My first OBE was terrifying – I thought I was dying.  That fear pulled me back after only a few seconds of floundering outside of my body.  Without any frame of reference for what had just happened, I had to dismiss the experience as stress related – a strange blip compounded by years of bizarre dreams and sleep paralysis. 

When it happened again, it was no less frightening.  Your arms and legs detach, torso stuck somewhere between your chest and stomach, head screaming with a subsonic roar, nothing but empty space beneath you.  I had no way of knowing that just beyond the wall lay a multiverse of staggering and infinite wonder. 

Spend enough time falling out of your body and re-integrating without incident, the fear eventually subsides into curiosity. 

On several occasions I attempted to manually induce an out of body experience by lying down as if to sleep, but setting my intention to enter the semi-conscious dream state that precipitates an OBE.  None of these attempts were successful – invariably I would fall asleep, or couldn’t reach a state beyond deep relaxation.  Whenever I had an OBE, it would happen by accident as I was waking from sleep, or if I was attempting to go back to sleep after waking up during the middle of the night.

I knew if I wanted to explore this further I would have to decide in those half-conscious moments to take control of the experience – to become awake while remaining asleep.  This was difficult because in the beginning, whenever I became aware I was in that state of semi-consciousness, which is often accompanied by audible and visual phenomena generally assumed to be hypnagogic hallucinations, I would reflexively force myself to wake up.  And because I had no way of knowing when I might experience an OBE, it was several years before I consciously entered the astral planes.

This occurred when I had successfully maintained a stable out of body experience and managed to walk around my bedroom.  Once I tried to leave through the door, I leapt into an unimaginable wilderness. 

The awe has never left me.  What astounds me, without fail, isn’t just the beauty or ugliness or the incomprehensible magnitude of the astral, but the experience of it.  This is a place that is as real and solid as I am here sitting typing on this laptop –  even more so.  I often find myself there just touching things around me in astonishment.  Sounds are louder, colours are brighter – taste, touch, smell – everything is magnified.  I can see with a violent clarity details that my eyes could never make out in the waking world.  I am always profoundly humbled, moved and grateful that I am able to access these places in the vast beyond.