If all this sounds familiar, I don’t need to tell you that these moments belong to a unique category of dream experience. I believe they are, in fact, not dreams but a natural phenomenon of human consciousness that is often referred to as (for lack of a more accurate term) “astral projection” or “out-of-body experience” (OBE). The term “astral projection” really is a terribly vague and misleading expression for this variety of experience. Astral? What’s that? Is astral a what or is it a where? Is my “astral body” my soul? Is it a body at all? Do I project it into space when I “travel” around in it?
We hear the terms “astral body,” “astral plane,” and “astral world” thrown around in esoteric conversations as if we were talking about conscious ectoplasmic apparitions floating around geographical locations rather than vibratory frequencies of human consciousness (which is precisely what they are). The fact remains, however, that our adventures in these vibratory frequencies of consciousness often feel disturbingly like we are conscious ectoplasmic apparitions floating around geographical locations.
Learning to navigate around this strange universe (which other cultures and other spiritual systems might call “the spirit world”) is particularly helpful to the magician who understands the importance of being able to think and function in this subtler world—a world that lies just behind and beyond waking consciousness. Indeed, just as the inventor’s intangible idea is the foundation for his or her material invention, this world forms the foundation of the material plane of existence. In fact, any magical operation that obliges the magician to see with the mind’s eye a symbol, a pentagram, a hexagram, a spirit, or an angel, or a demon, or any spiritual life that inhabits and animates things deals directly with this so-called astral dimension. Ancient magicians called the ability to view the spirit nature of things “scrying.” The adepts of the Golden Dawn called it “traveling in the spirit vision.”
Lucid dreaming is another dimension (pardon the play on words) to this mysterious phenomenon of consciousness. The ancient Egyptians took the skill of lucid dreaming pretty seriously. In fact, the ability to consciously gain control of our dream self and the circumstances of our dream environment may very well have been the cornerstone of the science of dying whose master textbook is the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Below is a short excerpt from an article I wrote for the October 2004 issue of Fate Magazine67 that attempts to explain the DuQuette field theory on the subject. Please note that the principle for my theory is based upon the now-almost-universally-accepted premise that the function and powers of the mind transcend that of the physical brain.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a magical text supposedly written by the god Thoth himself. It is designed to give the newly deceased man or woman a fighting chance of hanging on to his or her individual consciousness center by projecting it step-by-step through each phase of the death experience to arrive intact at a higher level of existence.
The basic idea is this: If a dying person can keep the mind focused and occupied on series of particular ideas and images while the physical body dies, the “self” of the individual can separate from the physical body and take up residence in the “mind.” The preoccupied mind literally becomes an escape pod that will rescue the self from its attachment to the dying body and brain. At each step along the way, the deceased is required to identify with higher and higher aspects of the mind—a process that continues to create new and subtler escape pods that will keep rescuing the self until it is finally delivered safely (and intact) to realm of the gods.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead ingeniously organizes this journey of ideas and images to match the landscape and nature of each of the progressively higher levels of consciousness and requires the deceased to perfectly memorize and rehearse each leg of the trip prior to dying.
Every level is guarded by a gatekeeper who must be identified by name and forced to allow the deceased to pass. Even the furniture has names that must be carefully memorized and identified with constant chatter—everything that can be done to bolster the deceased’s confidence and keep their mind minutely focused on anything but the temptation of allowing oneself to dissolve like the untrained into the sweet oblivion of death.
At this point you might be asking yourself, “All this may have been fine and good for the initiated royalty of ancient Egypt, but what does it mean to me? I’m not going to school to learn how to die.” My staid answer to that question would be, “Aren’t you?”
The idea that consciousness separates from the body at the time of death is as old as human introspection itself, and it should be clear to anyone who has ever had dream experiences like I’ve described above that consciousness can and does separate from the body in times of sleep, distress, or during other extraordinary circumstances. Furthermore, during such periods of separation, our astral senses are attuned to (and perceive) a dramatically different level of reality.
I wish I could say that I am a skilled astral projector. I’m not. Oh, I get out of my body quite often, and when I’m out I’m pretty skilled at controlling my movements and the circumstance of the vision. But only rarely do I consciously initiate the experience. When I do, it is always at that golden moment (at bedtime or naptime) as my thoughts are just beginning to take on visual dream-forms, but while I am still conscious of the fact that I also have a physical body slumbering on a real bed. This moment is characterized by a strange noise that I seem to hear not with my ears but in the very center of my brain, then an intense
