2. Return to the Planes

Following my disagreement with the Grey Man, I felt a bit at a loss. I had spent over a week off the Planes, with my only desire being to get rid of Grey. I had now accomplished that, so I had no goal left.

Some people say that, with the sheer size and variety of the Planes, it should be impossible to get bored of them. And this is true, but... well, it's like the Internet. Just about every subject you can think of is covered in a variety of ways on the Web, and yet it's still possible to sit in front of your computer and be bored sometimes. You run out of ideas for things to look for.

That hadn't been a problem before, since usually, each time I went to the Planes, it would lead to me wondering about something, or learning some new trick, or something else that would give me a starting point for my next Projection. After my unplanned break from AP'ing, I had lost momentum, and when I projected, all I really did was the Astral equivalent of checking my email. It was disheartening, to have gone to so much effort to get BACK to the Planes, and then spend my time drifting around wondering what to do now I was back.

I needed a goal, something to get me back into the swing of things. After a lot of thought, I decided that my absence from the Planes had probably left me a bit out of practice, so I should go for a "test run", make sure I could still do everything properly. Hopefully, trying out every one of my Astral abilities would lead to something new and interesting.

So, that night I meditated my way out of my body, and floated across the room. I checked the new ward I had put in, which kept all mystic influences, good OR bad, out of the room. It was working fine, so I passed through the wall (I could have used the door, but I was still new enough at AP'ing to find walking through walls fun) and floated downstairs, and out the front door, giving next-door's cat a nasty scare (Yes, cats really DO seem able to sense AP'ers.)

I don't usually spend much time in Etheric Projections (projecting into the Physical Plane). There are too many annoying limits on what you can do.

A lot of people, when they hear about Projecting, think "Great, I can walk into people homes and watch them doing stuff". I don't think ANYONE who learns to Project has managed to avoid the temptation to spy on SOMEBODY. And so long as that somebody doesn't find out (and how can they?), it doesn't cause any problems.

The problem is that it's actually very difficult to see anyone doing anything they don't want you to see. Apart from the odds being stacked against you (Think about it. How much time do YOU spend during the day doing something that you wouldn't want anyone to see? Three, maybe four percent?), there's an annoying thing I call the Privacy Barrier.

"What's a Privacy Barrier?" I hear you cry. Basically, when a person is doing something they don’t want others to see, their desire for privacy manifests on the Etheric Plane as a barrier a Projector can’t pass through. The upshot of which is, you're not much more likely to see anything when OOB than you are when walking around in your real body.

So, I didn't try to find something interesting going on in the houses in my street. I just drifted along the roadside, invisible to the people driving past. It got boring fairly quickly, so I sped up and rose into the air above the houses, and started looping-the-loop, swooping, and generally doing all the kind of flying that you can only do when you're out of your body and can go as fast, and turn as sharply, as you are capable of imagining.

After a little while, my travels brought me to the park not far from my house. I've been there many times before while Projecting, though I prefer to stay clear of it at night (People generally find woods at night spooky. They think of woods at night as having spooky things in them. And because they think they’re there, on the Etheric Plane, they ARE! Almost as bad as passing through a kid's bedroom... so often they have monsters under the bed.) I couldn't detect any stray Negativities in the area, so I floated up into a treetop, and floated slowly through the branches until I came across a squirrel.

Like cats, rodents are able to see AP'ers, but since I wasn't hostile, it sensed no danger from me, and didn't run off. Which gave me the chance to practice Body Jumping.

I forget why I originally came up with that name. I think it was something out of a film. I first tried it when I wanted to see if you could 'possess' someone when you were AP'ing, like demons do in horror films. I discovered that you could halfway do it: You can send your Astral body into someone's body and use etheric energy to 'bind' yourself into it, so you stay inside, instead of just passing through it, and you can then experience everything that the individual does: Sight, smell, touch, everything. If you have any ability with telepathy, you can sense what they feel mentally. What you can't do is, you can't actually MAKE them do anything. You're purely a passenger, you can't take over the driving.

