Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection, OBEs, etc.

Post Reply New Topic

Anybody practice anything like lucid dreaming, astral projection, out-of-body experiences, et al?

I've been working using Michael Raduga's methods of out-of-body travel, but it's extremely difficult and I've only had one semi-meaningful separation in 7 months. (I've been told I'm an extremely rare case. Typical.) Regardless, I can't stop thinking about the practice and I have high hopes for what I can accomplish using it. There's lots of things I'd like to do "over there," wherever "there" is, but supposedly the possibilities are pretty much limitless.

I can share my experience if you guys like (I'll just copy-paste it from the other forum that I posted it on.) and I highly encourage anybody else that practices similar things to share as well.

I've had two lucid dreams in my life. I'd like to keep having them at will.

If I could get an OOBE, I'd take an astral trip into the space to see if we are alone in there And I'd take a look at some people, also those from WP

I have lucid dreamed a few times, but never really mastered it. Might not. My interests lay elsewhere for now.

I have problems with lucid dreaming, I can't control them though I know it's a dream

Why would you group lucid dreaming with out of body experiences and astral projection?

Lucid dreaming is an actual scientifically studied and accepted concept, whereas the other two are not accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community.

This is not to suggest that things can't be real (or not) based on what the scientific community believes, history is a long road strewn with false beliefs held by mainstream science... but it is very weird to see them clumped together like that.

During the part of my self-study involving the brain's memory storage, I studied dreaming and lucid dreaming.

My conclusion on dreaming is that it is the brain storing short and medium term memories into long term (mostly permanent) memories. Because this involves reforming neural pathways in different formations, it would be quite overwhelming to experience this while conscious, so the brain does it while sleeping. The brain administers drugs to prevent the body from moving, and then simulates the events until they have burned into the brain.

Dreams seem so haywire and random, because many memories are worked on at the same time, thus creating strange connections between otherwise unrelated memories. Think of a collage of recent memories. If you treat your dreams this way, you can easily learn to deconstruct your dreams into individual pieces from your recent memories.

For instance, you might have a scene where you are sitting at a dinner table with Stephen Hawking, your parents, and your cat. The cat is mostly just sitting there looking at you. Stephen Hawking you realise as you look at him, looks like your best friend, but you still know it is Stephen Hawking somehow. There is no food on the table, but know it is dinner time. There seems to be some sort of semi-transparent glowing sword or knife on the table.

In a collage like that, you may have recently been thinking about Stephen Hawking's voice box after seeing a web page that reminded you of him. You may have spent a few minutes the day before looking into your cat's eyes. You think about your parents often because you live with them and see them every day. The glowing knife might have been when you were playing a video game a few days earlier, and thought that you could have made a far better magical sword than the video game has, one that is glowing and translucent. Dinner time because you were often called off the computer to go for dinner by your parents.

When people try to come up with symbolism for dreams, it is all irrelevant. The "symbols" are always just short to mid term memories that haven't been stored yet, all jumbled up together. The eyes on your cat's face might be the eyes of your girlfriend/boyfriend, and it may seem totally normal to you in the dream.

The brain isn't trying to have you analyse what you are seeing, quite the opposite, it is trying to keep your consciousness to a minimum, so that you are not aware of this jumble of memories -- because if you became consciously aware of it, then you would create *new* memories out of this jumble, which would then need to be stored as well. If everyone were aware of their dreams, it would eventually get quite difficult to differentiate between reality and fantasy, it would be pure chaos.

The other important link is that because sleep is the primary time when the brain is able to store long term memories, if you don't sleep enough, your memory will be extremely poor. When I stopped sleeping on a schedule waking up to alarm clocks, it was amazing how much my memory abilities increased.

After studying dreams that far, I realised that I wanted to be conscious while I was asleep, a fully lucid dream. I understood that lucid dreaming is achieved by allowing the body to enter a deep sleep, and then have something pull the dreamer back to reality -- but not so much as to wake them up fully. So the trick is to do something that partially wakes up the consciousness.

The way I decided on to initiate my lucid dreams was one of listening to music each time I slept, but turning it up slightly louder each day. After a month, I was sleeping to music that was blasting the house and making the window panes rattle slightly. It was louder than I normally would listen to music in the middle of the day while wide awake.

