So has anybody gone into that at all?
Any active practitioners?
For those who are unfamiliar with this strange thing... It's a phenomenon you can intentionally experience with practice and knowledge which is said to involve the ejection of the "astral body" or spirit body out of the physical body and into the astral plane of existence. More or less... People claim to explore the universe this way, including realms not of ordinary existence.
An alternative explanation held by rationalists is that it's a special kind of dream called a wake-induced lucid dream (WILD), where instead of realizing you're dreaming mid-dream (as in a typical lucid dream), you go into the dream state from the waking state directly without losing conscious awareness, going straight into REM aware that you're dreaming.
Some say the two are different things and both occur legitimately. I don't intend to pick a camp 'cause I really can't be sure, true to my agnostic mentality.
Whether it's astral projection or a WILD, it most often occurs after waking up with sleep paralysis, the sensation where you can't move and can't feel your body (as opposed to just laying back in the middle of the day to shoot off into space, as you don't tend to start your sleep cycle in REM... though I've heard it's possible somehow). Personally, I wouldn't bother checking to see if I can move, incase I ruin that sensation of sensory deprivation. It's popular to experience a powerful vibration, a loud increasing humming sound, or a hallucination from some other sense. For me it was a loud humming that increased in pitch and volume till I could hardly bear it..
Suddenly it stopped and I could hear TV like voices in my room, where I never had my TV turned on. I knew I wasn't in ordinary reality.
I was either in my head or outside of normal reality.
I went to get off my bed and found myself almost as light as a feather, yet due to the awkward weight I smacked face first into the floor and involuntarily rolled into a sleeping position and woke up again in bed.
Miraculously I went right back in almost immediately, eager to try again. So I got off my bed in this dream world, or astral plane or whatever, and proceeded to try to turn on my lamp. Click... nothing... click... nothing. It's plugged in yes. Click-click-clickity-click-click-click. So my lamp doesn't work in this realm of existence.
I was told to expect such things to happen.
I saw a strange purple slab which seemed to have some sort of congratulatory phrase (like "congratulations" for example) carved/pressed into it, on my desk, apparently there to congratulate me for achieving this state. Whatever it was.
Then I go try to fly out the ceiling and explore the neighbourhood and I wake up after thinking "gee, I'm not sure what I should be seeing between the ceiling and the roof, or where I'll come out..." Worrying about silly details. Sheesh. Should have gone out the window, or better yet, the bloody DOOR. Just because you've got the supernatural ability to go through walls, doesn't mean it's the best thing to do as soon as you get a chance...
So yeah, astral projection anybody?