Yes they really exist. Some niches pay more like 20k+/mo pretty easily. Consulting at 150/hour isn't that hard. If you want specific advice learn an eCommerce framework really really well or become a deployment specialist for large clusters of JBoss/Weblogic/Websphere.

Just go back to the job that used to pay you $6K/month...

In other words, the consulting jobs exist but they are for "niche markets" - companies hire back their most senior workers on a consulting basis. Also those explicitly trained by SAP and the like at one time could get the bucks. I don't know if that's still true.

A short-term contractor with highly relevant domain expertise can charge 2-3x what the same person would be getting on salary. Finding clients reliably is the real trick of course, I wish I knew that.

$10k/mo is just a decent salary. If you're a good consultant, you're looking at more like $25k/mo. And that's accounting for slack time.