[DJkillos]

Just had the most fun lucid obe experience last night.
Before I went to bed I had done some good night reading from Robert Bruce's
Astral Dynamics. I was reading about lucid dreaming which I have also been
practicing for a while. I was practicing how to turn a lucid dream into an OBE,
by noticing in the dream world that something was wrong and making reality checks.

My reality check in lucid dreaming is pulling my thumb, to see if it react like in the
physical realm or it kind of melts away or extends with the pull.
I have done the same reality check for years so its pretty routine.

Well I went to bed and before long, I somehow got "scared" or some sounds, but
instead of getting up to see what it was, I channeled the fear energy into vibrations
(its a trick i have developed over the years), in order to trigger an OBE.

I felt the energy vibration fairly quickly, like those you normaly have when you experience
"sleep paralysis" and I know this is the time to exit the body. I willed myself to it and realy
got some "muscle" into it, untill i stood up and looked around my bedroom.
It seemed I had used too much will power and had inadvertedly broken the sleep paralysis
and had infact waken up and get out of bed instead of out of my body ;(

I went around my apartment, a bit and then i performed my reality check just by instinct
and nothing happend to my thumb, which told me i was indeed not out of body, but merely
out of bed. "Bummer" I though walking a big back and forth.
Quite impulsively I decided to jump up on my desk in my drawing room. And so I did, quite
impressing myself as i jumped onto it and landed like a feather.
I distinctively remember that when i landed, I made little or no sound.

Ahh well, back to bed I thought and walked towards my bed laying down, no OBE tonight
I thought.

But how wrong I was! In hindsight I can now see that this was infact an obe, only thing is
that it all seemed so real that my mind somehow didnt catch it and the fact that my
reality check didn't work made me even more sure that no OBE had been performed.

The thing that hit me when i later woke up in my bed, and made me laugh, is that
there is no way i can jump onto my desk, straight from the floor and landing on it like
a feather. It was an obe, but everything in it, even the realitycheck thing was so totaly
realy that if not for jumping onto the table like that, I would never have attributed
this activity to an OBE.

I learned a great deal from this and I think form now on i will have an easier time to seperate
from the body in the sleep paralysis state. I always thought that if it over tried, to exit the body
I would wake up somehow. I know now that it was my mind that equipped with this belief,
discounted the whole thing as nothing more than me waking up and walking around in the room
and going back to sleep agian.

Maybe I should adjust my reality check method to jumping instead

Happy OBE'ing
Mreee

[VemyhemiHef]

I don't know if this is common between people that LD for a while, but I think it is- I know that this has happened to me. When you get used to doing reality checks and they become habitual they become part of whatever reality you're in and no longer are effective to distinguish waking life, dreamtime or out of body experiences- I think this is partly due to thinking of OBE/dreamtime as another form of reality- so we don't think of it as 'unreal' anymore, just 'another' type of real, and this 'tricks' us.
I know I have this sort of problem- when I enter a different reality I know it's not waking life but I don't know it's dreamtime- it just becomes 'real' somewhere else.
I'm not sure how to counteract this, if you figure it out let me know.

[PRengine]

Just some thoughts...



This business of accepting the 'other' reality as just an-other reality rather than challenging that 'other' reality as an explorer in a strange land hadn’t really come into focus until recently - not until I had the experience of a ‘mini OBE’ did I really get it. At that point I basically caught myself in the act - red-handed - if you will. Naturally I wondered if there might be a way to signal myself out of the presumption that being OB in my house was not out of the ordinary.

I think this is basically the conundrum CF is pointing to - whatever devise we might adopt to determine our status - awake real world vs asleep ‘other’ world - will ultimately if not immediately become natural and ordinary to the other world experience. Recently I enjoyed an extended dream of ‘flying’ which should be signal enough that I was dreaming but I was enjoying it too much to challenge the ‘reality’. Suppose you’re in the theater watching a movie and just as the action comes to its climax someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “You’re watching a movie. Come, I’ll show you the projector.” what’s going to be your reaction? Probably something like, “I KNOW I’m watching a movie and please don’t bother me right now.”

This is the line of logic that the vast majority of us the majority of the time are witness to. Wake anybody up during REM sleep and they’ll tell you they were dreaming. If it were possible to ask them if they’re dreaming without waking them up they might become lucid, answer with a distracted “yes”, and just keep on dreaming in a please-don’t-bother-me sort of way.

Some time ago I became lucid to the extent that I asked myself the question. Standing on a high ledge I wondered if I could jump; ‘yes’ dreaming, ‘no’ not dreaming. I thought about it for some time and unable to satisfy myself one way or the other I turned and continued walking down the road. Later I stole a sailboat from a restaurant and sailed it across the desert. I did quite a few things that can only be done in dreamland but for the duration of this remarkable dream the question remained irrelevant.

This, IMO, is lucid dreaming and is such a fantastic campus for personal growth that if one’s spiritual path had taken him that far, it is warranty enough against any fears of death and so much more.

And then I had my mini OBE and everything changed. For a moment I caught myself simply ‘being’ without the movie. I’ve astrally projected to scenes where I knew I was a mere observer, a visitor before, but even that was dreamland. For the most part (aside from flying occasionally) I accepted the usual laws of gravity, solidity, distance, time etc., but that moment when I caught myself (naughty boy) sitting on the couch, on or in my own sleeping torso, smoking my pipe, I understood with certain clarity what the near-earth OBE was about and what a different world it is from anything I had previously experienced.

Now, back to the real question, the one mree and CF were considering; how can we signal ourselves into the recognition that this is ‘not awake’ and ‘not a dream’ but a totally different situation. For me, it was the display of the fire in my pipe reflecting on the glass panes of the french doors - it was just too fantastic to be real world which triggered my consciousness to think about what was going on.

I’ve been thinking in my imagination of making a blinking neon sign that says “Otherworld”, and placing it over the doors of my bedroom and study - that it would have an astral/etheric reality and I would see it during my exits during the night.

Pretty silly, huh. But then again, would I simply accept it as normal - what could be the equivalent of a dancing pipe-coal in the glass?

[Liaptoono]

Hey, Ritch.

You raise some valid points here. Especially the one with the "don't wake me now" logic. It's possible to be kind of aware that you are dreaming and yet not become fully lucid to it. It might change the quality of the experience you have, be a bit more in the background, you even might become lucid for a short while, then fade back.

It all has to with habits of perception. I nearly typed that this comes due to this: "Accepting the reality one is perceiving." But that might lead to wrong assumptions from my point of view - I'll qualify it a bit better: "Accepting the reality one is perceiving unquestioningly." You can jump on a skyscraper with that "attitude" and not notice anything unusual. You can find a dinosaur in your bedroom and find a "reasonable explanation" for that. I used to call this "dream logic," but maybe "non-lucid logic" would be better. It runs with whatever the senses perceive and tries to come up with rationalisations to justify the reality it encounters.

I'm not sure what can be done to overcome this tendency, but viewing waking reality through the lens of symbolism can be helpful, in my opinion. I think it takes one to a higher state of processing than usual and might help becoming lucid as well, I assume. I think it helps you to tap what you usually so sorely miss in non-lucid dreams - context! The dinosaur, the sky-scraper jumping - they are out of context. Trying to put them in any kind of context that makes sense would make you run into contradictions. Because when decoding a symbol you reach out to all kinds of connections - and you just might realise something in the process that helps you get lucid.

Even if not, your dreams will at least make more sense. I'd say your waking life and spontaneous OBEs as well.

Cheers,
Oliver