Astral and Mental Bodies

 

After a good middle-of-the night session with Powell’s book The Astral Body, I returned to bed and at once felt in contact with my Higher Self. I felt lightness, clarity and well-being. I was encouraged to shift my attention, and entered the vision space.

    I see brilliant bands of color at the edges of my energy field. Orange and deep blue, then yellow, crimson and green. A purple band towards the outside and a lighter, translucent refulgence around it.
    I have the sense of rising above both my physical and my astral bodies.
    Now I am high up inside an immense bubble or dome of light. I realize with some surprise that the tiny object far below me – as if glimpsed from an airplane – is my physical body, with a second body floating above it. I feel am entirely liberated from the tug of feelings and desires. I am instructed that I am now in my mental body. Its form, when separated from the astral body, is that of a point of light.
    To understand the role of kama (desire) I am allowed to see the effect of descending into the astral body and removing the sphere of light that encloses the whole scene. I’m struck by the urgent, ravening quality of all the things that come through. Would-be human visitors include women filled with sexual desire; some may be thought-forms I have generated, others seem to have independent existence. Many other thought-forms press for attention, as do discarnate entities.
    I resolve to practice continuity of consciousness and pursue this teaching experience.
    I fall into a dream for a few moments. I find myself, very realistically, back in a restaurant I used to frequent in an earlier period of my life.
    For much of the night, I am conscious of learning and studying. I read complex but very clear material on the nature of the subtle bodies that I feel sure I will be able to reproduce. I’m determined to bring as much back through the filters into “brain knowledge” as possible.

- from my journal for December 28, 1995.

I enjoy opening old journals at random and seeing what was I was doing, in one world or another, in earlier phases of life. Here, nearly thirty years ago, I am road-testing Theosophist descriptions of the multiple vehicles of consciousness by traveling beyond my body and the astral plane, in a succession of subtle bodies. Dreaming is not a spectator sport. I drew on similar experiences in Dreamgates, my book for frequent fliers.

"Bilocation at St. Martin de Londres". Journal drawing by Robert Moss

Dream Review One Year On: I'll Keep the Golden Robe

 

Quiet days with snow on the ground are perfect for one of my favorite pastimes: going back through old journals to see what I was dreaming and doing around this date in past years, what recurring themes pop up and what cold case files might be worth opening up again. I found three reports from one year ago that immediately seized my attention.

January 9, 2023 

dream

People Trees 

Through the window of the train, I look out at the landscape as a wild pink wind picks up, sculpting the trees into different forms. There is a wood wizard in a hood, of course, and a female figure wagging a finger. I decide to call her The Schoolteacher. As I watch it seems that I am not merely indulging my fancy. These are People Trees, capable of communicating and showing themselves in more ways than I knew. 

I would normally call them tree people. There is something different going on here that made me call them People Trees. I feel that a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses has come alive and is playing in reverse: as if people who were turned into trees, like Philemon and Baucis, are showing themselves as people again. 

Shall I get off the train and speak with them? Not right now; the train is moving fast and there are other adventures ahead. Perhaps I'll be able to meet them or their kind in a future journey.

Comment 1/9/24

Trains often feature in my dreams, though I rarely take them in ordinary life these days. I frequently make an association with training. Now, a year later, I am about to launch two new dream teacher trainings. We almost always start such programs by helping people connect or reconnect with a personal tree of vision that can become their ladder between worlds. I have learned a great deal from trees and have often found them to be wiser than humans. I have encountered and lived close to trees that also harbored human spirits, including that of a great Native American shaman. I do want to draw those trees, and that pink wind.

 January 9, 2023

lucid dream starting in hypnopompic state

My Dream Double Is in Danger in Russia

I am at the mouth of a tunnel. There are rails on the ground. I decide to go through. The walls of the tunnel are dirty and spattered with graffiti. When I come out it is at a train station somewhere deep in eastern Europe. There are crowds of men in fatigues or work clothes by a gunmetal train. Soldiers or convicts. Two big, brutal men look at me. I have given no thought to the form I am in. I am surprised they can see me. 

I feel this won’t end well if I remain visible, and ponder how to get out. I don’t think it’s safe to simply leave the scene. Some part of me is in that scene. Now observer as well as actor, I am amused by the idea of needing to arrange an extraction for one of my doubles or projections, while recognizing that this is actually a serious matter. I could try to go back through the tunnel but they might follow. Instead, I focus on lifting myself up so fast and so high I won’t be visible le any more and the men at the station will soon disbelieve what they saw. I’m out of there.

Comment 1/9/24

Here the train is a literal one, apparently a troop train for conscripts - many of them convicts - being sent by the Russians to the meat grinder at the front. Maybe in a parallel life, I am still engaged as a journalist in trying to monitor and report on such things. Or maybe I am simply being reminded of the state of the world we are in. I am also reminded that when we get around in our dreams, we are generally not just disembodied thought forms. We travel in a subtle body that can get into trouble.

 

January 10, 2023

Dream 

The Golden Robe 

When the bagpipe starts playing I know it's time for the team to get out fast. I encourage them to climb through a back window. I am in no great hurry. It's as if I have stepped into a movie - in this case an exciting spy thriller with scenes in Cyprus and Turkey - and can leave or switch roles as I please. I stay in the room when the other team come in and pull it apart, searching for something. They make a great heap of clothing and bedding in the middle of the space. I want to be sure to retrieve my beautiful gold brocade robe.

Waking, the simple image of the robe is what I want to keep from my streaming dream movies. I will picture myself putting it on and see what swathing myself in golden silky energy does for my creative output. Simple is good.

Comment 1/9/24

I am in all kinds of adventures in my spontaneous sleep dreams, and the lucid dreams I simply allow to unfold from scenes and images that arise in liminal states between sleep and awake. Come morning, I can be quite travel worn! My dreams often give me wonderful research assignments involving scholarship or detective work, and glorious material for performance and storymaking and creative art. Sometimes, however, as I noted in my original journal report it is enough to bring back just one thing, and wrap myself in its energy.