What is the difference between lucid dreaming and astral projection?

Twin Flames: What is the difference between lucid dreaming and astral projection?

Lucid dreaming simply means awareness that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. With this comes the ability to explore dreams further, to take a little more control, rather than being carried by the current of the dream.  So, if there is a door, rather than letting the dream take you past it, you might decide to open the door and see what lies beyond it.  If there is a bear in your dream, you might ask the bear why it’s there, ask it what it wants you to know.

Astral projection or an out-of-body experience is when your astral body or consciousness leaves your body and travels to other places.  This can happen during dream states, meditation, near-death experiences (NDEs) or during intentional exercises at astral projection (e.g., such as those outlined in Robert Monroe’s book, “Journeys Out of the Body”).  Sometimes, your astral body can leave a physical trace, so others may not even be aware that you are appearing in astral form rather than in full physical form.  And, there are even some cases where people are able to project both their astral and physical bodies, so their body appears to hop from place to place.  Lon Milo DuQuette talks about an example of this in his book “My Life with the Spirits.”  The person with this ability was a pranic healer with a highly evolved consciousness level (i.e., a high energy vibration; DuQuette, 1999). 

When we dream (including when we lucid dream), it appears that our consciousness travels to a dream realm, while our bodies stay in our beds, so I suppose you could argue that that is a form of astral projection.  But, others would say that some dreams involve astral projection whereas other dreams do not.  So, they’d say that dreaming in general (and by extension, lucid dreaming) is NOT a form of astral travel; only certain types of dreaming involve astral travel.  For example, Robert Moss postulates that the following dream experiences are evidence of astral travel: dreams within dreams, dreams of flying or falling, dreams of being stuck in a car on a mountaintop, dreams that switch from black and white to color, when you wake from a dream feeling like you’ve been dropped or jolted back into your body, and more (Moss, 1996).  But, as you can see, he doesn’t include lucid dreaming in this list.  So, are all dreams (including lucid dreams) a form of astral projection or are just some dreams a form of astral projection?  As you can probably gather, that is up for debate. 

Unfortunately, phenomena such as astral projection and dreaming have been dismissed as pseudoscientific hocus pocus by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.  This means that the individuals with the knowledge, training and resources to study them scientifically aren’t studying them, so our understanding of these phenomena is very limited.  Dr. Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Dr. Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia are two of the only individuals I’m aware of with the knowledge, training and resources to study these phenomena scientifically.  And, the data they are uncovering is astonishing, enough to upend everything we consider “reality” in the Western world (Parnia et al., 2014; Radin, 2013, 2018).  In time, I hope questions like this will have much more definitive answers.

If you’d like to learn more about lucid dreaming and develop your skills, Dream Interpretation: The Basics & BEYOND: A Next-Level Course for Twin Flames contains some instruction, a handout and a couple different methods to facilitate lucid dreaming.

For those who want to get a sample of the course prior to purchasing it, you can access the first module for FREE here.

References

 DuQuette, L. M. (1999). My Life with the Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician. Boston, MA: Weiser Books.

Moss, R. (1996). Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life. New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks.

Parnia, S., Spearpoint, K., de Vos, G., Fenwick, P., Goldberg, D., Yang, J., . . . Schoenfeld, E. R. (2014). AWARE-AWAreness during REsuscitation-a prospective study. Resuscitation, 85(12), 1799–1805. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.09.004

Radin, D. (2013). Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities. New York: Deepak Chopra Books.

Radin, D. (2018). Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. New York: Harmony Books.