I spent one night and a day in Februrary as another self. I didn’t tell anyone this had happened. This is the story of what it felt like to wake up as another person — who was also me — that walked around inside my body, inside my life, for about 20 hours, and what it taught me about the soul, the self. Our many, many selves.
This experience defies language. I will do my best to describe what it is like, but I’m going to be playing fast and loose with pronouns here. Do your best to feel the story behind the words. Experiences like this make it clear that we need new language to describe the myriad components of conscious experience.
His very first impression of my life, once he was lucid, was surprise. He was obviously as surprised as I was (…would later be) to be there at all. I, as him, woke in my bed. I’d been doing something just before this. Something amazing. I struggled to remember. But oh… Oh, did I remember.
I was dancing starlight. I was playing with the stars. An entire starfield worth of stars. I didn’t just remember, either. It had just finished happening. I knew in the same way you know what you were doing five seconds ago. It was five seconds ago. I had just been doing it and now I was laying like a lead weight in some dude’s body in a dark room.
My first thought was:
“What the hell just happened?”
I frantically tried to recall everything about the experience and the transition to this point. I knew it was important and, like waking after the most beautiful and vivid dream you’ve ever had, it was rapidly liquifying and I could feel it draining away from me. I grabbed what little I could of the experience I could puddle into the palms of my grubby human hands. The rest slipped between my proverbial fingers and is lost to me now. Here is what little I could retain about how it feels to be dancing starlight playing with the stars themselves. It is as good, better maybe, than you will imagine. Just take that perspective. Yes, it really is as amazing as described.
At the first moment of lucidity I was expanded to the size of, I don’t know, a galaxy or so. Maybe more, maybe less. My consciousness was spread out onto the stars. Not the entire space, but literally wrapping each and every one of the stars.
If you melted yourself down into liquid light and then poured yourself evenly over the surface of every star in a galaxy, that is what this felt like. I was just light, or energy, and I was feeling at that scale.
I say dancing, but it was also like singing, moving. Flow-based and energetic. Complete unthinking, joyful, twinkling movement. I wasn’t the stars, but I was playing with them somehow.
I was also pretty unaware. Very spread out. No conscious will at all. Simply reacting in the way a small child might to a proper beat. They just feel the music, it moves through them, and they move in time without any thought. I had no self concept and no body.
It was fun, basically. I was having a good time.
I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted because I only really remember the come down from this glimpsed state. I do recommend dancing with the stars sometime, if you get the chance.
I started condensing down from this galaxy sized, playful thing that wraps the stars into… well, something more like me. It felt like someone pulling the drain on a bathtub and I was the water. I got pulled down. Distilled. It happened very rapidly.
I started coming out of it. It was like coming out of a trance or waking up from being unconscious (instead of merely asleep). I was incredibly dazed. Like, where am I? What am I? What’s happening to me?
There’s a ME!?
That was just as jarring. A sudden sense of self. A body. I was in a bed. To be clear, this was a continuous experience. I didn’t “wake up” and feel like I had a dream about being dancing starlight. I went from doing it to being here in one, unbroken motion. From that first lucid moment I never lost consciousness.
I started grasping for that experience again. Like a person desperate for water. I held it again, but only for a moment, and so much of the detail is lost now. It was ineffable, but not because I couldn’t describe it with words, but because I would need to be able to go back and forth to capture all the feeling tones and what it was like. It was too much to hold and then dump onto a piece of paper in one go. I’d need to be able to keep re-examining it — looking back and forth to get a fuller description.
It’s hard to describe that feeling of sinking despair, bordering terror at watching this beautiful experience bleed away from me, knowing as it did, that I couldn’t possibly hold it long enough to capture it even as a memory, much less as words. It was like someone showed you the most beautiful painting of a heavenly scene, the exact kind you didn’t even realize you always wanted to see, and they gave you just two seconds to look at it. One. Two. Now it’s gone. What was it like?
That’s how I was feeling. Except I was the painting and I knew it had been real.
But I didn’t just return to my body in bed here and now on earth.
I felt like a ball of living energy bouncing around, only roughly, in the proximity of my body. Very, very loosely tethered to this thing. Oh, I could feel it. I knew that it was mine and I was rather fond of it. Appreciated it. It was like my home base, but I definitely wasn’t stuck in it.
While my physical body just sat there like a rock, some energetic body danced around my darkened bedroom like a ribbon of playful light. You know, sort of like if you took a guy who had been dancing starlight and then smooshed him down into a human body. I was just smaller now.
My conscious awareness floated around the room, excitedly inspecting everything. My physical body was so tired that I didn’t bother moving it. I watched this aspect of myself like a tired father, after a long day of work, watches their four year old excitedly running around the yard. Happily, warmly, but definitely not getting off the front porch.
I use the term “astral projection” for this kind of experience. It’s like walking around in your imagination. In this case my imagination very closely matched physical reality and I was very, very untethered to my body. I went outside. I went on the roof. I tried reading my car license plate (which I can never remember). Objective details like that were very difficult. It was like trying to force them into focus. I was trying to make them be specific numbers and letters when they really just wanted to be the idea of some numbers and letters. (I did get pretty close to reading the actual license plate. It was too difficult and I was like a pixie, so I quickly abandoned that boring task)
I’d done this kind of thing before, as “me” me, but it ain’t easy and it only very, very loosely correlates to the real world. This was different. This was greased. I was doing it like this was my natural state.
