This is amazing. I regret not having arrived at time to upvote this, but I can give you this !tip (besides, my vote's value is insignificant).
I can say that I have experienced inner travels similar to this one, and it's always a wonderful mystery that I'm still trying to solve: Was it an intense lucid dream or something else?
It is possible that there are several kinds of lucid dreams, depending on the strength of the lucidity, the activation of certain processes in the chemistry of our brains and many other factors. Or maybe the OBE are completely separated from the processes that characterize the lucid dreaming.
However I'm suspecting more and more, with each new experience, that the OBE, the lucid dreaming, the shamanic journeys and even the common dreams are just different manifestations of the same reality inside us.
In lucid dreams I have seen things that later that day become a reality, and then I wonder if our dreams are not just personal experiences, limited to our own bodies, but that there are many factors of the outside world that really participate in our oneiric perceptions.
I suspect this: there is a permanent connection we have, as individuals, with the whole universe, through that common source that we call collective unconscious, anima mundi and otherwise. When our conscious bonds with the outside world are weak, we get closer to that connection.
We can experience that connection through a vision while we are still awake, or through a dream, a symbolic story that is made of personal images, related to our lives. We can live that also in a lucid way, by creating the context of that story willingly; or instead we can just explore a representation of the real world (as in a OBE).
In fact, for Schopenhauer and Jung, the world is just a representation, and it is different in the eyes of a human than for animals. And it is different also when we come to another state of mind. So, for me, it's perfectly possible that you saw the real world in your experience, but it was another representation of it.
I think these are transcendent and important questions that deeply enrich our lives. That's why the inner live of an oneironaut may be so ecstatic and rich! It's the capacity to live that other life whose existence most people don't even know.
But I think that it's more important to experience all these things, than to understand them. The more we live them, the more we understand, but seems like we'll never understand everything about it, not intellectually. The real understanding of this realm of life, is a mystic understanding, that sublime shifting that we call enlightenment.
You just got me going through my memories. I recall one of my friends asking me to shuffle a deck of cards, pull one out and put it on the wardrobe without looking at it. Then he went to sleep and the next morning he asked me (while still laying in bed, and yes I slept at his house) to check if the card was four of spades.
To my surprise it turns out that the card was indeed the four of spades. I couldn't believe him at first, but he told me that he had a camera in the room because of his sleepwalking. We checked it and he was in his bed the whole time.
I guess it would be improbable to randomly guess one out of 52 cards so I asked him and he said something like you before!
Btw, thank you for the tip and for such abundant comment! All the best!
Great! This is a very rich inner world.
You made me remember the Rhine-Jung experiments. I just found this about them, I think it will be interesting to you.