Had a weird experience that felt like VR astral projection and I can't stop thinking about it

[simon_j_5767]

I get what you're describing, but my experience with that "rendered" feeling made me less inclined to see it as accessing something deeper. A couple years ago I had something similar during a really rough patch — sleep deprivation, stress from work, the whole thing. I was lying in bed and suddenly the room had that layered quality you mentioned, like I could sense the "edges" of what my brain was putting together. It felt profound in the moment. But honestly? I think it was just my nervous system misfiring.

"The VR-like quality might have been my mind's way of making the experience feel 'safe' enough to engage with"

I used to frame it that way too. But the more I sat with it, the more it felt like the opposite — like my mind was distancing me from something uncomfortable rather than creating a container for it. When you're a social worker dealing with other people's crises all day, you get pretty good at recognizing dissociation, and looking back, that's what it felt like. Not a symbol I needed to engage with, but a symbol my brain was using to keep me at arm's length from actual feelings.

The Tower thing is interesting though. I wonder if the impulse to read it as a meaningful symbol is itself part of the avoidance. Like, it's easier to say "my psyche presented this archetypal image of transformation" than to sit with whatever's actually going wrong in your life that's making you want to bolt. Not saying that's what happened with you — just that it's worth considering the symbol might be the distraction, not the message.

[mellow_finch_7200]

I want to push back on the idea that the VR quality made it feel "safe enough to engage with," because my experience was the opposite. I've been recording dreams since college, and I've had maybe a handful that had that same rendered, layered quality — like there was a subtle depth-of-field effect or something behind the surface. And every single time, it felt more unsettling, not less. Like my brain was showing me its own scaffolding, and that's not a comfortable thing to see.

"the VR-like quality might have been my mind's way of making the experience feel 'safe' enough to engage with"

I think this might be projection, honestly. You wanted it to be safe so you interpreted it that way. Which is fair — I do the same thing sometimes when I'm analyzing my own dreams. We reach for frameworks that make the experience manageable.

The Tower thing though, that's interesting to me. I actually had a tower appear in a dream series back in 2019, right when I was debating whether to stay at my old firm or make a move. And I didn't run from it — I went up. The dream was incredibly vivid, that same "rendered" feel you're describing. But nothing collapsed. I just stood at the top and looked out. In my experience, The Tower doesn't always mean destruction. Sometimes it's just... perspective. Height. Seeing the structure you're inside of.

I'm not saying your fear response wasn't real or valid. I think it was. But I'd question whether you're maybe reading the symbol too literally because you were already primed to find it threatening. Jung was pretty clear that symbols aren't fixed — they shift based on the dreamer's current psychological state. The same image can mean totally different things at different points in your life.

As for the predictive processing angle — I think you're right that the brain is always generating models. But I'm not convinced that explains away the experience. That's kind of like saying a building is just concrete and steel so the spatial experience of being inside it doesn't matter. The material substrate doesn't exhaust the meaning.

[deep_compass_219]

Okay so I gotta push back on the predictive processing framing here, even though I get why it's appealing. You're basically saying "my brain generated this so it's not real" astral projection, but that's exactly the assumption I think we should be questioning.

"from what I understand about predictive processing, the brain IS basically a VR engine anyway"

Right, but here's the thing — if you take panpsychism seriously as a metaphysical position (and not just a fringe thought experiment), then the distinction between "brain-generated simulation" and "accessing another layer of reality" starts to collapse. Philosopher Philip Goff argues that consciousness is a fundamental feature of matter, not something your brain produces like a factory output. So if that's true, what you experienced might not be your brain "rendering" a false reality — it could be your consciousness tuning into a frequency of experience that's always there but usually filtered out.

I'm not saying I have the answer. But I think jumping straight to "it's a brain simulation" is kind of a cop-out that lets us stay comfortable with materialist assumptions without actually testing them. The Tower showing up and you nope-ing out is fascinating regardless, and I think Jung's take on that part is solid. But the texture of the experience — that rendered quality — might be telling you something about the nature of consciousness itself, not just your personal psychology.

Has anyone here actually engaged with integrated information theory or Goff's work? I'd love to hear if others think panpsychism changes how we should interpret these kinds of experiences.

[wistful_mirror]

the VR feeling is just you noticing the machinery you've been running on the whole time. the tower didn't scare you — your ego noticed itself getting rendered and panicked.

