Hi. Thanks for sharing these extremely interesting personal experiences. I have had a fair number of strange experiences with lucid dreaming and related phenomena myself over the years and wanted to get your opinion on a theory I have on a related subject.
Basically, my idea is that the "astral planes" are the consciousness of the Earth, like a vast sea of her thoughts and dreams. More specifically, the often overwhelming nature of what is encountered is a function of the fact that the Earth's consciousness encompasses our own. What I mean to say is that her thoughts are the source of what Jung called archetypes, overarching symbolic motifs that turn up in our most intense dreams. Thus, some astral experiences can be heavenly while others seem to be visits to some version of hell -- because all of these possibilities exist in human consciousness, modeled after all the those that exist in the much greater mind of the Earth.