Dream Walking and Astral Projection: My Story

I knew from a young age that my sleep and dreams were different to other peoples. My parents remember me regaling them with vivid, often psychedelic experiences every morning before school and when I asked if they had this too they said they very rarely dreamed and if they did they didn’t remember it.

It’s a bit of running joke that no one wants to listen to someone’s weird dreams, but growing up they affected me so much I tried to share them with friends and was always hit with the same ‘No, I’ve never experienced that.’ It seemed that yes, people did dream, but not as often or they just didn’t remember it or it was so mundane that it wasn’t memorable.

When I started experiencing sleep paralysis as I child I started getting worried, anyone who’s had it knows how terrifying it can be and at the beginning I’d often snap out of it with palpitations and panicking. But it became such a common occurrence that I started getting curious about it. 

The base of most of my experiences.

Could I snap myself out of it? Sure, I learned this quite quickly. But…could I do other things in it, like talk to the creatures I saw? I started trying to manipulate the experience in anyway I could and I soon discovered I could ‘climb out of my body’ and walk around the family home. When I told my friends about this not only did they never get sleep paralysis they had never even heard of people doing this.

Through my teenage years it became clear my sleep states were not common or ‘normal’, I also fell asleep quickly, slept often, fell asleep at inappropriate times and started dreaming the minute I shut my eyes.

These problems continued into my 20s and once I hit the world of employment it became and real issue. After many doctors visits I was referred to a neurologist who diagnosed me with narcolepsy.

My diagnosis improved my life but didn't offer answers.

Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder where the brain doesn’t produce enough of the sleep cycle regulating hormone orexin so our sleep cycles are irregular and this was why I found it so easy to slip myself into sleep paralysis on command and potentially why I dreamed so much.

I’ve never met another person with a narcolepsy diagnosis in person but the internet has been a wonderful tool to meet others living with it and though my symptoms were similar, what I did when I was in sleep paralysis and dreaming was not. Lucid dreaming isn’t unheard of but the extents I took it to were quite unusual.

Dreamscapes became my second home.

By my late 20’s my ‘dream antics’ had become an odyssey. I visited repeating locations, locations I could find at will and bring dream characters to. I had recurring characters too who I could call when I needed them and have complex conversations that they remembered from dream to dream. I also achieved silly stuff that was apparently ‘impossible’ like reading the strange languages that writing appears in and even writing things in English to read to other dream people.

Some of my strangest experiences were in long dreams, one where I lived out 3 weeks in dream time in a 20 minute nap and towards the end my dream self was aware my body was waking up soon and started hugging the people I’d lived with goodbye and promising to find them again in another dream then promptly waking up.

Often so surreal, my second life was hard to explain.

The more I researched the more I started to feel these were not just the human brain doing it’s nightly indexing, though it’s important to know it DOES do that, those dreams feel very different to the ones I’m describing as I do have them swell, we all do. I started finding other people online with similar experiences and the word ‘astral’ suddenly popped into my life.

The astral world, also known as the astral plane, is a concept found in various esoteric, spiritual, and philosophical traditions. It is generally described as a realm of existence beyond the physical world. It is often portrayed as a transitional space between death and rebirth, where individuals may reside in an astral body while experiencing a different reality. The experiences of others who regularly ‘visit’ the astral plane very much echoed my own.

One of the first place people visit in the astral is 'the purple planet'.

I discovered at the same time that the ‘climbing out of my body’ I do during sleep paralysis is often referred to as astral projection and is a relatively widely accepted experience that’s been documented in many ancient and indigenous cultures for centuries.

But how did I know I didn’t just have a really vivid imagination or my narcolepsy wasn’t just playing tricks on me? Well, when I started asking the spirits of my relatives who had passed away to visit me.

I have always really struggled with grief, I’m a baby of a mum who was the youngest of her much older family so I’ve sadly experienced quite a lot of older relatives passing on and every time I found the grief absolutely crushing.

After the passing of one particularly significant relative I began meeting them in the dream space, at the time I chalked this up to grief, though as time went on things started to stand out to me.

Meeting them in the astral helped me process my grief.

When they visited I had vivid, lucid conversations with them, and again they remembered things I’d previously told them about my life after they had passed. They had a particular knack of visiting before large life changes happened to me.

After I discovered the reality of the astral realm I decided to see if I could request visits from them before going into dream sleep or sleep paralysis and to my abject joy I found I could. Now I could see them as often as I needed (and they wanted) and they started introducing me to spirits of people they were now friends with in the astral and when I asked them to bring other relatives they happily obliged.

My family were somewhat unsettled by this but have always been curious and supportive. The event that started getting them to take it more seriously, though, was when my relative asked me to ask my mum about some specific information, information I had never known and my mum and this relative had never shared with me in life. When I later spoke to my mum about this she was genuinely shocked and this was when all of us started to take the experiences a lot more seriously.

I am so grateful for the time I get to spend with them after their transition.

As I’ve said in previous blog posts I approach most things with a healthy scepticism and live by the phrase ‘always think of the mundane before the magical’. It’s important when you are on your spiritual journey not to look so deeply into every experience that you begin to lose touch with reality, spiritual psychosis is a very real affliction and is sadly all too common in our community. I’ve had enough consistent experiences with astral work now, that have been echoed by trust teachers in the community, that I am very much secure in my knowledge and skills and would love to help others with their own dream work.

I offer an in-depth dream analysis sessions online to help others with their own experiences and to sharpen their skills and discernment over what is normal human dreaming and what is astral travel. Astral work has been pivotal in helping me manage grief and open my eyes to the worlds beyond our own which is why I think it’s such a valuable topic that should be discussed more in our community. I look forward to offering my insight and helping others access this powerful form of healing and exploration.