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Since it's not one size fits all like you said, I'll give you my take on it as well. I utilize my energy work for lucid dreaming/projection work specifically, but it bleeds over into every other aspect of your life.

After initially finding out about these things when I was younger, I voraciously consumed research, annotated a progress journal, practiced exit and trance techniques, tried more methods of energy raising meditations.

During that initial binge I was doing at least 3 full cycles of chakra raising meditation 3 times a day: in the morning after I woke up, at night before beginning my trance inductions/techniques before bed, and during the ten or so minutes i'd be awake after doing the "Wake after 4h Back to Bed" technique.

I was able to have my first wake-induced lucid dream in 9 days, and amazing experience after amazing experience followed.

FOR ENERGY-RAISING TO THE CHAKRAS

I've found the most effective basic chakra raising meditation for myself is:

1. Inhale through the nose, out through the mouth
   
   
2. Root yourself and pull energy from the Earth (or just your lower body) on the inhale and bring it to a chakra, exhale through the mouth and let it absorb into that chakra.
   
   Do this 6x for base chakra, 3x for sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, and third eye, and 2x for crown. That's one full cycle.
   
   3 full cycles is a good meditation, more is better, but even 1-2 will center you.
   
   I've found doing consistent energy work to probably be the most important supplement outside of a dream journal for projection work. When doing energy work, I try to use tactile imagery rather than pure visualization if possible.
   
   In my experience, when your energy body is "buff" it's easier to fall into trance, dreams/projections tend to be more vivid and concrete, for some reason it's easier to have inadvertent lucidity moments -- it just kind of greases up the progress wheel.
   
   

   FOR INDUCING THE MIND-AWAKE BODY-ASLEEP STATE (Trance)
   

   
   Trance is one of the most important states for having experiences, meditative or beyond. Inducing it takes diligent practice over time.
   
   I personally like a basic Focus-10 meditation (Robert Monroe).
   
   I utilize a binaural track 50% of the time.
   
   

3. Relax. Close your eyes. Clench-and-release all your muscles starting with your feet all the way up to your head. Afterwards relax and focus on your breath.
   
   
4. Use an energy conversion box: Visualize a big chest/box, and put all your worries/desires/physical sensations inside of it, then shut the lid. Feel it convert them all into energy and fuel you. Since physical sensations are in the box, any time you have an itch or have to shuffle while relaxing later on fuels your attempt rather than distracts you.
   
   
5. Inhale through the nose pulling good energy up to your crown, exhale through your mouth with a guttural hum ("ummmmmm') expelling stale negative energy out. Do this for about a minute or so. Relax and breathe through your nose normally.
   
   
6. Feel the energy you pulled into your head rising off the top and forming a bubble around you as it cascades to your feet, then recycles back through you. Visualize this energy shield as only allowing positive energy in.
   
   
7. Breathe slowly, relax. Count your breaths up to ten, with each each count pulling you deeper into relaxation. You can do what works for you, but I like:(count 1) face relaxes (c2) jaw and neck relax (c3) let that feeling of relaxation sink deeply into the brain (c4) starting with feet and working up to the head on (c10), make the rest of your body feel like your increasingly relaxed brain.
   
   There we go. Now you're at a 10 count. This is a great starting point for trying to relax deeper into trance. You might not get into trance every time, but these techniques become more powerful with repetition.
   
   

   How I personally practice Kundalini Yoga
   

   
   I simply practice using Maya Fiennes 'Journey through the Chakras' daily yoga sessions for chakra raising. They're available online if you look hard enough.
   
   Kundalini energy is very visceral and feels completely different from normal energy work.
   
   I know I dumped a lot on you, but I love sharing my experiences with these types of things. There is so much more to this world than most people acknowledge.

The book that really got things started for me is the Autobiography of a Yogi. The group he founded is called Self Realization Fellowship who have carried on his mission of teaching powerful yoga techniques of meditation. I can certainly testify that their techniques work very well, and they have plenty of meditation groups around the world.

So if you like what I have written you can check to see if there is a local center of that group. However there are all kinds of groups out there.

What kinds of spiritual groups do you resonate with? Christian? Jewish? Hindu? Buddhist? Native American?

