The first time I woke up in a dream.

I learned how to wake up in dreams in the ‘Dreams and Out-of-Body Experiences’ course run by Gnosticweb.

I don’t mean to become lucid in a dream where you become aware that you are dreaming and gain some control over the dream, I mean to take it one step further and actually ‘wake up’, becoming fully conscious so that you are not dreaming at all anymore, and to have a conscious astral travel experience.

The first time I experienced this was about 1 ½ years ago. I was having a dream where I was holding a strange-looking fishing rod, when some kind of giant creature/thing started chasing me. It wasn’t overly frightening like true nightmares can be, but my instincts told me to run and so I did.

It wasn’t long before I thought “hang on, this is a very bizarre situation” and I realized this wasn’t ‘reality’, I must be dreaming! Once I realized this, I knew that whatever was chasing me was just a figment of my imagination, so I stopped running. The creature as well as the scene I was in disappeared, and I found myself standing in my apartment.

Funnily enough I was still holding onto the fishing rod.  Knowing it wasn’t real, I dropped it and it vanished before it hit the ground.

In the course I learned there were things you could do to test whether you were in the physical or the astral, such as pulling your finger – if you are in the astral it will stretch (there are different laws that govern the astral, and as such matter behaves differently over there. For instance the law of gravity doesn’t work the same so you can fly and you can also go though solid objects just as walls). Even though I knew I was in the astral I decided to test anyway. So I pulled my finger and it indeed did stretch like rubber!

I looked around and the thing that struck me the most was how familiar the mystical feeling of being in the astral was, and I thought to myself “wow, I do this all the time, I just don’t remember”.

The next time I woke in a dream happened not long after, when I was overseas. I had gone to the Philippines for work, and it happened the night I arrived. During my travel I was pushing really hard for awareness, and this no doubt helped increase my lucidity that night.

We got to our hotel late at night. I was tired so went strait to bed. Before doing so I closed the curtains in my room, but unfortunately I didn’t do a very good job and left a gap between them. It was just enough for the sun to come streaming through in the early hours of the morning and get me right in the face! Being comfortable and sleepy, I turned over and buried my head under the blankets. But the light was still bothering me, so eventually I got up and went over and shut the curtains.

I turned to go back to bed and noticed that the hotel room was a complete mess! There were things thrown about everywhere, and I was really puzzled… I had only just arrived and gone strait to bed, how on earth did the room get to be in this state? Then I saw on the floor a possession from my childhood, and I was like ‘wait a minute, this can’t be right, maybe this is a dream?’ But it felt SO real that I was totally confused. So I pulled my finger, and it stretched. But I still wasn’t convinced, so I had to pull it another 2 times to satisfy myself that it was in fact the astral and not the physical. And there I was, fully awake in my hotel room, having a conscious OBE. Only this time it didn’t feel mystical at all, it really felt just like the physical.

Then I decided to visit by brother back home in Australia, and attempted to fly out the window. But I couldn’t seem to get though the glass. I sensed this was a psychological barrier, so I turned over and sailed though backwards without a problem.

I flew out over Makati city, and it looked beautiful! I got distracted by this and just flew above the city for a while, taking it in. By the time I decided to visit my brother I had lost some lucidity and began to fall into a dream.

I dreamed that I was with my brother in Australia, and we were on the rooftops of houses and I was telling him how cool it was that we were in the astral! Then he said he had to go now and left. Not long after I woke up – I was back in the hotel bed, with the sun still streaming through the curtains.

I called my brother to tell him about the experience, and amazingly he said “that makes sense now!” At around the same time he had also projected consciously, (unlike me he has a natural ability to do so), when he heard a familiar female voice talking to him. Thinking it was his girlfriend who was in the bed next to him, he purposely went back into his body to she what she wanted. Only when he did so she was fast asleep! He woke her and asked if she said something to him, but she said no. When I told him about my experience he remembered the voice as mine, not his girlfriends!

Unlike most people I know who have taken the Dreams and OBE course, I tend to project more often than wake up in dreams. I imagine this is a direct reflection of how unaware I am during the day, and it indicates that I need to push much harder to wake up my consciousness moment to moment…