Not sure if this is astral projecting but it was surreal.
One night i got super drunk and blacked out for a couple hours. Then later, i was in a strange awake/asleep state. And it felt like i was a small spirit just flying away from my body, left the room and flew around in the hallway. Fully doing barrel rolls, flying in spirals, and flips, was so fun. And i kept hearing what sounded like a large waterfall or strong winds the whole time.
Eventually i got sucked back into the room, and back to the body. But i kept trying to leave my body.
Couldn't replicate the experience it ever since.
I’m going to quote your experience from another thread because it captures exactly what I’ve been trying to explain. Plus, you’re the OP. As I said earlier, when someone can astral project at will and does it daily, they’re in a completely different category from most people. But besides those people which including me, in general, people who happen to astral project sometimes in their life often don’t recognize what it is. They remember it as a vivid or unusually weird dream. When they insist you just know, it’s often because the experience only occurred a very few times, so it burned itself into their memory.
But when astral projection starts happening a bit more frequently, that clarity begins to blur. Experiences overlap and it becomes much harder to distinguish what was just a dream from what was an actual projection. That’s why I’ve been trying to explain that many people who have actually projected may not recognize it for what it is. The other forum members’ experiences in the thread I linked above line up closely with what I’m explaining. And your experience as well, since you weren’t even sure what it was.
Whether a specific experience counts as astral projection is another question. I’ve written elsewhere on the forum about what I call different “ranks” of astral projection. Some people feel themselves floating, half detaching, hovering just above their body. Others feel themselves step out of the body, yet find they can’t leave the room, and they’re stuck circling the bed or pacing the same four walls. Then there are those who are traveling to another area that looks like it’s a dead space with no one around. And there are the experiences where someone travels from place to place, interacts with people and environments. All of those fall under the umbrella of astral projection. The difference lies in how far you can travel. That’s what I mean by “ranks.”
What you described in your experience is a lucid dream, not astral projection. You were in that “in between state,” halfway between waking and sleeping. You were asleep, but conscious enough to remember clearly afterward. Lucid dreaming is about control, controlling your actions, the environment, the storyline, pretty much all the fun stuff you mentioned doing in that dream. The key point is that you haven’t been able to replicate the experience. You don’t have reliable access to leaving your body, which is a part of astral projection.
This is also why I pointed out earlier in my comment that if you can switch scenes at will in the dream, that’s when you know you are projecting rather than just dreaming. One way to test this is what I often call the information test. When you arrange for someone else to write you a note, and you put it anywhere in your house. But don’t look at the note. Then during your experience of dreaming, you shift the scene to your room, look for that note, and read it. When you wake up, you go and check that note physically. If what you read during the experience matches what’s actually written, that’s a strong evidence you weren’t just playing around inside your own mind.
Of course, you don’t have to run that test. You can also switch scene to a place you already know, your favorite restaurant, your work location, a street corner, etc. The point is the shifting scene, intentionally moving from one scene to another.
The difference is that in a regular dream, things just happen to you. Even if in the moment you’re aware enough to want to act differently, you can’t. Your body in the dream, your reactions, the events, they just happen.
In a lucid dream, you gain control over the environment and your actions. Astral projection is gaining the ability to switch scenes intentionally. So you can encounter information or details that you did not consciously know beforehand. Which is why I like to comment the information test.
If you want to know whether one of your past experiences was an astral projection, you can try to move back into that same scenery when you dream. If you can’t reach it, can’t dial into that place, then that past event was not an astral projection. It was a regular dream or a lucid one.