On the other hand, it can be fun to Jump into an animal, especially birds, cats, and squirrels. Animals are more open to the suggestions you can give them, and it can be very exhilarating experiencing a falcon's dive down towards its prey (I usually leave before it starts to eat anything it catches, wimp that I am) or a cat's leaps and balancing acts.

Or, in this case, a squirrel's run across the treetops. Squirrels are a lot of fun, running up trees, dropping from branch to branch, and so on. I spent about twenty minutes travelling along with the squirrel, and was able to direct him to the food I'd put on the bird table earlier that day. After that, I'd had enough of being constantly on the lookout for predators (Not that I would have been in any real danger, but it would have hurt) so we went our separate ways.

I decided I'd spent enough time in the Physical Plane at that point. I didn't want to slip into the Astral by accident, since that tends to mean you loose your lucidity, and your AP becomes just a dream. So, I sent Etheric energy back to my body, and my consciousness moved closer and closer to the thought energy of the Astral.

As it did so, the landscape around me changed from what is really seen in the Physical to what is generally perceived by people (slightly less detailed - like the difference between a photograph and a painting), becoming more and more abstract as I moved further and further into the Astral, until I was standing on a bright, sunny path between two small, grassy hills. I didn't stop sending energy back though, I continued to "lighten" myself, sending back Astral energy this time, until I moved again, from the Astral to the Mental Plane.

The Mental Plane is not made up, as the Astral is, of thoughts. It’s made up of thinking. Since thinking is a dynamic process, the Mental plane tends to reflect this, and be a hard-to-understand landscape, constantly in motion, and looking like it was made up of rainbows. The whole place is made up of dazzling, coloured light, constantly shifting and (one of its main attractions in my opinion) not part of the normal spectrum you get in the Physical Plane; there are HUNDREDS of totally distinct colours, not just mixtures of red, green and blue like you get here in the Physical.

I wandered the Mental Plane for a while, enjoying the colours and strange landscapes. Then, I returned to the Astral Plane, which is something I always find difficult: Going UP is a fairly simple exercise, since it only requires you to send energy away from you, and it happens, assuming you have the ability to remain in the corresponding state of consciousness. Going back down, you can't just pull energy back to you: It would be the energy you already have, and would simply make your current body "heavier". I usually manage it by imagining myself getting heavier, while pulling only a little energy back from my body. Trying to make yourself energy-heavy with only a small amount of energy seems to be a good way of pulling lower-plane energy to you.

It worked, and I soon dropped back into the Astral. I forget where I was, but I was only there for a few moments: I created a Door, and returned to my house in the Physical Plane. Key figures don't work terribly well in the mental Plane, or it would have been fairly simple to get back to the Astral.

Having ascertained I could still move up and down through the Planes, I once again rose up away from the Physical level, this time fixing the image of a huge library in my mind, willing myself to be inside it, rising as I did through the Astral and towards the Mental.

In-between the two, I appeared within the Library, and stopped there. I had made it to the Akashic Records.

As far as I'm concerned, the Akashic Library is the most useful thing about being able to Project. With AP'ing, you can travel anywhere in space and time, cast 'spells' to make future events come to pass, experience things beyond normally beyond human ability, develop psychic powers, and many other things. But nothing beats being able to go to a Library where you can access all the information in the world and find the answer to any question you may have.

I picked a few books at random, took a brief look through a few books, and then did my usual test of reliability: Looked up what the winning lottery numbers would be that week. Having committed them to memory, I went off to continue my test of powers.

Next on my agenda was Dreamwalking, another of those skills that people always want to learn, and then use surprisingly little when they've got them. It's not surprising, really: Trying to have a conversation with a dreamer is an exercise in futility, because they tend to change the subject without telling you, and they're not that sensible even when they DO stay on the subject, since they are, after al, half asleep. Other interactions are possible as well, but dreamers have a nasty habit of stopping dreaming when you make a dream too exciting, and tend to fade away at the most inconvenient times (It IS possible to encourage dreamers to stay dreaming, but it takes a lot of work).

