I had gone to bed early, a little after 8:00 PM. I was unable to project consciously and fell asleep. I woke up around 1 or 2 AM, and not wanting to wake my wife, got up for a while and went back to bed at 4:00, drifting off to sleep. At some point I heard a crashing noise coming from some other part of the apartment. I got up and headed for the door, and as I got to it, it dawned on me that I was out of my body. Now, at this point, I would describe my level of awareness as like that in lucid dreams I have had, except that this experience lasted much longer than any of my lucid dreams. The main difference here being that in a lucid dream, at some point I think “well, what do you know, this is a dream!†but this time it was more of “Well what do you know I am out of my body.†It was very vivid and realistic, and like I said, comparable in clarity to lucid dreams I have had, maybe slightly more so at points.