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Dr Robert Crookall - More Astral projections

Case No. 301-Alan M. Bain sent the following (in litt., Sept. 23, 1961):

I relate an experience which took place on Monday, 18th September, 1961 at about 3 a.m.

I had lain down to sleep ... 'run down', extremely tired and with a cold.  I was dreaming that I was entering the doorway of some premises very familiar to me, and thought,  'How like going through between the pillars of the Temple'.

At this precise instant I became aware of my body lying in the bed, and of sensation of an unusual kind in the region of the chest generally, and the solar plexus in particular. The rest of my body was very flaccid. ... Consciousness was apart from it, something distinct in itself.

I had the thought 'This is projection !'

I had at the time read about one-third of your book, The Study and Practice of Astral Projection and some two years ago I read Muldoon's The Projection of the Astral Body.

With the thought, I stepped out of my body.

The sensation prior to this was analogous to a fine, loosely-knit network, suggesting the nervous system, but capable of separation of the finer part, wherein, at the time, awareness was located, from the other, denser, physical part.

The actual act of separation may be likened to drawing a Yale key from a lock.  I had the feeling as if hundreds of connections were being simultaneously slid apart. It was very much a slipping out.

I then became aware of being parallel to my body, some two or three feet above it ...felt rather as though I were suspended in a kind of dark fog, without any of the oppressive quality that fog has.

I then became slightly alarmed and thought, 'I must get back to my body!' I attempted to move my right arm, and then to open my eyes, but was unable. I still felt as if I were apart from the body, though conscious of it ... I somehow realized that I would have to wait for a moment. ... I was then able to move, and turned over to sleep. Until then I had been lying on my back.

It is interesting to observe that the experience, though unusual, was familiar to me in the way that things long forgotten are familiar, when they are suddenly remembered. I was (and still am) struck, by the quality of reality of all that took, place. Just before I turned over to sleep, I had the feeling that, had I continued further, I would have become aware of someone of whom there was a suggestion of a presence, who would have been able to make things clearer for me in some way, whose form was necessarily insubstantial ...

The above is a copy of the notes I made later on the same day that the experience occurred. I have not added to it anything that I have observed or recalled about it since, in order that the influence of suggestion, due to interest in the subject, may be reduced as much as possible.