Astral Projection vs. Lucid Dreaming

Is astral projection just a lucid dream?

It is one of the most common questions I have been asked since I started my channel, and I think it is the best one, because it carries so many assumptions about what dreaming is. Lucid dreaming and astral projection grow on the same branch. Both are non-physical experiences, both happen while the body sleeps, and at first they can seem alike. In their deepest essence, though, they are very different.

Three depths of one body of water

The dream, the lucid dream and the conscious crossing into the worlds beyond, which the old books call the astral, are usually spoken of as three separate countries with guarded borders between them. They are closer to three depths of one body of water. Sleep carries you down through all three most nights of your life, and what you lack there is not the place but the wakefulness.

In an ordinary dream the observer, the part of you that can step back and ask whether any of this is real, is asleep. You are swept along by the story and believe it completely, however vivid it is. Then morning comes, the first movement of the body wipes the slate clean, and you carry almost none of it back.

But the observer can wake up. In the middle of the story a quiet thought asks: Am I dreaming? In the instant you truly know that you are, you are awake inside the dream. That is a lucid dream, and it is not the wishful invention of dreamers. In the late 1970s, Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University asked trained dreamers to signal the moment they realized they were dreaming, with eye movements agreed beforehand, and the signals came from people whose every instrument confirmed they were fast asleep. In a lucid dream you can think, decide and reshape the dream around you, because it is woven from your own mind. If you decide the sun should not be in the sky, it will go. I have done it for fun many times. But you are awake only within your own dream, not beyond it.

The third and deepest depth is the astral. You are as awake as in any lucid dream, or more so, but the world around you is no longer your own mind talking to itself. It is a shared, living place that was already there before you arrived and goes on after you leave, with other people in it who are not figures of your imagination. You know who you are, you know where you are, and you know that your physical body is asleep in bed.

What the difference feels like

Before I ever left my body I had hundreds of lucid dreams; they filled two or three dream journals. Then, on the night of July 25, 2011, I woke in the middle of my sleep and stayed completely still. Vibrations ran through me like a small earthquake, I heard a noise like a hurricane mixed with static, and I floated upward and saw my own body asleep on the bed beneath me. I stood in my dark bedroom and felt the carpet under my feet.

I saw the wall and my hands in a detail so sharp it shocked me. I was awake, thinking clearly, completely myself; I even caught myself walking quietly so as not to wake anyone in the house. Look around the room you are in now and feel how real it is. Astral projection feels just like this, and often more real.

How to tell them apart

The plainest test is the one I met that first night: a lucid dream obeys you, and the astral does not. When I am unsure inside a lucid dream, I try to move the sun across the sky or replace it with a moon, and if it moves, I am dreaming. The astral has its own independent substance. It is not being created by your mind, and it refuses to bend, the way the room you are sitting in refuses to bend. Not every lucid dream obeys perfectly, though, so take a second sign with it: detail. Look hard at anything in a dream and it goes soft, or changes, or dissolves. Look hard at the astral, even at the palm of your own hand, and the detail deepens, and it stays.

The difference at a glance

• Ordinary dream: the observer is asleep, and you believe the story completely.
• Lucid dream: you are awake inside the dream, in a world woven from your own mind, and it obeys you.
• Astral projection: you are awake in a shared world with its own laws. It will not bend to you, and it shows you things you could not have invented.
• Who you meet: dream characters are often your own subconscious; in the astral you meet people who are not figures of your imagination.
• Detail: a dream goes soft when you look hard at it; the astral grows sharper.
• Yourself: in astral projection you know who you are, where you are, and that your body is asleep in bed.

Watch the talk on YouTubeLucid Dreaming vs Astral Projection: Awakening of Consciousness

The wall is thinner than you have been told

Many people picture astral projection as one dramatic event: vibrations, a roar, floating up to see yourself asleep. That is real, but it is one doorway among many, and not even the most common one. Countless crossings are made with no roar, no vibration, and no sense of leaving the body at all. Sometimes, as the artist Jurgen Ziewe found in forty years of daily meditation, it is only a change in how clearly you are looking: the fog of the dream clears until the country underneath it stands solid.

Once I was dreaming, walking around my neighborhood. When I became conscious and turned the dream into astral projection, I saw my own dream layer dissolve in front of my eyes, and I was in the exact same place in the neighborhood, now seeing many people who were in the afterlife. I eventually spoke with them. I had stepped out of a world of my own into a shared reality. The dream, the lucid dream and the crossing are stations on one long slope of awakening.

From a lucid dream into the astral

That is why I call lucid dreaming a natural stepping stone toward astral projection. Once you are lucid, you are already halfway there, already in non-physical reality. What remains is to recognize that you are the one creating the dream: look around and feel your mind making the scenes. Once you feel it, you can stop it, just as you can catch yourself daydreaming on a walk and come back. And when your consciousness is out of the body but no longer dreaming, it has no choice but to enter a more objective reality: the astral. The dream dissolves before your eyes, you may feel vibrations or hear loud sounds, and then everything feels more tangible, and you simply know you are not dreaming. Sometimes you find yourself back in your physical body instead. Don’t move it; leave from there.

There is also a method I found on my own and have used again and again: once lucid, become present, feel your dream body intensely, and fly upward fast with the intention of entering the astral plane, saying inwardly, “Enter the astral plane!” After a few moments of darkness you find yourself somewhere new, and the difference in clarity should be astounding.

One path: waking up

None of this makes dreams worthless. Overlooking them is a beginner’s mistake: dreams reveal the things we most need to work on, and a lucid dream is a profoundly personal way to know yourself. But for a while I treated lucid dreaming as escapism, until I asked myself what the point was if everything I ever experienced was in my own mind. That question turned me toward meditation, and then to astral projection.

This is why I say astral projection is synonymous with the awakening of consciousness. We dream during the day too: the constant inner film of worry, fantasy and replay is a dream, and what we dream in the day, we dream at night. You already make the crossing every night, as every human being does; you simply make it asleep, and let it melt away by morning. Be awake in the day, and you will be awake in the night. As above, so below.

Where to go from here

I wrote about all of this in my first book, Beyond Dreaming, along with the practices that lead from one state to the next: reality checks, remembering your dreams, waking back to bed, meditation, and the flying method. My newer book, Sealing the Vessel, goes into why the day decides the night. And The Astral Doorway Course, recorded live with its first circle, is open now to walk at your own pace.