I know that astral projection is having you astral body apart from your physical body but is a really realistic dream ( you can feel pain, etc) considered astral projection?
Not really astral projection is technically like going somewhere without your body. A realistic dream probably a sign of AP but sometimes it could be just that a dream. Signs of AP are seeing your self asleep and traveling around like your floating. I have never AP 'd before but this I have read about OBE's and NDE's phenomenon.
Astral projection is when a person leaves the physical plane onto the astral plane. Your astral/energy/soul form leaves your physical body and you would have freedom to control yourself. Astral projection is done when a human being is sleeping. When we leave the physical plane onto the astral plane, we can feel objects or feel pain, etcetera.
I do not know if you can die on the astral plane. If a person dies during astral projection, the wouldn't be alive to tell us. So I don't think we'll ever know unless someone dead told us. If that is possible. I heard about Necromancy, the ability to talk to the dead.
There is a cord that keeps us attatched to our physical body when doing astral projection. This cord is strong and can stretch far. I don't think you can lose your body though, because you should know your limits. Don't go a little too far.
I don't know if this is true, but your physical body can get possessed by a demon while youre on the astral plane. You should cast a protection spell/circle if you fear this.
It is considered an out of body experience and although it is traveling, it is not projection because it is not a conscious effort. Sometimes dreams can still feel real, however, but in my own experience, dreams that feel the most real have the most meaning whether psychological or intuitive. But toss the dream dictionaries, those things are ridiculous! No ones subconscious mind is alike. But it's pretty simple, if you're always afraid in your dreams, than you have a fear in your real life that you need to deal with. If you feel pain--pain is pain, whether physical or emotional. If you feel pain in your dreams regularly, then I'd bet that you're going through emotional turmoil of some kind. The rest are usually metaphorical clues. The subconscious is extremely clever with metaphors.
But going onto projection.
Even when we experience an OBE while dreaming, it can seem like a very Alice In Wonderland adventure. This is because despite the fact that we are in fact traveling outside of our body, we are still perceiving it through our dreaming mind. It's a lot like sleep walking with our spirit. We see what our subconscious has to say but the activities we are doing are really being done through our astral body. I could just imagine how idiotic we must look...but I try not to. =P
The number one way you know you weren't just dreaming but experiencing an OBE is waking up and feeling like you lived the entire experience and didn't sleep. You're tired! When you travel while sleeping you don't go through all the stages of sleep as you normally do, they are disrupted. So the fatigue can even be scientifically explained.
You may also see yourself sleeping in bed either in the beginning of the dream or directly before waking up. And OBE's generally begin in your home and then you end up leaving and doing crazy things like flying randomly or surviving falls that should have killed you, yet you're unharmed. It's also common to not notice that you have a body at all when you are experiencing an OBE, instead you just see and roam around like a floating camcorder.
I remember a particular OBE I had when I was really young. It started off with me in my bedroom. A big monster came and I began to run down the stairs. Now, bare in mind, I was also a very lucid dreamer. The monster was gaining on me and I didn't like that one bit. So I decided to jump down each flight instead of running down them. I did this with ease like there was less gravity. But then I became bored of that and decided that wasn't good enough, I wanted to use it as a big slide, so I began sliding down the stairs like they were a bumpy carnival ride. I had so much fun, I forgot about the big monster until I came to the bottom of the stairs. When I looked around, he was gone, and that made me very happy. Then I woke up. Ah, childhood! Such simplistic times. =P