You can use meetup.com to find local mediation or spiritual groups, or find a metaphysical bookstore to find groups of like-minded people that get together. Then find the individuals that seem to 'glow' and are positive and lovely people and find out where they go for spiritual strength and support and training.

Then always check to see how you feel after you leave any person or group of people -- you should feel uplifted, joyful, buoyant, cheerful.

A group of people gathered in a place like a church should have a tangible uplifting atmosphere that takes you up out of your problems and makes you feel energized and positive.

Once you find a group that you like, you want to use the power of their community space plus a personal daily practice of connecting to the Divine within to really accelerate your growth.

If you keep asking around and making it clear what you are looking for, you will find individuals that will speak up. There are many like me that are passionate about this kind of thing, and there is plenty of power out there if you will look and start to open your 'spiritual eyes' and pray for guidance.

The Divine exists within you as you, so you will find plenty of inner help if you ask within and don't doubt and create static to mess up your answers. Just ask with faith and trust that you will be guided and you will, slowly but surely, even though you may make mistakes along the way.

I don't want to be too specific with my recommendations because you will have your own unique set of circumstances that will really resonate with you. However the principles will stay the same.

Edit:

IF your senses are strongly focused on material plane, as is the case with many people, you may not get seemingly strong results or a strong sense of light/upliftment. If your physical eyes are closed, a strong physical light may show up as rather dim. Likewise if your spiritual eye is closed, then a strong spiritual light may similarly show up dimly to you.

However just as the sunlight shows up very faintly in the first dim glow of dawn, if you follow that light it will keep getting stronger and stronger until you get full daylight. The same thing applies with spiritual practices. You may think you are not getting much of a result in most cases, but you are seeing the very subtle first rays of dawn. So if you only get a little peace, or only a little joy, or only a little love or upliftment, don't discount those results but treasure them instead. Just like tiny gold flakes will indicate a mother lode of gold nearby, tiny spiritual results will
Indicate great spiritual returns if you keep seeking and working and praying -- developing your spiritual abilities takes great time and patience -- but it is worth all that investment because nothing else will give you that kind of lasting and powerful results.

it's always interesting to me that quite consistently people see female beings/spirits/whatever wearing white. you didn't say whether your father felt this being to be male or female, but i am assuming there was a long gown, to make him think it was a nun.

from 'the field guide to little people':
>"the White Women of Northern Europe fulfill many of the same functions as the local fertility elves of southern Europe ...
like the korrigans and the fees, they have been associated with the old pagan priestesses ...
>"the white women are helpful and generous towards humans ...help travelers find the right road, change flowers and stones into precious amulets, aid women in childbirth, make cows produce more milk, foretell the future, lessen the fury of storms ...
>"despite their generous natures, they can be easily angered by cruel, or ungrateful men ...
>"often seen near sacred groves ..."

• the boldface is my own emphasis, also i'm using an older edition than the one cited here on amazon.
  
  
• nuns and convents are the remnants of an older priestess order. this would be particularly true in ireland.
  
  
• an orchard is a kind of a sacred grove, though like a roman catholic convent, much diluted. apples in particular are sacred in celtic belief.
  
  
• my guess is that your father and his chums, through no fault of their own, acted in a way that overrode the sacredness of the space, and did not exhibit the kind of gratefulness for the gift of the apples that the white lady would have liked to have seen.
  
  
• when you (or anyone) are not appreciated or acknowledged, it is like you don't exist and you fade a little. perhaps what seems like an over reaction on the part of the white lady is in fact because she is in a fight for her continued existence in these modern times.
  
  if you haven't already, you might very much enjoy 'The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries: The Classic Study of Leprechauns, Pixies, and Other Fairy Spirits' by wy evans-wentz the version i just highlighted has it for free on kindle. it is well well well worth the effort of reading. very long. can't remember if it specifically discusses white ladies. i doubt it. but it will discuss the tuatha de danaan, the great race of original irish beings from whom all true fairies are descended. the tuatha are shining white beings of great size, great age, and great power and are felt by many in celtic countries to be angels trapped for a variety of reasons on earth.
  
  edited to add: just noticed you said your town was noted for stories of bean sidhes. 'bean sidhe' just means 'woman fairy' and have the three aspects of 'maiden mother crone'. again, they all wear white. and they are believed to be the closest to the original tuatha de danaan
  
