I have seen this too. And it also happens to my astral self when my conscious mind is occupied with the materium. It’s animated when I project… and likewise I have a friend I have visited in the astral, and it’s like their form is fully catatonic, they are not a mage and don’t meditate, journey or anything like that, the ability has never been exercised.
Worse than that I found it covered in layers of crap, artifacts of memory that manifested as stress and overreacting and overthinking things in their life. Clearing the junk off them had an immediate effect in the physical and they became calmer and less reactive. But they didn’t ‘wake up’.
So my thoughts on this so far are:
You are only really using one vessel at a time, when you’re projecting it’s your astral form and your physical form is sitting unresponsive to the physical, and vice versa.
My analogy is, it’s like a car, that has been loaded onto a ferry: it’s not doing anything when the ferry is crossing the waters, then you get back in the car and drive off the ferry, and the ferry is now doing nothing for you… so to an extent I think it’s normal for many incarnates that have one conscious mind, with these multiple stacked vessels like we do and with this deep distraction into the physical to be only able to consciously animated one at a time.
But as your friend found out we also have multiple minds, and the astral form can communicate on it’s own. It was I suspect your subconscious that was talking to her.
The way to fix this is to develop a stronger communication with your subconscious, then it can tell your conscious mind “hey we got a question coming in over here”, and then you can consciously contribute to the communication event. This approach to psychic ability comes from remote viewing a la Ingo Swann.
This sounds like a different problem. Getting zapped is unusual and begs the question, who’s doing this zapping, what’s that about? I would try a divination to look into this.