King's Canyon, Australia; photo from Creative Commons

After using the same basic procedure I went through a long period of strange sleep and vivid dreams. Though my sleeping isn't usually normal anyway, this was unusual for me. I had two separate episodes of intense dreaming, either of which could have qualified as an out of body experience at least at times. The first was the most intense.

I woke up, or at least felt like I woke up, lying on a narrow stone ledge on the face of a high cliff someplace. At first I didn't realize where I was, since I was lying on my back with my head turned towards the rock wall. When I started to roll over to look around I nearly went off the ledge but caught myself. Then there were several horrible minutes while I tried to figure out how to move without falling. I was in a pretty bad position without handholds and facing the wrong way. If I moved my legs I could feel the rock slab they were on shifting and I couldn't tell how secure that was. It didn't feel very secure. I couldn't go up even though I could see the rim of the bluff about

forty feet above me. There just wasn't any way for me to get started without falling. Finally I got over the terrors enough to sit up just a little and realized that from the hips down I was already on a wider section of ledge, and the shifting rock slab was actually pretty stable. Beyond my feet the ledge was wide and there was even a clearly defined path leading up to the top of the cliff. So I got up and followed the trail, feeling relieved and silly.

Follow up:

At the top of the cliff was a place I felt was familiar although I don't know why it was. I had some flash memories of seeing it before -- a house trailer inside a fenced area, the end nearest the cliff covered with a clear plastic tarp. A fenced pathway led from the trailer area to another larger building a hundred feet away. Most of that building was a one story wood frame structure without windows, about the size of a barn. The side I faced was a greenhouse or sun porch that ran the full width of the building and was full of green plants in pots. The fence around all of this was at least ten feet high and made of strong welded wire. Everything was covered with that same clear plastic sheet, which sealed off the sunroom area completely.

Inside the sun room I could see someone lying on a cot between the tiers of plants, so I walked up to say hello. This was a young woman, only a few feet from the plastic barrier, and she raised up a little when she heard me. She was obviously sick, with a flushed face and a disoriented look. Her lips were swollen and blistered, the skin between her upper lip and nose a mass of small yellow pustules oozing clear fluid. It looked like the infection continued inside her nose. She warned me not to get too close, but I was on the other side of the barrier and didn't feel like I was in danger, much. She asked me if I was from The Company and I didn't give her a clear answer. There were some other flash memories, having to do with employment ads. These all involved travel companies and tourism, the one I remember clearest was an ad for work aboard cruise ships. Then somebody else was coming, walking around the building towards us, and I opted out. No sense of where this place was, the air was cold but above freezing and the surrounding landscape was dry, high desert with scattered conifers. I didn't see any sign of other human activity but I didn't look around much except down into the canyon, a very rough and wild place.

In the second experience I did have a sense of location, although this was a place I don't recognize at all. I was walking a dirt road somewhere in China, going towards a village built on the side of a steep mountain of yellow earth. This was a warm and densely forested area on very loamy ground, the kind of earth that becomes a fine powder when it dries. Today it was raining there and I could see water running down the mountainside and off the roofs of the small houses below me in sheets as the rain showers passed over. I tried to follow a footpath up the mountain so I could see the surrounding area more clearly, and nearly immediately slipped in the mud and went face down in the slop. There was a trick to walking that involved driving a heel through the top layer of mud into firmer ground below, and it took a few steps to learn it. On top of the ridge I stopped and took a long look around in all four directions. This wasn't a totally wild area, but there was a region of forest on one half of the mountains. Most of the landscape was field land, some of it fenced for cattle that looked like water buffalo. In one direction I could see pylons of electrical transmission towers, angling away from me so it looked like they were stacked together. The high point of the ridge was a small military camp and I went as far as the road into that town. When I saw tanks I felt like I had gone far enough. After that the experience blended into ordinary dreams in which I talked with the people working in the forests there, and was shown diagrams from many decades ago that marked trees and gave measurements in board feet, predicting a value at harvest. The trees were huge now, cedars measuring fifteen feet across at the base. Most of the work was being done by hand with crosscut saws and axes, but there was also heavy machinery for transport, an odd blend of things that you do still see in some places where labor is cheap.