I actually had an astral experience this morning. It was around 4:30am. I was lying in bed alone. Erin was sleeping in our guest room because she's getting over an illness (my health is normal).
I thought I was lying there awake when I heard some strange noises, as if there was someone else in the room with me. I could feel its presence. I sat up and looked around but saw nothing unusual. The room looked perfectly normal. Since sunrise happens pretty early in Vegas, it was already partially light in the room, so I could see everything clearly.
I lied down again and heard more noises, like strange insect sounds... clicking and crawling noises. I opened my eyes and was startled by what I saw at the side of the bed about 4 feet away. There were two humanoid-sized insect-like creatures. Each one looked like an upright praying mantis. I immediately thought, "Crap! I'm astral!" I mistakenly assumed I was in physical reality, but the sight of those creatures immediately told me I was on one of the astral planes. (Sometimes when I'm astral, the astral plane looks identical to the physical universe, so it's easy to mistake them for the physical plane unless you see something out of the ordinary.) It would be highly unusual to see insect-like creatures at the side of my bed in physical reality.
I scanned the creatures to read their intent and immediately picked up that they wanted to drain my energy. I didn't want that to happen, so I willed myself back to the physical plane. As I stared at the creatures, they gradually phased out. The room looked the same, but the creatures disappeared from my view, and I could tell I was back in phase with my physical body.
I knew the creatures were physically out of phase, but I could still feel their presence in the room. I did a quick visualization to shield myself from them, calmed myself down, and went back to bed for a bit, but I don't think I fell back asleep.
When I got up, I felt unusually tired and drained. I had to drag myself out of bed, so they probably did manage to vamp me a bit while I was transitioning. I feel fine now.
For me it seems the best way to invite an astral experience is to think about it a lot. Whenever I'm thinking about AP or reading about it, there's a good chance I'll experience it. Since AP was on my mind last night, it doesn't surprise me that I had an astral experience this morning.
Astral projection is like tuning your consciousness to a different frequency than physical reality, so you can "see" and "hear" non-physical beings. Physical reality is just one of many stations we can perceive.
There are lots of creatures on the astral plane that try to vamp off my energy when I go there. It's almost like my astral energy becomes a food source for them. Erin learned how to defend herself from these kinds of attacks, but I really haven't. I ought to put some effort into learning how to prevent myself from being vamped on the astral plane.
Maybe Erin and I will do a podcast about AP. There's so much richness to this topic. We could seriously talk about it for hours and barely scratch the surface.