Time slows down = partially leaving the body, or precursor?

[anagogy]

I agree completely. "Leaving the body" is really more of a cognitive distancing from this plane of vibration. Many people think you have to have a sort of terrifying vibrational experience to "separate" but really the vibrational state is just something you experience when you are trying to hold onto the consciousness of the physical world and carry it with you into the higher levels vibration (many parts of that square peg of consciousness don't fit into the round hole of time/space), its like water skiing and then falling and getting dragged along the surface of the water. It's really rough because you are perceiving the resistance and friction between the boundary strength of the water surface/air convergence point. On other hand if you were fully above the water, or fully below it, the resistance is mostly non perceivable. Similarly, when you naturally go to sleep, you seamlessly sink below the surface with no perceptual vibrational experience. It is a far smoother transition into time/space. And if you talk to people who have been consciously projecting for a while, you find that the "vibrational state" upon exiting their body gets less and less rough as time goes on (like a stone in river it begins to wear down the hard edges of thought that create resistance on that plane -- the stone becomes smooth). And if you leave your body via lucid dream state you don't experience it at all, because you have already seamlessly transitioned gently to the new state of consciousness.

My experience has been the further you get away from the physical vibration the more "warped" time becomes. In normal dreaming you are usually not that far away from the physical so the warping is not too bad, but if you get even further away (like during conscious astral projection, and some rare dreams), you might return and feel like an hour had passed but physically it was only about 15 minutes. I can imagine that if you got even further away from our native space/time that time would seemingly stop altogether (relative to the physical world).