been told you have to be determined and just do it. The thing is, to be laying down and start climbing a rope just with your arms is not something I would just “do” without some mental preparation. It’s a fairly intense physical activity, rope climbing. In short, it did not work. I tried the “ladder” variation, but I still wouldn’t convince myself I was doing it.

So I tried rolling. I rolled all the way to the edge of the bed and my body dropped to the floor. But not the head. It stayed as a pivotal point around which I could roll all I wanted, but it wouldn’t separate. I pulled a bit and somehow I “snapped” back to my original position.

Now what? I couldn’t just float away no matter what, but I remembered something about sliding yourself along the length of your body and coming out through your feet. I started to try and “slide” using the power of my mind, just as if I was laying on ice and someone pushed me. To no avail. So I tried the power of my limbs instead. Using arms and legs, I dragged myself on my back all the way to the end of the bed. I could feel a tingle in the back of my neck as I dragged my head around. I thought it was my hair against the sheets, naturally…

Finally I got my feet on the ground! I’m usually uncomfortable with the thought of seeing yourself lying there, like a corpse, but I thought it was something I just had to do, at least in my first OBE. I was also expecting a “Fringe Dweller” messing around with me. And just as I was expecting, before I could turn around, a 2-feet tall white bunny bite my hand and wouldn’t let go. I knew my mind was doing this because I was expecting it, but there was nothing I could do to avoid it at this point. “Damn dweller!”, I thought as I grabbed its mandible and tried to bravely fight it. Big mistake, as I woke up all excited. I realised I had one hand under the pillow, hurting because of the weight of my head on it!