And so, I am.
Field Notes of Nobody’s Ghost - 20261025-S10
The crown fell the moment something took her weight. Being lifted out has a price, like everything else out there, and hers was the one thing she’d kept above the water.
Well, the ghost got her out. She lost the crown in the process and reached after it as it fell. What was it worth to her out there, and what was she still planning to do with it? I don’t know yet. I do know what it’s like to have a door at your back and keep shooting at the window, and that’s what today’s entry will be about.
For today’s session I finally put on the “Five Questions” tape from Wave III of the Gateway Experience, the Monroe Institute’s home course I’ve been revisiting this month. I’ve written for almost a year about casting questions in trance, but those are specific to my practice. The questions on this tape are your run-of-the-mill woo material.
Who am I? Where and who was I before I entered this physical being? What is my purpose in this physical life? What is my purpose for this existence in physical matter reality? What action can I now take to best serve this purpose? What is the content of the most important message I can receive and understand at this point in my existence?
How would you ever confirm any of that in this incarnation? The very first time I ran the tape, a few years ago, I got an instant answer to the first question. Who am I? Earth. I’ve returned to it a few times since and never had a different answer. In fact, I’ve never had that question answered again at all. As far as I’m concerned, that’s probably an actual answer then. No such answers today, which is expected. These things unfold well after the session for me.
When the track ended, I set the headphones aside, turned onto my left side, and began initiating an immersive altered state through intention. I say it in my mind, starting with “Now I am out of my physical body,” and as I repeat it, I watch for hypnagogic imagery, the pictures and scenes that come up at the edge of sleep. Once something catches my interest, I pay loose attention to it, even engage with it, and before long I find myself in Locale 1.
An aside: Locale 1 is Monroe’s name for the “here-now”: the physical world as it is, visited from outside the physical body. It’s built one to one, and it gives itself away in small factual mismatches. “Finding myself there” is exactly the phrase, and I’m usually already positioned and doing something.
First pass: the laundry room, pulling a trash bag out of the cabinet. “Really? This is what I’m doing?” My hands were right in front of me, but the situation was so silly I couldn’t stop interrogating it, and that ended it. I felt myself rise, hover in place with zero vision, then travel back through the wormhole, the portal I pass through on the way back, still blind. I said “clarity now,” “I can see,” “vision now,” forcefully, the whole way. That’s what’s recommended, but it has never once worked for me. I’ve read enough accounts to call it a coin flip, and I’m the half it doesn’t work for. What works for me is intuition, emotion, and feel. The things we’re told to shout are commands, like it’s a video game. At this point I’m consciously dropping them.
The second projection was different from every one before it. It began with me at my desk, typing a reply on Reddit, on a laptop instead of my main rig. A notification came in and I moved to read it. By then I was fully lucid and coherent; I could feel the urgency to stay engaged. The comment was odd, not illegible, just “hmm” odd: the kind you read twice and realize you’re not quite capable of understanding yet, but it’s legitimate. I have a feeling it’ll come again at a later time. I do remember the title of my post: “And so, I am.”
I got up and looked around. The office had the bright, clean, crisp quality I usually associate with Locale 2, the astral, the “more real than real,” but I knew it was Locale 1. I brought my hands up and leaned in to really look at them. “Yep, these are my hands.” Then the creases in my pale palms began to shine a brilliant green light; it raced and glowed through them as if it itself were alive. “Well, that’s definitely different.”
As usual, I couldn’t help myself; I ran and jumped. This time I could feel the mechanics of levitating. I wasn’t doing it physically but by feel and emotion instead, as weird as that sounds, and honestly it’s difficult to explain. The lift came from joy and vigor at my core. I was floating and controlling it, the energy shifting from the core into my legs as I turned and maneuvered. The ceiling grew with every attempt to fly through it, which has happened many times before.
I landed and gathered myself. I wasn’t in a hurry the way I usually am. As long as I stayed engaged, I’d be fine, and I was. Then I began to draw energy, by instinct, with the intention of passing through the window. This time I remembered to visualize myself already on the other side of the window. Something caught my eye, so I glanced down to see what it was. I was in a white T-shirt that I haven’t worn in a while, and from underneath it came a bright, pale-blue and white light, growing and shooting off tiny sparks in every direction. Perhaps this was the energy I was gathering, I assumed. Incredibly new for Locale 1, for me at least.
“Okay, if this doesn’t work, I’ll stop this approach.” I concentrated on the energy at my center, warm and powerful, and shot straight at the window. No physical movement, just intent and power behind me. I smacked into it without feeling a thing, like an invisible force. I attempted to visualize once again already standing outside, moving through, being the window: nothing worked.
I drifted back to where it started and thought, let’s see if the ceiling moves with me again. It did not. I began to pass through it and saw only the blackness of the void and instantly knew what that meant. I tried to lower back down to no avail; I was already exiting. The transit was quick this time. I clicked into place on the daybed, took the sleeping mask off, and checked the time.
Perfectly lucid, no transition of awareness at all.
This office, the garage, these spaces I project into, feel like prisons of my own creation. To take the fear connotation out of the word, I think it’s a puzzle, a big one, and perhaps I built it myself.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again to drill it in: next time, use the doors that already exist. Leave the office through the door, then the house through one of several. Easier said than done when fine-tuned levitation is at your fingertips, and maybe that’s the lesson.
Sure, I can go blasting my shotgun at a pond to catch a fish, but I’d do a lot better with a fishing pole and some bait. Power and force will be the harder habit to break, because I like the feeling. I’ll work it out.
This projection was different from the rest. Far more agency.