I think one of the number one questions I get about astral travel is how to know if you’re actually astral travelling or if you’re imagining it.

Here’s the secret – there isn’t a way to know, for sure, that you’re not imagining things.

But there is a difference, to some degree. You see, imagination is something you’re creating for yourself whereas the astral and spirit realms exist without us. That being said, dreams and your imagination are somewhat connected to the spirit and astral realms. Your spirit is somewhat connected, after all. You can affect those realms and we can create changes within those realms. It only follows that we can even create those realms with our minds.

We’re more powerful than we know, after all.

But there are ways to make sure that what you’re experiencing isn’t merely made up in your head.

1. Is everything centric to you? We tend to play hero in our own heads. So a good way to tell if you’re making things up is to do a Mary Sue check. Does everyone love you? Does everyone hate you? Do you always succeed? Can you never be hurt or are your injuries easily remedied but seem super serious at the time? You might be making things up if this is true.
2. Can you change form? In the astral and spirit realms, you can shape-shift but it’s fairly rare in your imagination to picture yourself as something else. Oh, it’s extremely common to imagine yourself more (or less) beautiful than you are. The change I’m referring to is turning yourself into a frog or something. Can you do that? Then you’re probably not making things up.
3. Do the people around you live their lives without any thought to you? Spirits have lives of their own to attend to. It’s kind of unusual to daydream yourself in a crowd with no one acknowledging you unless that’s the specific things you’re intending to imagine. Spirits may acknowledge you the same way you acknowledge someone walking by you on the street. That should be the same. If that’s not the case, such as no one paying attention to you no matter what you do or everyone paying attention to you, then you’re probably making it up.
4. Check gravity and physics. Things in the spirit and astral realms don’t operate according to physics and gravity. It’s fairly uncommon to run into this in your imagination without it being purposeful.
5. Are you experiencing time skips? I find that time in the astral and spirit realms is fairly useless. You can live an entire day in the spirit realms but only a few minutes in the physical realm. Conversely, you can sit down to dinner with friends in the spirit realm and find that you’ve lost several hours rather than the twenty minutes you might have expected. That doesn’t happen usually with daydreams.

Bonus: consistency is sometimes hit or miss. With your imagination, you might dream up new and better ways to accomplish the core of the daydream. But with the spirit realms, that probably won’t happen. Things will stay the same. That being said, you can affect the spirit and astral realms, so you might find that things change quickly. It’s very YMMV.

It’s going to be hard to tell the difference at first but with practice, you should be able to pick up on the differences fairly easily after a while. Be patient and good luck!