[dim_summer]

I keep seeing people assume that if an experience feels "rendered," that means it's revealing a deeper layer of reality — but what if the opposite is true? > "the brain IS basically a VR engine anyway" — you said this yourself, and I think you brushed past it too fast. From what I understand about predictive processing models like Karl Friston's free energy principle, when the brain's prediction errors get weird enough, it doesn't mean you've peeled back a veil; it might just mean the model is glitching. The Tower showing up could've been your unconscious serving up a symbol you already associate with disruption, which then created the feeling of significance. I'm not saying nothing happened — I'm saying maybe the "layer" you slipped into was still you, all the way down.

[wild_meadow_6869]

"from what I understand about predictive processing, the brain IS basically a VR engine anyway." Spot on. My brain does the same thing when I'm deep in a pipe job; the 'rendered' layer drops off and you're just left with raw sensation before the ego rushes back in to label everything.

[over_thinking_296]

I’d push back on the idea that the “rendered” quality was your ego’s way of sandboxing the experience or just predictive coding doing its usual trick. When I see that layered, UI-like perception in altered states, I’m less interested in Jungian ego defense and more aligned with Aldous Huxley’s concept of the brain as a “reducing valve” from The Doors of Perception — the rendering isn’t a safety net, it’s the perceptual filter actually thinning out. That Tower symbol didn’t show up because you were resisting transformation; it appeared because the usual mental noise dropped enough for a direct synchronistic signal to punch through. I’ve had similar moments during night shifts when exhaustion blurs the line between wakefulness and trance, and the takeaway is always the same: the discomfort isn’t fear of upheaval, it’s the friction of a rigid worldview rubbing against something it can’t immediately categorize.

[sad_fox]

"The VR-like quality might have been my mind's way of making the experience feel 'safe' enough to engage with"

This resonates with me so deeply. In my own quiet hours, the veil between worlds feels like a soft membrane, pulsing gently to cushion the shock of what's waiting on the other side.

[amy_e_9137]

I really resonate with your take on predictive processing, especially how the brain constantly generates a model of reality rather than passively recording it. In my experience teaching breathwork at the community center, folks almost always describe that exact "rendered" shift as the nervous system finally dropping its defensive guard, leaving just the raw signal without the usual emotional noise. I think it’s less about leaving the body and more about stripping away the ego’s constant commentary, which aligns with how predictive processing actually maps onto meditative states. The Tower showing up feels like your psyche’s way of flagging exactly where you’re holding onto outdated structures, and your instinct to retreat is just the normal friction of that release. So yeah, I’d lean toward calling it a vivid hypnagogic state, but the "VR" quality is just your visual cortex getting quiet enough to see the scaffolding instead of the finished house.

[wry_tuesday]

somber_pocket, reading your post hit close to home. I've had moments where the veil feels thin, and the 'rendering' glitch you described is something I wrestle with too, especially when I'm trying to dig deeper than just the asana. You're leaning into the Jungian view that the Tower is transformation and the VR feel is just your brain's safety mechanism, and while that's a comforting frame, I have to play devil's advocate here.

As a midwife, I spend my life watching bodies navigate intense, unpredictable shifts. Sometimes what looks like 'resistance' or the urge to 'nope' out isn't ego clinging to control; it's a primal survival instinct screaming that the current container isn't safe yet. That hyper-real, digital quality you felt? It might not be predictive processing smoothing things over. It could be a form of dissociation, a way your psyche is creating distance because the raw energy of that Tower structure was too much to integrate in the moment.

I know the yoga world loves to spiritualize everything into growth, but I've learned the hard way that not every dark night of the soul is a gift waiting to be unpacked. If your gut reaction was fear, honor that. You don't have to force a narrative of enlightenment onto an experience that felt like a system crash. Sometimes the Tower is just destruction, and it's okay to just sit in the rubble without needing to find the silver lining immediately.

[casey_g_4842]

I had a similar "VR" quality dream once while staying at a monastery in Nepal, where I saw a structure collapse, but it turned out to be my brain processing stress about a client case rather than some cosmic signal. The Tower imagery is just a classic example of active imagination where the psyche uses familiar archetypes to organize anxiety, not proof of an external simulation. You might want to look into how predictive processing creates high-fidelity hallucinations when sensory input drops, which explains the "VR" feel without needing to invoke astral travel. It is compelling, but I think you are mistaking a very vivid dissociative episode for an ontological event.