I know this site is known as a place where people can document their experiences with the “not-so-mundane”, so with that here's my experience with the bizarre and insanity-inducing.
I’m sure most of you are aware of astral-projection, but if you're not here’s a summary. It’s when an individual has a willing out of body experience, during which your consciousness can travel freely. The reason I bring this up is because I’m able to astral project and even travel through different planes of our reality. Now I know what you're thinking, but I can assure you that I’m not some druggy that tripped off DMT and now believes that I’m somehow smarter for doing it, I’m not going to give you some bullshit about how I opened my third butthole or something and I’m not interested in spouting “woke” rhetoric. I’m just here to tell my story.
It all started when I was a kid. I had a pretty shitty childhood and during my dad's meth-fueled assaults on my mother, I found that the safest place I could hideaway was under my bed. The sturdy wood frame and dark lighting comforted me. Within this hidden corner, I began to wish to escape somewhere else. Anywhere else, far away from my father's rage and my mothers screaming, and one day it happened. With my eyes closed, I saw a single dot of white light appear within the inky blackness of my mind, the sensation of being disconnected from my body was unmistakable. The point of light extended out and formed a ring of white light, it began to expand further soon occupying every inch of space I could see. Moving through this shifting tunnel of light, a ring of blue spread across my vision and engulfed the once ivory white. I stood in awe and would later as an adult realize that I was moving through “gates” and into different planes of reality. With each gate I passed through, the colors became more and more varied and they began the mix together forming an amalgamation of incredibly vibrant hues. Soon enough I was moving through a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns, even textures began to form the longer I stayed in this state of consciousness.
I didn't know what I was experiencing as a child, just that It made a good distraction from the horrors of my day to day life. Sometimes I spent hours just gazing at the seemingly infinite amount of multi-colored light tunnels and their phantasmagoric qualities, never truly knowing the danger I was putting myself in.
As I matured into a teenager I stopped hiding under beds and started rebelling against my parents, in times of distress I would simply leave the house and by 8th grade, I had run away to live with an aunt, so I forgot about my astral projections by my freshman year of high school. I wouldn't recall my astral projections until junior year when a conversation about strange childhood experiences amongst my friends brought the memories flooding back. I asked my friends if they ever had any similar experiences, thinking that it was common for people to experience this phenomenon as children. Sadly no one knew what I was talking about. I inquired about it to many teachers and none could give me any real answers about what I experienced. This only served to make my curiosity ravenous and I began to research everything from dream interpretations, psychology and even paganism all in an attempt to find out about what I had experienced. It wasn't until after high school that I had become obsessed with meditation, lucid dreaming, and astral projection. I spent much of my time training myself to lucid dream and spent hours meditating but nothing was able to recreate what I had experienced. Even when I was able to astral project during prolonged meditation sessions it was different though the feeling of disconnecting from your body was familiar.
In my early twenties, I started researching transcendence through meditation and astral projection, and it was also around this time my mother died. Years of abuse at my father's hands had driven her suicide. I had left her alone, I was so selfish in my need to escape that I had abandoned her. I left her to deal with that monster, and that's when I longed to transcend this plane of existence. The real cruelty of this life is that our consciousness is confined within vessels that will fail us sooner or later regardless of how well we treat them. Our lives would always come to an end, whether it be abrupt or we see ourselves slowly and painfully wither away. Few were lucky to go in peace and intact. So I began to long to leave this body behind, to leave this plane behind. I longed to be a part of so much more, to reach out to the furthest expanse of our existence, to see what no human has ever seen. I refused to suffer through the curse of this mortal coil any longer.
After I spent several months researching all sorts of writings from the widely known to the esoteric I concluded that our universe was “layered” with different facets of it being impossible to reach or perceive under normal circumstances. However, I had the ability to send my consciousness occupying a spiritual form into these different facets through these tunnels of light I saw as a child. More specifically these “light tunnels” were doors into different realms that I could traverse while astral projecting. With this knowledge, I hoped to reach a higher plane so that I could exist as a transcendent being free from the shackles of mortality.
The main roadblock was that I still could not replicate my childhood experiences, I figured that my mind was always too clouded with varying stormy emotions and that I needed to recreate the most peaceful moments of my life, the time spent under that sturdy wooden bed frame.
I decided to pay my father a visit for the first time in years, The bastard had the gall to tell me that he didn't have any money to give me, he hadn't seen me in years, didn't even attend my mom's funeral and that's the first thing he decides to say to me. He was shocked to hear that I was the one that wanted to offer him money for my old bed frame. He eagerly took my offer.
