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monolalia → Car parts, bottles, cutlery → My out of body experiences

Let’s get this out of the way first

These OBEs weren’t the sort of nice floaty edifying shit you’d want to play insipid New Age music to.
I don’t believe I’ve ever actually left the body. I am not sure that is even possible.
I don’t tend to see things in my head, except when I’m dreaming. I can’t remember things as pictures, and I can’t imagine things visually. And this, too, was not primarily a visual phenomenon.

When it starts (1): with sleep paralysis

The usual route to an OBE for me has been sleep paralysis. Now, I’ve sufferend from sleep paralysis on and off since… late childhood? At any rate, I was still young enough to crawl into bed with my parents because I was scared.

For me, sleep paralysis has been terrifying enough all by itself: you can’t move (obviously); your breathing is shallow; your heart is racing; there’s an odd *pressure* in your head and you’re scared you’ll suffocate — and you can’t call for help or even just open your eyes. Maybe you can see your bedroom but something’s not quite like it should be: items are in the wrong place, your partner isn’t there with you, the door is where it… isn’t. Most likely you can see nothing at all because, well, your eyes are closed. If you manage to pry them half open, what you see might be distorted, blurry, and unreal.

Then, at some point, you somehow wrest yourself out of it. Whew! The next time you’re about to fall asleep that night, it’ll probably happen again…

Sleep paralysis had never led to OBEs until I was… host… to a suicide in my early 20s. Seems a bit too on the nose to be a coincidence, doesn’t it? I hadn't even *had* sleep paralysis any more,

When it starts (2): spontaneously

There was at least one evening where I’d start to “go out of body” the second I got horizontal. I don’t know what was special about that day except it fell into one of the worst times of my life. Asking a very nice fictional character for help in my head turned the last of those into a sort of ecstatic upward-flying dissolution experience… yet the thought of my mind dissolving was frightening enough in itself to force myself out of it. (Could kick myself for that now!)

When it starts (3): progressive muscle relaxation and mind-blanking

I experimented with inducing it, with some limited success. Shut out all disturbances. No notifcations doodliblippeting at you; this was before everyone had to or could be available 100% of the time. No street noises, if possible. No light, no tense neck or shoulders, no constricting clothes, no anything. To be frank, I mostly just fell asleep. Sometimes I’d wake back up into an interesting sort of emptiness, with my only thought being “why am I not thinking anything *else*, and where did the outside world go?”. Sometimes I’d see… distortions; rainbow spectral loops or smears. And sometimes I’d have an OBE of less-than-brutal intensity.

So what’s it like?

Rough, raw, physical, and, to put it mildly, uncomfortable.

There'd be a pain in my limbs, 'electric' vibrations running through the length of my body, sounds somewhere between rushing wind and white noise in my head, in my ears — swelling, ebbing, *thundering*.

Then a leg, or a *perception* of a leg, or my head, or an arm — tingling like an “electric field” in a murky staticky aether — would separate from its physical counterpart. For a while I’d be aware of both at the same time: one would lie paralysed while the other was getting pulled or torn out of body. If I couldn’t hold on to it, the rest of my body would follow. And I’d be… in it.

It’s quite indescribably except through imagery… please forgive me. The key, I think, is the perception of the orientation and position of my “aethereal” body. I could feel myself literally sinking through my mattress. I continued to perceive myself in the real world, but was inhabiting a most unlikely place in it.

Sometimes I’d be quite awake and conscious, and I’d see little more than something like an intensified version of those dark violet spots flickering across your retinas in the dark. And sometimes I was still half dreaming, and aforementioned *pulling* could come from a demonic visage floating above me, for example. One time there were elfin figures giggling as I was struggling.

I knew, or assumed, nothing bad would happen, and yet — how could you be *sure* while in the thick of it? How could you tell yourself it wasn’t real while you were *experiencing* it?

Where did it go?

Pretty much nowhere ever. It ended in a sense of dissolution, or a sense of getting pulled back into and realigning with my physical body, and then the sleep paralysis would likewise end.

Bit of a letdown, eh? There was no *useful application* of it at all!

…the end. Might write more about individual experiences later, or not. :)