Experienced practitioners who astral project daily can distinguish astral projection from regular dreaming. Most people can’t. When they do manage to astral project, they often dismiss it as just another weird dream.
Why do you think there are so many posts where people ask others to interpret their dreams for them? It’s because they don’t recognize the difference between a psychological dream and an out of body experience.
You can actually astral project and lucid dream at the same time. Meaning you can be fully conscious or lucid while your awareness has shifted out of the physical body. To someone who doesn’t know the signs, this combination feels like an especially vivid dream. To someone who does know the signs, it’s a controlled transition where you’re not just watching the dream, you’re navigating the astral environment. And that means you can change scenes at will in your dreams.
This is why discernment matters so much. There is a lot of “advice” floating around about astral projection. Many of the voices you’ll see commenting on astral travel can’t actually project themselves. They repeat second hand ideas, posture as experts, or talk like edge lords to seem impressive without any real skill behind it.
If you’re serious about astral projection, you don’t want to take every comment at face value. You need to pay attention to whether the person shows understanding regarding the subject, not just edgy language. And do look for a testing method, not just some vague mystique.
Everyone who can do it has many testing methods. One simple test I’ve described before somewhere on the forum and still stand by is that you have someone else write a sentence on a piece of paper and hide it anywhere in the house. You must not see what they’ve written. Later on, you deliberately astral project into that room. Locate the paper and read what’s written on it while you are out of body.
When you return to your body, go physically to the paper and check what’s written. If what you saw matches what is on the page, you’ve just proved that you were not simply dreaming, you were perceiving something that exists in the physical world, outside your body.
If you’re just starting, tests like this are how you separate actual astral projection from just another dream. And they are also how you filter the advice you listen to. Again, those who can project will show you a way to verify it and will speak very differently from those who only want to sound powerful but can’t astral project.