Partial Separation

Sometime in the 1990's

I woke from a deep sleep, lying on my back.  There was an intense vibrations flowing up and down my body from head to toes, in a slow rhythm.  There was also a very loud buzzing noise in my head.  I didn't hear it with my ears, I felt it in my head.

I raised my hand to sit up.  But instead of seeing my hand in front of my face, I saw a gray and white outline shaped exactly like my hand.  Inside the outline there were bright sparks of light, traveling to and fro, through my hand.

It was then that I realized my physical eyes were closed, and my physical body was laying perfectly still.  In fact, I couln't move it.  When I tried, I became aware that I was able to feel myself existing in two distinct ways.  One, the way I have always existed; I could feel my body laying there, heavy with sleep, and unable to move.  I could also feel a weightless version of myself, complete and sensate in every way.  This version of myself was coincidental with the physical, except where my "non-physical" hand was raised above my physical hand and arm, which were laying on my chest.

I turned the non-physical hand and examined it at length.  It had feeling, just like my physical hand.  I raised my other hand, which came up in front of me in the same ghostly, light-outlined way.  I clasped these "non-physical" hands and they felt exactly like my physical hands.

I started to feel nervous, so I put my "hands" back down on my chest.  My eyes opened, and everything seemed to be normal in my room.  For two days after this experience, my left hand felt cold and tingly, as if there were a small electric current flowing through it.  It was so persistent that I asked my sister to feel my hand, without saying anything else to her.

"It feels cold, she said."

An Early Separation

Sometime in the early 1990's.

It was winter, and I was camped in a high, cold place in the Oregon Cascades.  The temperature that night was 17 degrees, by the little thermometer I carried on the zipper of my parka.  I was having a hard time staying warm, and I kept waking up, because I was cold.  I think the repeated transitions between waking and sleeping had something to do with this...

I woke, sat up in the tent, and rearranged my sleeping bag, and the frost liner above me.  I scrunched back down into the bag, pulled it over my head, and rolled over on to my side.  And I kept on rolling, oddly enough.  I rolled right through the wall of the tent and outside to the snow-encrusted ground, where I bounced twice, lightly, in the cold dark air.  I bounced and floated, as if I only weighed an ounce.  when I finally came to rest, I sat up, and I was just sitting there on the snow.  But I could no longer feel temperature in any way.  I wasn't cold or warm, I just didn't feel anything like that.

All other sensations were perfectly intact.  I could see the bright, hard stars above me, and I could see everything around me, in the dim moonlight.  Instantly, I thought "up."  I don't why I thought that, but my body (whatever it was in that moment) shot straight up.  I went up and up and up, and I seemed to be passing through dark gray layers of .. Something.  As I went higher, I felt more resistance with each layer I passed through.  Finally, I hit something and bounced down.

I woke up in my tent, feeling cold.