But it worked!

I first had a "semi-lucid" dream, and a couple days later I had a fully lucid dream.

The weakest type of lucid dream is where you are aware you are dreaming, but otherwise you can't do anything differently in your dream.

The moderately strong lucid dream is one where you know you are sleeping, and consciously have moderate to full control over your actions in the dream.

A fully lucid dream is one wherein you know you are sleeping -- and most importantly -- you know where your real physical body is. You know which room you are sleeping in. You know what position you laid down to sleep in. You know if anyone else is in the house.

Fully lucid dreams are a lot harder to achieve, but they're simply amazing!

In my semi-lucid dream, I had a very funny conversation with some guys in a crowded street who were wearing Agent Smith style black suits (long before The Matrix came out). I chose all the words I wanted to say to them, including telling them that we were in a dream, so nothing they did mattered. It was quite fun, but I didn't get to choose the setting of my dream or anything like that.

When I had my fully lucid dream, I immediately left the scene I started in, by flying off into the sky, then followed above the road I had started on, in some country hills. Flying dreams and sex dreams are the most enjoyable dreams I have had before, so I decided I would do both, and flew around above the road until I found a cabin in the middle of nowhere, which I either created a woman in, or else just knew there would be a woman in it. I had sex with her, then woke up when the music went from a quiet song to a loud one, and it jarred me awake.

I have had a ton of strange dreams over the years, but that one was definitely the most enjoyable.

I have recently learnt how to control parts of lucid dreams but after a while it turns into a regular dream again.

Has anyone else experienced sleep paralysis?

I had that one time, in the 1990s, it was extremely scary. I fell asleep while very tired after being awake a very long time. I started to have a dream where I was wandering around a shallow river with sand and pebbles everywhere, the water was only up to my knees.

In dreams, I have always had issues with motor control. I can walk, but I can't run. Very frustrating when trying to escape a monster that wants to kill you. Speed walking away instead of running.

For whatever reason, I fell backward into the water, laying on the bottom of the riverbed, looking up through the water at the surface, the sunlight flickering around it. But right as that was happening, in real life an ambulance went by outside on the street, and this partially woke me up. At that point, I was laying under the water, and I could not move, I was going to drown if I took a breath. In real life, my body stopped breathing, as that is the natural reflex when underwater. I became conscious from the ambulance noise, but my body was still pumped full of the chemicals that paralyse the body, so that you don't act out your dreams physically. I was laying in bed, unable to open my eyes, unable to breathe (as I had gotten "frozen" while in the position of laying underwater).

It was horrifying. I started to panic somewhat, not being able to breathe. My logical mind told me that it was no doubt the paralysis chemicals released in my system, and that they would run out, just calm down and try to breathe... and a couple seconds later I was able to.

Had I not been in that underwater position, I would have been breathing normally, and the few seconds where I was frozen would have barely been noticed.

Interestingly, cats use far less of these paralysis chemicals, because they need to wake up at a moment's notice... such as being knocked off a chair while sleeping. So you can see them acting out their dreams much more than humans, paws fluttering around, muscles twitching every which-way.

I get sleep paralysis sometimes, I hate it and it's a really scary experience. I've had it 3 times in a row before.

I didn't do anything.

I've never actually experienced sleep paralysis, but now that I know what it is, I think it would be interesting to try it.

Last edited by SammichEater on 17 Jul 2011, 5:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've mostly mastered lucid dreams. It gets boring after a while.

They all require unusual uses of the brain's semi-wakeful states from what I understand.

