My Body Was A Little Grey Cloud

In about 1985, when I was about 30, I lived in Lancashire (England). I had been reading the works of Lobsang Rampa, as many of them as I could obtain through the local lending library. His works are largely autobiographical, and he was a "natural" astral traveller.

In my astral experience, I became aware that I was floating along a footpath, like the one that connected my own housing estate, to the one on the hill above it, where some of my family members lived.

It was dark, and a string of yellow lights lit up the footpath ahead of me. The lights went all the way up the hill, and lit up the houses of the estate. I think the lights were street lamps, but they looked pretty, like fairy lights.

As I drifted along the footpath, I glanced down at my body, and I saw that it was a little grey cloud.

I became startled, and I tried to say "I'm astral travelling", but my jaws and tongue were too heavy for me to move, and no sound would come out of my throat. I now believe that I was trying to use the vocal cords of my sleeping physical body, without success.

I then felt myself being reeled in, like an angler reels in a fish, just as I had read about in Lobsang Rampa's books. I found myself in my physical body, waking up in bed.

I looked over at the window. Daylight was coming in around the edge of the curtains, and I realized that I must have been on the astral plane, not in the etheric counterpart of the physical earth, because in my astral experience, it had been the middle of the night, but when I woke up, the sun had already risen.

There are two points that I think are significant, about my astral experience.

The first is that, I don't think I would have had the experience I had, if I hadn't known that astral travelling was a reality. I only recognized what I was doing, while astral travelling, because I had read about it.

The second point of interest, is that, it was as if I had woken up on the astral plane, in a place of my own creation. I certainly did not project myself there, I just woke up there.

Technically, I would say that I woke up twice, first in the astral plane, in my little-grey-cloud body, and then on the physical plane, after returning to my earth body. I don't think there's any specific term for this experience.

This experience was spontaneous, and it has never happened to me again. Now, I am working on astral projection, and if I achieve it, it will be for the first time, since it didn't happen in my astral experience, as I explained.