General

My thoughts on Astral Projections

Do you believe the people who share their astral projection (AP) experiences? I personally don't. Not because I don't believe in astral project. Actually, I believe it's possible that every human astral project and they just don't remember it. In fact, I believe people who never remember their dreams are ones who most commonly astral project. What I don't believe are people who say they remember their experience. Let me explain why.

We form memories because of the information our brains receive from the physical world, which is also correlated to our state of consciousness. To make a memory, we must have some degree of active consciousness. We can also remember things we imagine. This is because of our brains powerful capabilities of manipulating stored information ("memories&quot to how we see fit, and our conscious mind allows us to save (ie form a memory) this manipulated information as a new piece of information (ie a "save as" function). Both ways of forming memories requires our conscious mind and processing from the brain.

When we sleep, we can form memories of our dreams if our conscious mind reaches a certain level of activity. Most of the time, these memories are quickly degraded after awakening. We are able to remember our dreams because it is similar to imagining. Our brain uses old information, manipulates it, and presents it to us as new information in the form of dreams. It's a process that occurs within the mind, and when our conscious is active, we are able to remember what was presented to us.

When you astral project, you somehow "leave your body" while being in a conscious state. Astral Projection enthusiasts believe it to occur in the form of energy that is still connected to your physical body, in other words, an energy copy of you (your essence). In order to remember your experience, you must be receiving and retaining information in your energy form. To receive and retain information, your conscious mind must be within your energy form. Finally, this information must be transferred into the brain and then processed. It would be impossible for energy forms to retain information, and your conscious mind cannot leave your physical brain while it is alive. Even if your conscious mind could leave a living body, it would need your brain to encode and store the data but since energy forms can't retain information, that data would not be present. Thus, it would be impossible to actually remember the outer body experience (OBE). At this point, I would like to mention that I am referring to OBEs as astral projections under normal, living conditions, and not near-death experiences. OBEs that occur due to near-death experiences would be a completely different matter, mostly because you are actually dead for a short amount of time, and thus the possibility of your conscious mind detaching from its physical body arises.

Now I will propose a mechanism that might make OBEs realistic. Let's assume the energy form and brain work similarly to controlling a webcam through a computer and you're using it to explore a location. The energy form (webcam) instantly captures information and forwards it to the brain (computer/you), and then the brain/conscious mind can reply with signals of "go left", "go right", "forward", "backward", etc. This means that the energy form can act as a server, obtain all sorts of information, and relay it to the brain for interpretation. This sounds like a very possible explanation.

However, if that were true then what about those who have been born blind? These people are known to be unable to have visual dreams, and visually imagine things. In addition, studies have never shown any record of these blind people having OBE's. If my proposed explanation and remembering OBEs was true, then it would mean even those who are blind can receive visual information when experiencing an astral projection, as energy forms bypass the visual (bodily) impairments they have. Even if they weren't born blind but became blind later on in life, then this would also apply to them. If they move to a new home and have become already become blind, then when they have an OBE, they should be able to have visual glimpse of their new bedroom. However, this isn't the case and that's simply because we can't remember OBEs.
There are no records of people who remember their OBE being able to follow others in their energy form, or watch them sleep, or witness anything in reality that would give them insight to something they would normally not have. Instead they are apparently watching themselves sleep, or traveling through a strange world. I believe people who say they have had OBEs were most likely lucid dreaming. It would be very easy to confuse an actual OBE with a lucid dream. Their conscious mind knew they were in their bedroom, and so the brain created a dream of their bedroom in which the person thought they were astral projecting in. Because it was a dream is the reason they were able to remember it. Furthermore, many AP enthusiasts say that you don't just astral project into reality, but also into different planes of reality. For those who remember astral projecting into a different plane, that was most likely just another lucid dream with a world heavily distorted by the brain.

TL;DR -> I think most people confuse their astral projection experiences with lucid dreams.