I decided to try and find two people: One close friend, and one person I hardly knew. This way, I could test the two main approaches I use to find people Astrally. Firstly, the simple way: I visualised a door, with the name of the first person I was visiting, who was in this case someone who had started catching the same bus as I did in the mornings. Since I didn't actually know her name, I had to write "Person who started catching my bus in the mornings" on the door. It isn't really important what you write on the door, so long as it identifies the person you want to find in some way. I stepped through the door, and found that I had just stepped onto a bus. Coincidentally, it seemed she was dreaming herself to the place I knew her from. I saw her sitting there, checked her aura to be sure it was really her, and went back to the Between.

The other method of trying to find someone on the Astral is a lot harder, but I like to keep in practice with it. It only really works if you know the person fairly well. Basically, you concentrate on them, focus on their appearance, their personality, their aura, everything you can think of, and will yourself to go to them. If you concentrate enough, you'll move to where they are.

Which is what I did, after a little longer than I would have expected. Wound up in a place I didn't know, an open tarmac space surrounded by buildings. Seeing my friend just across from me, I went over to speak to him, and tried to make him aware that he was dreaming. He thought I was just joking, as dreamers often do. I tried to prove it by making a ball of light appear and float around him, but as soon as it appeared, he faded out; presumably the surprise of seeing me do magic had been too much for him to cope with as a dreamer, and he had either woken up, or gone into non-dreaming sleep.

Left in his empty dream, I crouched down and pushed against the ground. It bent easily, which told me that this particular plane had been brought into existence by my friend's dream: It was too low-energy to be a proper Plane. It would soon fade away without a dreamer keeping it in existence. Which meant that I could have a bit of fun without worrying about it.

Dreams are great places to play around in: Because they are low-energy, they can be affected by the slightest thought. So while in the more solid, non-dream parts of the Planes, there's a limit to how much you can affect your surroundings, in a created dream Plane, you can move mountains, tear the sky open, and generally reshape the world as you like. And here was me, out of practice at doing that kind of thing.

A dramatic flourish of my hands caused the buildings to collapse in a tremendous cloud of dust. Slowly lifting my arms up towards the sky made the ground tremble, and split apart with an earth-shattering bang, as a huge flow of lava erupted, buckling the smooth ground upwards into an ever-growing mountain. Raising my hands above my head, I brought them down sharply, and lightning forked down from the sky, striking the ground with explosions and loud tolls of thunder.

And then, I yelled into the storm "Stop!" and everything went quiet. The volcano stopped sending out lava, the clouds stopped sending out lightning, and the whole world became silent. The downpour of rain became a blizzard of snow, which settled in seconds into a white blanket, covering everything I could see. The sun broke through the clouds, and I was standing at the top of a snow-covered mountain, beneath a very blue sky.

I walked over to the pair of skis on the ground (No, they hadn't been there moments before), put them on, pushed myself off with my poles (No, I never picked them up from anywhere), and plummeted down the slope, faster than I would ever have dared in the Physical plane. Apart from anything else, I can't ski.

That's one of the best things about being able to AP: In the real world, you watch expert skiers hurtle down amazing ski slopes, and you wish you could do that. But by the time you've had lessons, and practised on easier slopes, and gained enough experience to DO what you wanted, it's so familiar, you wonder why you bothered. Go to the Planes, and even if you've never so much as TOUCHED a ski before, you'll be able to do whatever you imagine; jumps, turns, stops, anything.

And that's what I did, racing down the gleaming white slope before me. Skiing on an Astral slope is better than skiing down any real slope. However many times you go down a slope in Reality, you're always relying on memory to tell you where the unexpected twists and turns are. On the Astral, there aren't any: All the twists and turns exist only because you put them there.

