The How To
Below is an excerpt from a book that I am writing about a woman who awakens in an alternate parallel reality after astral projecting. It provides a general concept of how to achieve astral projection and describes the astral realm. Please let me know if you’re interested in beta reading the in progress book and I can send you a link.
….
With her eyelids firmly shut and her body motionless, Katia visualized the intimate details of her bedroom, a familiar vision. Her internal gaze, unseen, fell upon the cheap dresser, its veneer peeling, from water damage and age. Her mind's touch lingered on the sharp corner, a familiar sensation from countless reaches while dusting. Next to the dwindling bamboo lotus candle, which diffused a faint floral fragrance, lay Alan Watts’ “The Cloud-Hidden Heron,” its pages stained by tea—a relic once offered to a tasseographer for interpretation.
Just visualizing her bedroom wasn't enough for Katia. She aimed to deceive her brain, making it believe her body was awake and moving around the room, not just lying in bed. To achieve this, she heightened her senses, focusing intensely on the dresser and mentally recreating the sensation of rolling out of bed. She imagined herself smoothly transitioning over the edge, likening it to the gentle cascade of a waterfall.
At first, it felt forced, and her lower mind begged to return to sleep. But after persistent phantom wiggling, a different sensation emerged. A magnetic pull, she felt, drawing her energetic body. The feeling of spilling over the bed's edge intensified, crescendoing in realism until, for a fleeting moment, Katia was certain her physical form had actually moved.
Experience had taught her better. Instead of the expected jolt of waking back in her body, she found herself free – free from its physical constraints, hovering beside the familiar dresser, separate from the woman nestled beneath the airy lavender comforter. The woman, a physical shell of Katia, slept soundly, her red hair a fiery cascading contrast against the mismatched green satin pillowcase.
In the astral realm, the very fabric of materiality seemed fluid. Unlike the physical world, where atoms held tight to their determined patterns, here they danced freely, reshaping the environment on a whim. This time, Katia found her bedroom reverted back in time, to when it stood as a small farmhouse instead of a high-rise apartment. Drywall became wooden panels and photos of wildlife transformed into a worn set of pots and pans hanging above an old cast iron stove.
The familiar safeguard of reality checks felt more like a pesky routine than a source of wonder. She plugged her nose, inhaling deep the familiar scent of her bedroom despite the impediment. Good. Looking at her hands, she noticed her fingers, usually slender and pianist-like, now stretched impossibly long, looking like hotdogs, the amethyst ring she always wore on her right ring finger duplicating itself onto a second middle finger. A while ago, Katia would have found all of this amusing, but the novelty had worn off with exposure. Like the White Rabbit perpetually late, Katia had somewhere to be.
In her haste, she walked around the room, touching everything within reach—the cold pan, the dusty iron stove with remnants of a dying fire, a random notebook that appeared on the counter, its writing incomprehensibly shifting. She did all this to ground herself in the astral realm, making reality more vivid, flooding it with colors beyond ordinary sight. Whenever she felt herself drifting back to her body, she did something else to anchor herself further, even eating an apple that materialized on the kitchen table. Despite heightened vision, her senses of taste and touch remained somewhat muted.
Finally, two windows manifested, followed by a door. Katiannah walked over to the first window, appearing behind an old worn couch, and peered out at the ominous woods that continued to stalk her. She had seen these woods many times before but had never entered them. While Katia typically found herself fearless during these encounters, the woodlands, shrouded in darkness and fractionally visible by the faint glow of the moon, stirred up a deep, primal sense of terror.
The second window, displayed a mesmerizing beach beneath the Northern Lights, the ocean's surface reflecting the azure and chartreuse swirling hues of the sky. The waves threatened to crash through the window, and Katia knew that if she opened the latch, she would be swept away into the oceanic world.
But today, exploring mystical beaches wasn’t her intention. The manifested door stood out amidst the ephemeral surroundings. It appeared solid and sturdy, as always, its surface adorned with intricate carvings that seemed to shift and morph with each passing moment. However, before her hand could reach for the silver doorknob, a jarring intrusion shattered the projection. The untimely cry of her alarm clock ripped through the dreamscape, yanking Katia back to her physical form. The sensation most people dreaded – the plummeting feeling of falling asleep – was Katia's fuel, a jolt reconnecting her to her material shell. "Dammit," she muttered, her arm instinctively reaching from the warm embrace of her blanket to silence the insistent alarm on her phone.