Lucid Dream or Astral Travel?

[jayh]

Sorry for a long post, but I'd love to get feedback of your thoughts about my experience...

This morning, I had what I think was an out of body experience. It was truly amazing, but I'm not quite sure what to call it. It started almost like a dream, but I was very aware of what was going on. I could see "through" my eyelids and was gazing at the stars. But then I realized that I could change the number and arrangement of the stars at will. When I realized this, the picture changed to the ceiling of my livingroom (where I was sleeping), and I could turn my head around and see various parts of the room - still as if I was looking through my eyelids. It was very hard to make out detail at first. As I tried to look around, I could only see areas where my eye movement was limited to, and I could feel my head against the pillow trying to turn around and look. So at that point I "sat up" but not my "real" body. I think it was a separation.

While this was going on, I could hear a very "scary" voice saying all kinds of strange things. And the shuffling of footsteps in the other room. It was almost like it was trying to scare me, but I was not scared. I couldn't understand it, so I asked it to repeat what it said very calmly, and then it kind of just went away.

Then I look over at the chair next to me, and my brother was there talking to me about various things that I don't quite remember, other than telling me about his divorce that happened a long time ago.

The next thing I remember is that I was walking down my hallway, and came to a mirror. I remembered that this was one way to tell if you were lucid dreaming, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw no reflection.

So - what do you think? Was it a real OBE? Just a strange lucid dream? Maybe both? And what the heck were those scary "incantations" I heard?