So when I came to the small copse of trees in my path, I didn't go around them, or slow down, I simply continued straight through, swerving from side to side to miss the trees. In the Physical plane, I would have become a tree decoration in about half a second. In the Astral, I didn't so much as brush against a twig.

Emerging from the trees, I saw a phenomenally big ski jump right in front of me. A quick push with my poles to add that little bit extra to my speed, and then I crouched down low, and took the jump. As I left the top of the ramp, I could just about see the landing space in the distance.

Touchdown was a bit bumpy, simply because no matter how Astral I might be, I couldn't imagine that a jump of that magnitude NOT having a slightly bumpy landing. But after a second or two, I was fully recovered, and continuing my headlong plummet down the mountain. It was interesting to note how habit-ridden I seemed to be: I knew perfectly well that even travelling at a hundred miles an hour, I could turn on a dime, but whenever I came to a bend, it always had to be a huge, gradual one, with sloping sides. One turn I took so fast I had to increase the height of the side, I was so sure I couldn't turn sharply enough.

But, however fast and spectacular you may make the slope, after a while, it becomes a bit Same-ish. So, turning ninety degrees in the space of about a metre while travelling so fast the land seemed to be a blur, just to prove that I COULD do it, I went up over a small hill, sailed through the air, and landed on the surface of the sea, my warm skiwear having vanished somewhere en route, and my skis having turned into a surfboard mid-leap.

Immediately I landed, I was riding a huge wave headed towards the distant shore. Surfing is another of those things I can't actually do, but what does that matter? I continued to ride the wave, even as it grew above me, rose over the top of me, and collapsed into a huge blue tube. As it shrank and threatened to engulf me, I shot out the end, into calm water, slid to a stop on the beach, walked over to the table, and picked up the multi-coloured drink that sat on top of it, and took a sip. In the baking heat of the beach, the drink was pleasantly cold, thanks to the ice floating in it. Maybe the little umbrella helped keep the sun off it, too.

I relaxed back onto a very comfy deckchair, and relaxed. Anyone who's ever been on holiday will tell you that there's nothing like kicking back and relaxing on a warm sunny beach, knowing that you don't even have to think about working.

When you do it Astrally, you'll learn that there IS something better: Kicking back and relaxing on a beach that is exactly the right temperature, with a drink that's exactly as delicious as you can possibly imagine, knowing that while you're wide awake and happy on the beach, your body is asleep and getting even more refreshed, and that because you're doing it in the space of one night, there won't even be any work to catch up on at the END of the holiday.

Being able to populate the beach with highly attractive men or women is another bonus, if the fancy takes you. When you consider just what you can DO on the Astral, it's no wonder that some people let the power go a bit to their heads and start neglecting their lives on the Physical plane.

After a while, I decided enough was enough, and I ought to get on with my reason for being here. So, what did I have left to do? I'd checked I could still manage a reasonably long Etheric projection, practised Bodyjumping, checked I could get as high up as the Mental Plane, and then get back down to the Etheric, proved I could still get to and make use of the Akashic Records, made sure I could still find people's dreams, and had quite a bit of fun in Dreamshaping. So, that left... time travel, Key Figures and thoughtform creation, random destination travel... I couldn't help thinking it was a lot of effort to go to. I was warm, comfortable and pleasantly tired, it could wait till later...

As soon as I thought it, I jerked upright out of my chair. Tired on the Astral?? You don't get tired when AP'ing, for the same reason you don't feel sleepy when you're dreaming. I'd almost lost my Lucidity there, what was going on?

It only took me a moment to realise what was happening: In the Planes, Like attracts Like, rather than in the Physical, where Opposites attract. I had created a dream scene of a warm sunny beach to relax in. And I'd stayed in it too long: Like a bubble of air rising up to the surface, my little dreamworld had floated through the Planes to the part where all the lazy thoughts of holidaymakers reside. Carried along for the ride, my Thoughtlock had 'tuned in' to the 'frequency' of the Plane, making me feel lazy, unmotivated and generally lethargic.

