yeah this is one monster topic! In fact i dunno where to even start...
First of all i just wanted to say that i had a great reading with your posts and that i hope that i will be at the same level...
My starting point of all this is the extra-body experience:
for me, especially when you're taking psychoactives, the extra-bpdy experience is more of a INTRA-body experience, i think it's the unconscious that is simply let loose in some way or another. I found that quite of a suggestive idea with the thought of the unconscious as a chaotic cauldron where perceptions, expereinces, thoughts, images, personal time-cause relations, mnestic patterns, some sort of idea of spirit identity, ecc... are all mixed up, similarly to Freud concept of unconscious, and from which we can obtain experiences which may positively or negatively influence your life. I'm saying this without having done high doses of 'shrooms like some of you did, so i never actually experienced the "out-of-body" sensation, but i kinda formed my idea...
There tons of examples i could give but i'll simply tell you a few anectodes.
First of all, the dream state. There are many forms of dreaming, lucid, normal, hypnosis (sort of), and once i kinda experienced (sober) this weird state of being in between dreaming and reality; i remember clearly that i could clearly see the surroundings of my bedroom, but not only i couldn't grip the continuous thoughts and images that i personally did'nt create or WANT TO create but at a sort of point i was trying to say "help" but i simply couldn't... I wasn't in control and i was scared; you simply can't control a matrix as vast and complex as the unconscious, for us he's a sort of teacher that can transmit useful things but can also punish the ignorance or arrogance of his pupils.
Similar thing happened when i had 2.5 grams dried of mexican mushrooms, i had these short-term visuals, but most of all i couldn't define thoughts. Let me explain this, i was listening to some music and i tried to direct my thoughts in creating a mental image of a band playing that music, but i couldn't... I was continuosly redirected somewhere else like thoughts of colors, people, situations. All this not in a negative sense, but positive: i was contemplating the unconscious in one of his forms.
Regarding our surrounding world:
i don't personally believe much that we're part of a dream, in a tight sense, because that would mainly mean that everything is a product of our unconscious, so in a certain way if we had control of our or of THE unconscious we would bend reality. That wouldn't explain the role of dreaming and psychedelic states, except if not as "clues" of the true nature of reality. I think they're more than just that. I sometimes have the sensation that they can touch us better in the soul.
In fact i believe in the existence of a uber-reality, a metaphysical plane. But not in strictly outer-world sense as paranormal phenomena, ghosts or anyting "not human", but in the sense of a "gathering of souls"... I think that the soul exists and one example is the power of music. Music touches your soul, if you think a piece of music is nothing more than a physical phenomenon, the repetition of sounds and at certain pitches and with certain tones, but how the notes collide and create along with other things a piece of music in its entirety with its own very soul is fascinating because music seems to touch us all in different ways...
Take techno-music for instance: once i thought that they were far away of being considered proper music because most of the time the instruments weren't even played by people but by computers, so they couldn't have soul since there wasn't the soul of the player behind it. But growin' up i found that i was only fossilized to this idea: listen to "mescaline" of 1200 mics for instance; the music is really simple and the riffs and chords are the same, but the way the main rythm attacks and the music in its integrity makes this a very driving piece of music...
Not only this nut i think there will always be a metaphysical plane: in fact imagine that in a far future we find the theory, equation behind the universe or how it originated or even... a theory that's the proof of God's existence! If we stopped at this we would never understand why the theory is like this or the soul behind which solving this theory/equation the universe originates.
Timetravel:
this is one hell of a topic, since it can be seen in so many ways and there's still so much talk about it! I sincerely don't have a clue if it will be possibile, i can say that it is possible in the unconscious since laws of space-time and all other laws of logic aren't valid since any experience or image lives in the unconscious in a dimension of non time and non space and simply think how we can easily be projected to the past or have what we might think is a glimpse of the future in certain trips.
But once i thought while i was studying nietzsche: what if, for instance, all that is happening, has happened and will happen is all part of a unique phenomena, time fragment and so it's still evolving and so actually there's no time at all, it's all a unique moment, and time as we concieved it is just a way to help us cope and give reality a scheme to follow?
If that would be possible, we could find in a analysis of this fragment (the whole humanity's history plus this very moment?) the traces of the future and predict what will happen similarly to what nietzsche thought with the concepy of "eternal comeback", saying that what happened in the past and what's happening now are or will be the repetition of certain situations that the "ubermensch" can understand and be conscious of, understanding what will happen in the future so time will have no significance for them...
Sorry for the long post, i have much other stuff in mind but i don't want to bore you; thanks for reading!