  
  
  
  

Hey, I've never commented or anything in this sub, but your post caught my eye. I (like many redditors) consider myself a member of the skeptics community, and I mostly subscribe to this sub b/c these stories are fun to read around halloween time. The one book that I cannot recommend highly enough is James Randi's "Flim Flam". Randi is kinda considered the grandfather of the modern skeptic movement, he's an awesome dude, super nice, super funny, super smart, and this book does a great job of explaining all kinds of popular superstition from psychics to alternative healing. here's the link to the book on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Flim-Flam-Psychics-Unicorns-Other-Delusions/dp/0879751983/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373087973&sr=1-1

but also you can check out his site randi.org or watch some of his youtube videos. Penn and Teller's show "Bullshit" also covers a lot of these topics, videos of which are also on youtube. I'm actually very much into these topics so let me know if you have any other questions or anything.

Cheers

I think you might find better advice on /r/Meditation or /r/Buddhism. Actually, the best thing you can do if you plan to continue meditation is to find a real teacher. It's possible to get started with meditation on your own, but to make real progress, you're going to need to spend at least some time with a teacher.

Some schools of meditation would tell you that your experiences, while unusual, aren't any more important or any more or less real than your experiences working or studying or browsing reddit, and that it's important not to be seduced by the exotic. In other words, whether those experiences and those beings are "real" or not isn't really an important question; it's just something else to let go of.

Other schools would say that intense concentration allows you to both see things that you normally can't see and to mentally travel to realms you normally can't visit. Some schools even cultivate these experiences, which are variously called the siddhis, the Divine Eye/Divine Ear, and a bunch of other terms I'm too lazy to look up right now.

Another relevant angle would be found in The Progress of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw (specifically section VI). This is an explicitly Buddhist approach that delineates the levels of insight that lead to the four stages of enlightenment. The Mahasi text is a hard slog if you're not familiar with Buddhist terminology already, but there's an easier-to-understand, though somewhat controversial, modern treatment written by Daniel Ingram called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.

A teacher in the Mahasi tradition, then, might tell you that this was an Arising-and-Passing-Away event, which signals the beginning of the spiritual path in earnest. Of course, the teacher might also tell you it was just a dream (and certainly wouldn't tell you anything at all based on just an internet post :) ).

Arising-and-Passing-Away is usually followed by all kinds of unpleasantness, all of which is considered necessary for mental purification. St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul is considered the best exposition of this process from a Western Christian perspective.

So, yeah. If you're determined to keep at this, it's probably best to find a teacher.

Pick up mathematics. Now if you have never done math past the high school and are an "average person" you probably cringed.

Math (an "actual kind") is nothing like the kind of shit you've seen back in grade school. To break into this incredible world all you need is to know math at the level of, say, 6th grade.

Intro to Math:

1. Book of Proof by Richard Hammack. This free book will show/teach you how mathematicians think. There are other such books out there. For example,
   
   

• How to Prove It: A Structured Approach by Daniel Velleman
  
  
• Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics by Gary Chartrand et al
  
  
• Discrete Mathematics with Applications by Susanna Epp
  
  These books only serve as samplers because they don't even begin to scratch the surface of math. After you familiarized yourself with the basics of writing proofs you can get started with intro to the largest subsets of math like:
  
  Intro to Abstract Algebra:
  
  
• Linear Algebra: Step by Step by Singh
  
  
• Abstract Algebra: A Student-Friendly Approach by the Dos Reis
  
  
• Numbers and Symmetry: An Introduction to Algebra by Johnston/Richman
  
  
• Discovering Group Theory: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics by Barnard/Neil
  
  
• A Friendly Introduction to Group Theory by Nash
  
  
• Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler
  
  There are tons more books on abstract/modern algebra. Just search them on Amazon. Some of the famous, but less accessible ones are
  
  
• Algebra: Chapter 0 by Aluffi
  
  
• Algebra by Maclane/Birkhoff
  
  
• Algebra by Lang
  
  
• Advanced Linear Algebra by Steven Roman
  
  Intro to Real Analysis:
  
  
• The Real Analysis Lifesaver: All the Tools You Need to Understand Proofs by Grinberg
  
  
• Understanding Analysis by Abbot
  
  
• Writing Proofs in Analysis by Kane
  
  
• The Lebesgue Integral for Undergraduates by Johnston
  
  Again, there are tons of more famous and less accessible books on this subject. There are books by Rudin, Royden, Kolmogorov etc.
  
