Depth: The first tunnel

I did it.  It was spooky.  It was awesome.
             I pulled myself into a deeply meditative trance and I managed to explore my own mind.  Let me tell you about it.
          I began with how I normally self-hypnotize myself, which is totally relaxing my body and chasing away all thoughts by imagining only darkness and a single candle.  This candle is where any thoughts that I have are fed into and then burned, thus clearing my mind.  Soon, I can barely feel my body at all.  Then I float, yes it feels a lot like floating, to a door.  Upon opening this door, I find myself in a large area full of water.  I'm at the top of ten steps.  What's incredible here, is that with every step I take everything that I "see" (even though my physical eyes are closed) and "feel" (even though my physical body is just laying down) starts to become more and more real to me.
           When I reach the fifth step, I begin to enter the water, and let me tell you, it's almost freaky how real it seems.  It feels cool, but not unpleasantly so.  I continue down the steps until I reach the "floor" at this point, the water's only waist deep and I have to fall into it if I want to swim.  I do this and as the water gets deeper I can feel an almost total sense of release.  All my muscles are relaxed and I just float for a bit.
          Even if you're not interested in any self-hypnosis or "mind-searching" I recommend the process I just described for relaxation, cuz man it really works! (for me anyhow)
            Normally, if I were to only try to self-hypnotize, or even just relax, this water is about how far I go into this trance.  Maybe swim around a bit and open things that I find, but it's really just to relax.  Disclaimer: If you do ever try this and get this far, MAKE SURE that you won't have any distractions which will snap you back into your physical body, because it will quadruple your heart-rate for a few seconds and basically defeat any relaxation purposes you had.  It's that deep.
           As it is, I was not here only to release tension, but to explore my mind.  I found out how quickly when I saw a large dark hole, sloping down into who-knows-where, off to the left of the "pool".  Since it's my mind, I imagined up a rope, which would attach to my "ankle" and to an anchor at the top of the hole.  Later on, this proved to be a good idea.  The rope would stretch for however, long I want it to, and would pull myself up when I needed it to, and like this I "swam" into the hole.  The tunnel I entered was dark, but not long, and I soon came up to five more tunnels, a large one going straight, three medium sized ones on the top, left, and right of the large one, and a small one which would only barely "fit" me through.  I began with the one on the left.
       Upon entering, I began to wonder why my mind had chosen all the walls to be black so far.  I went to investigate and was surprised to find out that the black was a coating, and that underneath was silver, which is my favorite color.  Speculating, I realized the black was put there by times of depression, which dulls things I enjoy.  I was kind of down yesterday which is possibly why the entrance was all black, though that's only one theory.  Anyhow, I went down the tunnel (and it did turn more silver) and found that it branched into two more tunnels.  The two tunnels were my perceptions of the future, based upon being accepted to BYU, where I've recently applied.  The choice of "did not get accepted" was completely clogged with confusion, which looks green, twisted, and is not very malleable.  In this case, it completely blocked any entrance to that one tunnel.  The "did get accepted" tunnel had some floating confusion, but I was able to "push" past it and "see" what I thought may become of my future.  I saw, floating around, images of myself going to college, majoring in video editing, going on a two-year mission (something men do in my church when they hit 19, or shortly thereafter) and then returning, getting a degree, getting married, and after that there was nothing, because I guess I'd never thought that far.
         I did explore more, but what I do when I return will be on my next post, because this one's really getting long enough.  I would, however, like to say that it was the most interesting thing to happen, to "see" things which I know must have been created by my mind, but which surprised me anyway.  It was really quite eye-opening, so to speak.  Do I recommend it?  Well, I won't say yes or no, I don't know if everyone can even do it, or if I'm even doing everything right.  It was all experimentation, little to no instruction.  And, although it felt longer, it was all done in a little less than an hour.
             More to come my friends...