“That old piece of shit? It’s still in your room, the old bitch never did want to get rid of it. Guess it turned out for the better”
Forcing down an outburst I asked him If I could pay him extra to have the room to myself for a while. He didn’t protest and simply took my money. He left shortly, probably to buy drugs or something. I didn’t care, this was probably for the better. I wouldn't want any outside distractions.
Creaking open the door to my old room I saw that it was incredibly dusty, and smelled mildewy, but everything was left relatively untouched. My bed even had its old sheets. Without further delay I lay under my bed, curling up in a fetal position so I wouldn't have my feet sticking out, while also conveniently mimicking how I used to lay under here. I closed my eyes and started to relax and recall my childhood.
It felt as if I spent hours in the hazy darkness of my mind, lost in its murkiness waiting for something to happen. I was about to slip into the numbing embrace of sleep when a point of light appeared. Incandescent like an afterimage burned into my retinas it exploded into a supernova of impossibly bright white light. I was being consumed by its sheer intensity as a blue hue began to stain and darken what was once impeccably white. Rolling waves of navy blue spread out and engulfed me, It was finally happening.
I don’t know how long I spent moving through these landscapes of shifting colors. I saw so much I couldn't understand, patterns that revealed the structure of our universe, colors, and shapes that we could not perceive, I saw it all. After an eternity I reached what I knew to be the final gate, an infinite spectrum of color spiraled and whipped about violently. A singular black dot stood at the center of the maddening but brilliant polychromatic tempest. I was on the precipice of a whole new state of existence. As I approached its event horizon the storm around me died down as I was drawn into the black void.
I bathed in the endless darkness, wondering if I had done it. If I had reached the apex of our reality. I was suddenly blinded by a luminous slit of pure white that extended across my field of vision and blossomed out as stars exploded into existence, quasars, solar systems, entire galaxies took shape before me and revealed their true nature. A cosmic eye formed of countless celestial bodies gazed into me, I was taken aback, in danger of losing my myself in its sheer beauty, I was witnessing the birth and death of countless astronomical objects, iridescent light shone down upon me in its unfathomable glory. I wondered if I was looking into the eye of God.
A stream of knowledge linked us, as it began to bestow me with wisdom unknown to man. But what I learned should have stayed unknown, no man should ever know what I learned. I wasn't gazing into God but instead into the eye of a slain god, far older than our pitiful universe and that wasn't it, something else inhabited this god’s body. An entire civilization of beings carved from its flesh dwelled within it claiming it as their holy city. They were so alien to anything I had ever known, silhouettes of them flashed in my mind, cephalopodic in shape, they had gnarled tentacles and gaping maws. I was left in sheer terror when I realized why they had chosen to appear before me. I knew why they looked down on me with insatiable curiosity. These things had been collecting lifeforms from all corners of our reality to fill their Zoo and they hadn't been “granting” me knowledge, their thoughts had simply imprinted themselves into my mind unintentionally.
I saw streams of luminosity, tributaries of starlight fed by great cosmic eye, coalesced around me and formed a pyramid of manipulated light. These things could bend light itself to their will. I screamed as I noticed that I could see the outline of my physical body taking shape around me. These things were trying to bring my body to them. As my prison was being drawn into the iris, I began to feel a searing pain, worse than anything I had ever felt before, starting from my toes and slowly moving up my foot, I looked down and saw that half my foot had formed. They were gonna rip me apart atom by atom and reassemble me here. I had to get away, sheer unadulterated, primal fear took over me. My panicked mind was struggling to hold itself together. The pain was so unbearable I wished I could take my own life just to spare myself.
The pain had spread all the way to my knee when finally the pyramid cage around me shattered and I plummeted down into a prismatic whirlpool. I fell backwards through all the gates at terrifying speeds, my mind bent and broke in that hellscape of hues rushing past me. When I had finally reached my body I was an inconsolable mess, screaming and thrashing wildly. My dad called the cops on me after I trashed his house and they threw me in the Loony bin for a while. I eventually got out after my shattered psyche was clumsily stitched back together. Now I just live as a traumatized wreck.
The doctors couldn't explain what happened to my leg, everything from my right knee down is just gone. Not amputated, there is no scar tissue even at a molecular level. It’s like it was never even there, just a smooth stump. I know those bastards still have it because of the phantoms' pains I feel. I can feel the experiments they perform on my leg with excruciating accuracy. I felt my leg being reduced into a pulp multiple times and then reassembled and put back on display as something to gawk at. That's all life is to them, a passing curiosity that they can imprison, tear apart and reassemble endlessly for their own entertainment.
That’s my story, be skeptical if you want but I know what happened to me. One last thing, take this as a warning of sorts. They know of our existence now, they took my leg and I live in constant fear that they'll come to collect the rest of me. Humans come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. Pray that I’ll be enough to satiate their curiosity.