Astral Travel and Donkephants

stardate 3152024

Last week, my liberal friends shook their heads at me because I was worried about local job loss and rising taxes. This week, my conservative friends are shaking their heads. You’re writing about Astral Travel, Nina? Are you kidding me?

I am an artist. I heed no boundaries. I will not be labeled or contained (unless it’s with the aforementioned label).

My conservative friends think I’m liberal, and my liberal friends think I’m conservative. I’m a donkephant (oops, another label…though more of a metaphor).

a donkephant, my political spirit animal (ai generated this for me)

I like to keep everybody guessing.

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Ok. Let’s start where I left off two weeks ago.

Remember when I set the intention to focus on reality (nature, real objects, personal experiences) as opposed to hyperreality (TV, social media, movies, books—basically, all content created by other humans)?

Let’s just say, it’s been kind of easy, now that I am conscious of it, to see how often I experience and reference hyperreality - news bites, pop music lyrics, movie quotes, someone else’s opinion, etc… This happens all the time, especially with three kids who watch TikTok or Instagram Reels. How many times have we seen “Side Eyeing Chloe” reinvented? She never gets old for me.

I got annoyed with myself, realizing how much I parrot all that I see and absorb. So today, I spent ten minutes making metaphors and similies out of what I was looking at deliberately documenting an experience of the physical world. Porcupine skin after a shower, a whitewash of fog, trees covered in glass, blahh blahh blahh. But then, staring out the window at a wall of white, the fog kind of hypnotized me. I was tired and vitamin D deficient and uncaffeinated—a dull penny. I drifted off into that wall of white and imagined that I was at the edge of the world and all that existed on the other side was…nothingness. I existed inside of 1/10 of a mile radius and everything else was gone. My feet lifted off the ground and I floated in the whitish grayish nothingness. I kept going until I felt tired of zooming around like a drone in the fog, so I decided to turn back. But where was back? The fog disoriented me.

Then my dog Twinkle barked and I was back here in my house, in my kitchen, where I spend most of my days.

I’d Walter Mitty’d — imagined another reality.

I often do this, disappear into other lives or conversations or settings in my head, especially if it relates to a story I am writing. This is one of my favorite experiences— to go so deep into a story, that I am IN my story.

Some people call this lucid dreaming, dissolution of ego, theta brain waves, the creative zone, some call it astral travel, some even call it an out-of-body experience, OBE. Some get there with meditation, as they wake or fall asleep, while drunk or high. This sensation is nebulous and hard to explain exactly— but it usually involves a sensation of being unimpeded by time and the physical world.

So the hurdle is, if I experience another reality (feel the damp, smell the toast, hug the child)…is it real? It sure feels real.

Practicioners of astral travel believe that it is real. They would say I had traveled to another dimension. (Damn, I love this idea.) But what I have found, is that the more I do it, the more I can do it, especially with the help of podcasts like this one.

This feeling of flying and being unimpeded by time and walls is like a third-person writing perspective. At times I can be so close to a scene that it’s as though I am in it and other times if I am far above the scene it’s like I am omniscient, seeing the Akashic Records (past, present, and future) of my subject.

My friend Dani who does energy work says, “The Akashic Records is a vibrational record of every person’s Soul and its journey. This vibrational record exists everywhere in its wholeness and is completely available in all places. The Record contains all past, present, and future possibilities. It is an experiential body of knowledge and compassion.”

I love this idea for writing. When we layer in, or account for a character’s past or future life, it brings depth to the present story and creates causality in the mind of the writer—even if that Akashic Record never makes it to the page.

• The fry cook who makes french fries like she was formerly the Queen of England.

• She always protected her hands, feeling like somewhere down the line, she’d need them to be perfect.

• She didn’t drink, never had, didn’t know why, just knew she shouldn’t.

I love how poet Ada Limòn describes the feeling of knowing someone’s soul the moment you meet in her poem What I Didn’t Know Before from, The Carrying. I’d call it: the experience of having loved a person in a past life and meeting them again.

WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

God, I friggin’ love this poem. It packs so much punch by recalling this feeling of deep instant connection, souls reconnecting, with the help of a baby horse metaphor.

Ok, so consider Astral Travel for your next vacation. It’s inexpensive (free) and can bring a tremendous feeling of peace (which I need). It can also help your writing.

See you in the 13th dimension,

n