A Peculiar Experience

This happened long ago, when I was in high school.  I was alone in the apartment.  I had just lain down on my bed to take an afternoon nap, so this must have happened on a weekend (or during summer vacation -- why, oh why did I not write down everything then!).

Suddenly I found myself standing in the hallway.  I did not remember how I got to be there, but the oddness of the situation did not bother me so much at the time as the fact that my vision was somehow impaired (in retrospect, it was as if my brain were operating on autopilot, with the critical faculty turned down) -- I could see, but the whole environment seemed steeped in a shadowy sort of gloom.

It felt very oppressive, almost physically so, so I went (back) down to my bedroom, reached for the light switch by the door, tried to flick it on -- and could not.  I had not felt my finger making contact with it.  Thinking I had simply missed the mark, I looked at the switch, tried again, and it looked as if my finger went through it.  Under normal conditions this would have been shocking, but at the time I was simply perplexed (again, the incomplete critical faculty).

Then, suddenly, it came to me -- I realized why I couldn't see normally -- my eyes were closed!  So I had fallen asleep after all, and of course my eyes would be closed.  How I could see at all when I was sleeping with my eyes closed, that question did not arise at the time.  Instead, I tried to open my eyes but found it difficult at first -- it was as if my eyelids were glued shut, and they simply would not respond to my effort.  I tried again and again with a kind of desperation, and finally my eyes suddenly snapped wide open and I found myself awake and lying in bed.

What did I experience?  Was it some unusual semi-lucid dream?  "Traveling consciousness"?  A partly-conscious astral projection?

Oliver Fox, a pioneering writer in occult literature of the early 20th century pertaining to lucid dreaming and astral projection, set out four stages in the journey of dream-to-full consciousness in his writings.  It lists, at its base level, to put it very simply, just accepting everything in your dream unquestioningly, just as you would with any other ordinary dream, then only after waking, realizing there was something strange or odd about the dream;  then the next level is where you do notice something odd, but excuse it with your dream-logic as something that could normally exist within the dream.  Then, in the next level of awareness, the critical faculty comes into play, and you compare things in the dream with the waking world versions, and realize it really is odd, but still justify it somehow, using loose logic (like "It could happen!").  The last stage is a fully lucid dream -- you see something in a dream that's just absurd, realize it could not possibly happen in real life, and therefore you must be dreaming.

I mostly agree with this, and I would place my "strange dream" somewhere between the second or third categories.  But I confess I have always felt rather dissatisfied with Fox's categorization of dreams.  He seems to unduly emphasize melding from lucid dreaming to what he describes as astral projection without making a hard-and-fast distinction between the two (by way of contrast, Sylvan Muldoon makes the difference absolutely clear in his autobiographical classic tome of occult literature, Projection of the Astral Body -- he does not mention lucid dreaming at all anywhere in his book).

Related post:  A Silent Explosion