  Ideally, after this you would follow it up with a nice course on rigorous multivariable calculus. Easiest and most approachable and totally doable one at this point is
  
  
• Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach by the Hubbards
  
  At this point it's clear there are tons of more famous and less accessible books on this subject :) I won't list them because if you are at this point of math development you can definitely find them yourself :)
  
  From here you can graduate to studying category theory, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, more advanced texts on combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, complex analysis, probability, topology, algorithms, functional analysis etc
  
  Most listed books and more can be found on libgen if you can't afford to buy them. If you are stuck on homework, you'll find help on [MathStackexchange] (https://math.stackexchange.com/questions).
  
  Good luck.

Sure. :) I was trying not to hijack the thread, but I'll just put the list here and that way anyone can have it. Keep in mind, these aren't all collections of stories, some of them are research topics, but none of them that I've browsed through look like bad reads. The ones I have read I've tried to note.

Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People - Michael Bastine, Mason Winfield - most closely related to thread topic

Life After Life - Raymond Moody - Very good intro to Near Death Experience research

Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones - Raymond Moody

Journey of Souls - Michael Newton - Read this one, it was great, changed my views on reincarnation

The Day Satan Called - Bill Scott

Hunt for the Skinwalker - Colm Kelleher, George Knapp - read parts of, need to finish

The Vengeful Djinn - Rosemary Ellen Guiley - I've read this one, it's really good too, has a large "slow" section in the middle that quotes the Q'uran a lot, but some good creepy Djinn stories.

The Djinn Connection - Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Ghost Culture: Theories, Context, and Scientific Practice - John Sabol

Zones of Strangeness - Peter A. McCue

Lost Secrets of Maya Technology - James O'Kon

The Mythology of Supernatural - Nathan Robert Brown - this one might sound cheesy, but I've read a book on world mythology by the same author, and apparently the writers of the show did their research

Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not-So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night - Gary Jansen

What you described sounds like an interesting way for a spirit friend of yours to help you out in life. It's possible that some assistance in crucial moments was necessary to ensure your path unfolds as planned. Apparently, your protector has a flair for appearing to you dramatically.

Chances are that the armor is just his personal choice, the role in which the friend wanted to present himself to you this time. Maybe it symbolizes a history the two of you share, or maybe it's armor he wore in an incarnation he enjoyed living.

If he said goodbye, chances are that his role in your life is indeed over, and you won't be seeing him again. Your life is yours to live. It's likely you'll see him again on the other side. :)

You probably don't need to research this further, but if you want to, I recommend this and this.

Honestly, the best evidence and narrative defending the paranormal has been compliled lovingly into this easy to read book:

https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Worrying-There-Probably-Afterlife-ebook/dp/B00GBLRNTS

It covers a wide range of topics and is impeccably researched, regardless of its goofy title.

I find anything done for video/tv/movies is sensationalist, driven entirely by a profit incentive, mostly dishonest, and frankly - pretty stupid.

There's the nineteenth century school of spiritualism that has a lot to say and describes a system like you're asking for.

Then you have the entire world of nde's and everything they describe, which is mostly judgment and reincarnation. Life after life is good place to start or ian stevensons books.

Then you have hypnotic regression and the whole Michael Newton school of thought.

Then you have plain Jane religion, especially Buddhism, especially the esoteric stuff like the Tibetan book of the dead.

Personally, the best book on this subject I've read on this subject is this and it touches of most of the above. I suggest you check it out as a starting point and work your way from there:

https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Worrying-There-Probably-Afterlife-ebook/dp/B00GBLRNTS

Really interesting book Iv been reading on the ufo phenemenon and their relation to the religious experience. This sounds related. https://www.amazon.com/American-Cosmic-UFOs-Religion-Technology-ebook/dp/B07LFL7QMG/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3IU8IAOYTWCDS&keywords=american+cosmic&qid=1564937624&s=gateway&sprefix=american+co%2Caps%2C146&sr=8-2