Time I left, or I risked loosing my awareness that I was Projecting, and falling into a simple dream. To get so nearly caught out in such a way reminded me I was still not quite back on top form: I should have sensed the change in surroundings long before they had affected me. I walked over to the shoreline, and a wave rose up as I did so, but instead of falling back down as usual, it stayed where it was, and then opened like a curtain, taking me to the Beyond. Once though the door, I felt the warm lethargy fade away in moments.

Well, THAT had certainly been embarrassing. It had been a long time since I had been caught out by a Plane like that. But then, that was the whole reason I had wanted to test my abilities, after all.

So, what to do next? Time travel? That really needed to be done from an Etheric Projection, and I really didn't want all the effort of going back to the Physical. Besides, it's so easy to do: You just have to visualise a clock showing the current time, and then visualise it moving forward or back to the time you want to be. On the other hand, Etheric Projections take place at a level of consciousness very close to the normal, awake state. Returning to the Etheric now would allow me to re-establish the right frame of mind, and remove any last traces of the lucidity-removing state of mind that the dream had induced.

So, once again, I stepped through a Door to the Physical. This time, I went back not to my body, but to the downstairs of my house. Didn't want to risk being caught by the Cord Activity phenomenon and pulled back into my body. Once back, I quickly reviewed the events of the Projection so far, ensuring that I could remember them all clearly.

At the same time, I remembered that I had not yet tested Imagic, the ability to step into a picture. I decided to use that as my return to the Astral after checking Time Travel worked.

Visualising a calendar clock in my mind, I moved it forward to the next day. In the morning sunlight, I saw myself apparently trying to find something, in quite a rush. After a minute or two, my future self finally found what he was looking for: My Personal Organiser. That found, he rushed off out of the house, several minutes late.

Well, that was helpful. Come tomorrow morning, I wouldn't have to bother running around looking for my P.O., I already knew where it was. (It IS, incidentally, possible to change any future you may see with any psychic abilities. Not always easy, but it IS possible)

Having ascertained I could travel through time still, I returned to the present. I could have travelled to the past as well, but there's a time distortion effect when you time travel: Going to the past takes a long time, i.e. watching half an hour's worth of events in the past can take several hours in the present. The future is the other way around, several hours taking only half an hour.

So, time to test Imagic. I've yet to find any true practical use for it, but I still use it all the time. I first came across the concept when I was just Lucid Dreaming, and wasn't terribly good at controlling the dreams. I wanted to meet a celebrity, so I figured out a way of doing it that didn't involve being able to conjure up a dream image from scratch: In my dream, I would go to the poster of them I had in my room, and imagine the poster as being real, thereby bringing them into my dream without any major dream control needed.

It wasn't until I was reading up on AP'ing that I came across "Imagic", and wondered just why it had never occurred to me before.

Basically, your subconscious mind, which is the part of you that does most magic, assumes that what it sees is real. And because your subconscious creates the 3-d landscape in your mind, and you are in a body made of mind energy, by moving into a physical picture, you move yourself into the Astral scene that your mind has created. You walk into a picture, basically.

First time I tried explaining this to someone, he thought that it meant if anyone looked at the picture when he did that, they'd be able to see him. Bear in mind, you don't LITERALLY walk into the picture, you walk into a dream that was based on the picture.

Life gets very weird when you walk into one of those optical illusion pictures.

The picture I chose to Imagic into this time, though, was one I had used before, and in no way confusing. I'd originally been sent it over email, but had liked it so much I printed it out and put it on my wall. It basically showed an ocean shore near sunset, with flowering bushes and a small waterfall in the foreground, and mountains in the distance.

