Two thoughts on two largely unrelated topics:

1. In past threads, some of us discussed why we experienced a severe drop-off in lucid and paranormal dream experiences about 8 years ago. This drop-off is reflected, among other ways, in the very low amount of traffic on this site compared to years past. I've floated various theories for why this has occurred, but here's a new one. There's a saying that "when the guns speak the muses are silent". The current war in Europe, which still has at least the potential of getting much worse, started 8 years ago. Maybe our muses, which from the beginning would have sensed where things are going, have to some degree departed from us because they have been more occupied with the war.

One possible objection to this idea is that there are always wars. For instance, there was a really bad one in the Central African Republic a couple decades ago which most of us mostly ignored. I don't think this completely invalidates the idea though, since we're as individuals more directly connected to some parts of the world than others. Certainly I'm more emotionally connected to the current conflict than I was with past ones, except for maybe the second world war or the one in Bosnia in the late 90's.

2. A characteristic of 'dark matter', as conceived of by physicists, is that it has mass but doesn't appear to interact electromagnetically with other matter. A characteristic of 'astral matter', as conceived of by mystics, is that it interacts with normal matter in a way that's at least somehow analogous to electromagnetic interaction, but it has little to no mass. In other words, something binds it to our physical bodies, but if the gravitational interaction were very strong someone would have been able to demonstrate that by now. I think that whatever 'force' binds the astral body to the physical body must affect the physical body in a way that would be physically measurable though, if a person knew how to distinguish that effect from other more concretely physical effects.