I did pop into my body a bit, but I was bored there. It felt confining. I didn’t want to just sit in it. I had to GO places! But I definitely wasn’t geting up. So I zipped around for a long time, trying to think of stuff to do. I was beyond excited. I was so excited it was nearly elemental. That’s all I was. Emotion given just enough form to operate.
Eventually I did return to my body. I opened my eyes and started to co-exist these selves. They weren’t separate, but now I was in my body instead of mostly ignoring it.
There were… some marked differences from my usual Steven waking state.
First of all, it felt like my entire field of consciousness was high voltage. I was living electricity. A living bonfire. If you could run high power through your entire experience, this is what it would feel like.
It was as if there were waves going through everything I saw, touched, heard. It was all lit up. It was so charged that I felt like I was a conscious stop motion animation moving around inside my body. If that sentence doesn’t make sense, imagine being it. I’m like, flickering — skipping frames. I can’t even contain the amount of experience flowing through me.
When I looked out at the room there were these rippes, these waves. I, myself, was riding on these waves somehow. Like surfing from one peak to the next. But they were going through everything. I could just feel the energy in the air around everything. It was nearly tangible. Visible grey ripples, like fabric, or manifolds that went through and around everything. They were each distinct. They were only correlated with the physical objects, and some of the movement was dependent on things unseen.
I could more than see it. It was just there. I could feel it. I had a sense of where it was. In the same way that if you yell in a small concrete box, then yell again in a stadium, you just know which room was bigger — even with your eyes closed. I could sense all this flow.
Now, I had a sense of it, where it was, how it was shaped. But not what it was or what the hell it meant.
At this point I began to get concerned.
“I am not normally like this.”
Ha. No. I am not.
I started to willfully come down a little bit, energetically. I realized I had access to all my memories (human, Steven variety), in the same way you might remember you were wearing a backpack and there was some stuff in it. You could take it out and recall it, if you wanted to…
Eh. I didn’t really feel like it. I knew who “he” was.
I did not have any memories of whoever I was besides Steven. I had only the felt experience. Like a professional dancer who got amensia. If you asked me if I knew how to dance, I’d say “Yeah! Obviously.” and I could have even done it. But if you asked me how I learned to dance, for how long, or anything else I would have no idea. Exactly like someone who had amensia.
I was myself, somehow. Wearing Steven like one would wear clothes. I wasn’t two people. I was still me. I pulled in enough of Steven’s personality, memories to function. I dulled the bonfire to a mere campfire. I was very, very extra alive still. I wondered if I could do cool stuff.
I tried closing the bedroom door with my mind.
…Nothing happened.
I tried a few other things. Mostly I could only do extra sensory perception, and most of the “extra” I was sensing didn’t make any sense to me. It was cool, but little more than fireworks without any comprehension.
So I got out of bed. I was tingling. Electric with unseen power. And I was definitely, definitely not Steven. I knew who I was. I didn’t know my name, or anything beyond what I was feeling though.
I went downstairs. Got some food and coffee, and…
Sat around in this guy’s body, bouncing with the energy of a small child hooked up to high voltage wires of pure, uncut joy.
And… I kept being this person. What the hell?
I began to wonder if I was just going to be like this now. It felt good, but I was definitely not the person I was inside of. I wasn’t inside of him, per se, but I had him. And I became convinced that was the relationship here. I was some “higher” version of him, not usually directly embodied. Except, for reasons lost on me then, for this one night in February when I got to come down and live as him directly. We weren’t separate people. More like a bigger body, or self I suppose, that I was usually numb to. Now it had been squished down into this human experience.
Everyone woke up. I looked at my children, my wife, and laughed. They had no idea. I mean, I knew exactly who Steven was, but I felt like I was acting. Pretending to be this guy. It was easy. Nobody noticed.
What could I say? “Good morning, by the way I’m not the same person anymore.”
I had no idea how long this would last. I wanted to stay. It felt like more, not less. I still had all of my old self.
This person, however, was not born and raised in our world. He was ill-suited. I needed to go to work. Everything on the drive was fascinating. Anything and everything I experienced was beyond exciting. …Until it wasn’t.
The feeling faded throughout the day. Like my old self was bleeding back through. I could still call this “new” me back though. Like switching places. Foreground and background.
Eventually though, despite my intention to keep him, by the end of the night foreground became background, and background become nothing. This person, and all the charged and varied experience he brought with him, was gone. Gone gone.
I noticed then, how much my personality was shifted like that. This was a person who never knew paperwork, or waiting in line, or even the concept of doing something you didn’t actually want to do. He was so free. He likely would have gotten me fired within months. I’d have been a lot of fun to be around though!
I’d started the day as dancing starlight, but now, I was just a dude in jeans again.
I think we all have a higher self. They’re, like, sleeping or something. Or numbed. Put on ice. In suspended animation. Apparently mine has chosen to play with the stars while he waits around for this part of me to be done here.
I’d known that I had a higher self. I’d actually communicated with them directly a few times before this — more than just intuition, or guidance that I think they usually provide for us. He was exactly like what I experienced in that communication. I’d known all this, but one morning in February I learned that we can actually embody them. That we are the same person. And they’re waiting for us to remember them. To reunify. Or perhaps, to wake up to them for the very first time.
Because there has to be a first time right? It’s both beautiful and tragic that there is some part of our soul out there. Resting. Watching. Waiting to be whole again, with you.
He was so happy.