I looked at it from across the room, then, keeping my attention focussed on the image, I moved towards it. I tried to ignore everything outside the picture, and see nothing but the scene I wanted to enter. As I got closer, it grew larger and larger, as you'd expect, but not in the "static" way a normal picture does, becoming less detailed as you come closer. Rather, it became more and more detailed, and began to move, the leaves rustling in the wind, the waves crashing on the shore. Then, the whole scene suddenly expanded and instead of looking at the shore as though through a window, I was standing on it.

Back in my early AP days, when I had very little control, I found Imagic to be the best way of getting from the Etheric to the Astral, since it involves no real ability to do. I've even entered a picture unintentionally once or twice, when I was intending to walk through walls that happened to have pictures hung on them. Or even patterned wallpaper.

Back in the Astral again, it was time to test Key Figures. I created a glowing white sphere in my hand, and pondered what to have it do. I could tell it to make a certain event come to pass (Works 73% of the time), or to show me something, or... well, almost anything, really. I settled for telling it to go and find another of my friends, and signal me when it had found her by sending a beam of blue light to me, that would pull me to her.

I sent it off, and in only a few seconds, a brilliant shaft of blue shot towards me. I stepped into it, and after a confused moment of displacement, I found myself back in the Etheric, looking down at my friend, who was watching television. Late sleeper, I guess. She looked away from the screen, with a slight frown on her face. It's fairly unremarkable for people, especially when they're in a relaxed state, to react to the presence of an AP'er in some way, so I didn't pay any attention, just floated out into the street.

Once outside, I noticed that the moon was clearly visible, and nearly full. Struck by a sudden thought, I flew up towards it.

When AP'ing, you can travel as fast as you imagine you can. In bare seconds I was standing on the surface of the moon. It's actually a bit creepy up there, it's so quiet and empty. After a few seconds, I flew back up, but I didn't head back at the crescent of the Earth, I headed out into the blackness of space.

Out in the emptiness of the stars, with no reference points other than the dots of stars light years away, you travel faster than any machine could measure. Well in excess of lightspeed, anyway. The stars started blurring away from me in lines, the way they do in sci-fi films when they hit the warp drive, and before you know it, I was outside the universe.

Okay, slight exaggeration. I was outside the sphere of matter that has been expanding outwards from the point of the Big Bang. Looking back at the perfect sphere, made up of glittering dots that, closer up, would be swirling galaxies, I found it quite impressive that in the space of a few minutes, I had travelled a path that would take light thousands if not millions of years. Someday I really will have to work out just how it is that thought can travel so fast.

I couldn't be bothered to go all the way back to my body from here, so I decided to travel to a random Astral destination. Since people's methods of travel tend to rely on knowing where they're going (such as visualising their destination) you might think that random travel is difficult to do. It's actually very easy: You just look at your hands.

When you focus on your hands, they will almost immediately begin to melt away, like ice melting. This is all down to your conscious mind's inferior visualisation power taking over from the subconscious', caused by you putting your attention on them. It's a little like the way your subconscious keeps you breathing without you thinking about it, but as soon as you 'notice' your breathing, you start having to regulate it consciously.

Your hands continue to melt away, down the arms, and more and more of your body, as you focus on it, will melt away. When your entire bodily awareness seems to have vanished, look around you. You'll almost certainly be in a different place, and when you stop focussing on yourself, your subconscious will take over again, and bring your body back. (This is also, incidentally, a good way of returning to human form when you change your shape on the Astral, if you find shape changing difficult.)

I found myself standing in a typical street, with people bustling around. There were shops, houses, cars, everything was perfectly normal. The weird thing was, I could tell by their auras that all the people were not simple thoughtforms or dream images. They were all human beings. Dead human beings. All of them happily acting as though they were still alive and on the Physical Plane, buying food from the stores with money, walking or driving instead of simply flying or teleporting... what on Earth was this place?

Unfortunately, a strange noise told me I didn't have time to find out: My alarm clock. It was time for me to end this Projection. I quickly dropped an Astral Beacon, to ensure I could find this place again next time, and returned to my body.