States of Consciousness

The lucid state of dreaming is the skill of transporting one's consciousness into a realm in which one deals with a seemingly material environment that is perceivable by 5 human senses, yet bares zero material consequence. I like to call it the Eureka! Sex Time! realm. Most people (including myself) that happen to get there immediately throw off their clothes and start trying to hump the characters that happen to be within reach or sight. Occasionally it's cool to just float instead of walk places or fly around like a gnarly eagle person, but even still the flight usually ends in the molestation of some person generated by the ability the subconsciousness has to create an environment that is unknown. This Realm can be utilized is a playground to live out desires, learn their outcome, and satisfy material cravings without accepting material consequence, but is not to be confused with the Realm(s) of Astral Travel.
The best way to learn to do this if one has not experienced it yet or has trouble inducing it, as I have found, is to make several-times-daily reality checks involving quick musing over generally accepted aspects of Earth during this perceivable manifestation of time such as the sky still being blue, trees are still rooted in the ground, governments still demonstrating convoluted and ill-intentional control over its' people, etc. Soon the consciousness, lying parallel to the subconsciousness, will have been trained to do this compulsorily; and the realization to question one's environment will grant access to the consciousness we have developed on our material Earth plane. I haven't yet figured out how to use lucid dreaming as a springboard into astral travel, which is the exploration of a different Realm all together, but I have heard tales of others experience with this.
Astral travel, according my unfortunately limited experience of it, requires learning to function in a body that does not perform best like the material Earth body does. It usually starts for me with what I feel to be a replica of my body floating out of or getting up to walk out of my material body. The environment looks to be infinite black space overlapping with the Earth environment (items in the room will be suspended there, a comforting inclusion indeed) with a widely spaced white grid "floor" that is both near and far and at first glance available to walk on. At this point, walking can be difficult, like walking through mud. It is common for me to turn around after encountering this difficulty, see my body which has been used as a portal to this vast unknown dimension, and become sucked and locked back within it. I believe this Realm holds more potential by means of access to knowledge about our materially cosmic home that isn't readily available on Earth, according to discussions I've had with people that have also had OBE's (out of body experiences). Bernard, my life-drawing teacher from college, used to talk of having astrally traveled to Mars with a "guide" and seeing pyramids there. He was also apparently offered by three giant floating faces the answers to several questions, the answer to the last being a static screen field of vision with a piercing tone of E when asked to "see" "God". Some plant matter on Earth has the capability of transporting the consciousness into a new state, one by which Shamans administer in many places in the world as a religious beverage meant to induce communication with spirits or awareness of realms usually not perceivable in our third dimensional state, as a teaching process. This is a state that is claimed to also be reachable through the process of meditation.
I feel lucid dreaming and astral travel are rites granted to beings that have elevated their consciousness (or are in the process thereof) outside of the spectral material "good" and "bad" linear illusion of reality as being the only truth. Happy reality-checking!

Cash