I have those on a regular basis. they are always terrifying, pure horror. completely ruin the day that follows. the last two I had were particularly strange: started off as usual and with the usual setting - I'm in my bed, can't move but fully aware of my surroundings. suddenly I hear voices in the kitchen. I *know* it's just a dream but still I'm terrified. somehow I know that the creatures in the kitchen are evil and are about to come and kill or harm me. and now where it got weird the last two times - suddenly I saw and felt that my body was floating over the bed, with my legs higher up, basically diagonally in relation to the bed at something like 45 degree angle. the illusion was so amazingly realistic that I still find it hard to believe that I wasn't actually levitating. if I wasn't that much of a skeptic and just believed my own senses I totally could've been fooled by it, I still remember it clearly.

as to lucid dreaming - it started happening almost the moment I stopped trying for it. I have lucid dreams regularly now but haven't so far been able to direct them in any way. they always start in a similar fashion - something that shouldn't logically happen, happens, for example, I see myself step into a puddle of water yet my feet are not wet. the moment I realise that what I'm seeing flies in the face of the laws of the world as I know it, I know I am in a dream. immediately I start examining the surroundings. and every single time I'm amazed by the detail. everything is just so perfectly created, like even the walls have small scratches and fingerprints and bits of hair from the brush that had stuck to the wall while painting on them. that's actually my favourite part of the lucid dream. unfortunately it never lasts long enough and I either wake up or loose the lucidity. I always remember it really well in the morning though.

agreed about the astral projections and s**t though, it seems so unnecessary to even bring it up in this context.

Out of body experiences? I had what might be described as OBE's from about the age of four. I think they were some sort of very odd waking dream or daydream rather than anything else. I also think they were in response to stress.

At school - aged about 5 or 6 and going through a horrible time at home - sitting near the front of the class listening to the teacher. Then, in a flash, standing at the back of the class looking around. Seeing myself sitting there looking and listening. I'm sitting there knowing that I'm also at the back of the class looking around. I can feel and see the other 'me' looking at me but I was too afraid to look around. Very odd.

At nine or ten in a cinema watching a film with family, then, in a split second, being at the back of the cinema, again looking around. That's a constant. I'm always at the back looking forwards. I'm never in front of my real self and looking backwards. In the cinema, we are 'both' watching the movie. The 'me' at the back is searching for the me at the front and the me at the front knows the other 'me' is standing there looking at me.

I'd have such 'daydreams' about three or four times a year. They stopped when I was about 17/18. Just before I left home for good. I think there's a definite connection between the two. I was a mess when I lived at home. The atmosphere just wrecked me. When I finally got away from my mother's horrible negativity (usually about how much better her life would have been if she'd never met my father and had kids - especially not one as troublesome as me), her constant undermining and her nagging, almost all of my emotional problems and the accompanying stress, disappeared.

Last edited by pratchettfan on 18 Jul 2011, 5:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Lucid Dreaming: Check.
OBE's: Check.
Astral Projection: Check.

I've experienced them all. Its very interesting and I've gained some insight into things through my experiences. What I find is that humanity always wants to explore outer space, and the sea etc, but we should be looking inward and exploring our own minds through various methods such as Lucid Dreaming, AP, OBE's, and other things. (Ayahuasca and Salvia)

When I was in elementary school, and was very tired from lack of sleep, and stressed out from being forced to go to school (which I hated), I had some unusual mergings of sleeping and wakefulness.

At one point, which lasted around a week, I fully believed that I was able to fly. This is because every night I would have intensely realistic dreams of flying through my elementary school... but I would never remember the dreams directly. They were firmly lodged in my subconscious, so for that week I believed I was able to fly, and actually convinced my best friend of this. Finally I had one of the dreams and woke up during it and was able to realise the intensely realistic feeling of being able to fly was that repeating dream. It was happening due to the extreme overload and exhaustion, so my brain was confusing dreams with reality.

Another time, many years later, I had a another of those dreams that I didn't know I had, this one was one of me having a terminal illness. All that day and the next day, I was extremely depressed and feeling so emotionally overloaded and near to crying all the time. Finally I realised that the feeling was coming from a terminal illness -- which I knew I didn't have -- so I convinced my body it didn't need to be all worried, and I relaxed. Sure was a horrible feeling those two days.

This is the same type of thing as when someone dealing with trauma suppresses those bad memories, and they slowly leak out into their subconscious, making them feel things without being able to identify why they are feeling what they feel.

For me, I have always been completely against suppressing any of my feelings, I always acknowledge their cause, purpose and meaning, so their cause can be taken care of and they will naturally fade away. But if a feeling comes in through a suppressed subconscious memory that only the body is experiencing, and not the conscious mind, it can be much harder to identify the cause and release the emotion.