If you decide to follow the advice in the SOBT ebook, you should not attempt to do any "noticing" or "meditating" or Monroe tapes or binaural beats sessions or anything like that. Just try the indirect techniques 3-4 times a week, not even every day.

The reason behind this is that it takes some considerable motivation (conscious and subconscious) to be able to perform these actions reliably upon waking, and if you are trying it every day, or even spending time with other approaches in the evening, you are spreading yourself rather thin and it becomes very difficult to place the correct motivational emphasis on waking up without movement and trying the techniques.

Kind of like going to work every day and telling yourself "today I'm going to work extra hard!" Just not possible...

AstralBeginnings, can you please post back to this thread in a week or so and let us know if what you learned during that experience has actually helped you to project more reliably?

I have occasionally meditated on psychotropics and it seemed to come very easily to me, and I always felt afterwards that I had learned a new technique or approach that would make it very easy to reach the same deep state later on. It usually didn't work that way, although it is difficult to tell because these things are very subjective.

Anyway, I'd be very interested to know if this was indeed a useful experience for your long-term aspirations or if it was just a nice foray.

The instructional ebook called SOBT is completely free and available for download at obe4u.com.

If you follow the instructions carefully you should have success in a few weeks.

Ever wake up from a dream and feel just barely awake? If you remember, you were very disconnected from reality and your thoughts were random and rather incoherent. That's how your mind needs to feel. If you're concentrating on energy or vibrations or some such nonsense you're way too awake and focused for it to work.

That's the difference between awareness and consciousness. Consciousness is always of something, awareness exists by itself. Consciousness ends during sleep, awareness carries on. You are focusing on your consciousness and the various sensations it creates, when instead you need to let go of consciousness and just retain a thin beam of awareness.

Another way to get protection is to remember to take your medication.

What you don't realize is that every single one of his techniques are meditation based.
Anytime you're quieting your mind and focusing it towards an intended goal... you're meditating.

Yeah, I get it, okay? I'm telling you that recommending months of meditation to beginners is needlessly off-putting when all they want to do is have a lucid dream, not to "lower the entropy of their consciousness."

Also all your smileys are passive-aggressive 

Prayer is also a form of meditation, but we don't recommend deep prayer as a technique to have an OBE.

Raduga doesn't recommend meditation because although it's helpful, it is also tangential. You don't need to be a skilled meditator to use his techniques. It will help, of course, but it's like hiring a professional race car driver to chauffeur you to the post office.

This is where you try to remember the last time you were very tired and quickly fell asleep, then try to recreate that sensation mentally for about 10 seconds.

It's used when you've just woken up and accidentally moved, making it harder to enter the phase. This method dials your wakefulness down a few notches and makes the cycles more effective.

It probably comes more easily and intuitively to people who meditate and are able to quickly quiet their mind and relax, but Raduga says you can get good at it with just a few days of practice.

If you're cloudy and groggy it might be a good opportunity to do the cycles right away, even if you've woken up and moved.

Do 15-30 seconds of Forced Falling Asleep, and then go through the cycles. Do at least 5 cycles, don't stop early. A lot of people go through cycle after cycle only to be surprised when it works on the seventh or eighth cycle.

Nobody can say for sure that they imagined everything, but I can definitely say that it's possible that they imagined everything. Humans as a species are very susceptible to delusion. Look at false awakenings, for example. This is when you "wake up" from a dream, but are still actually dreaming without being aware of it. This is extremely common for people who astral project, OBE, whatever you want to call it. In his book, Monroe says that his travels and experiences gave him magical powers that protected him in real life, and as an example describes an event where he fell down some stairs head first and instead of breaking his neck, floated gently to the floor.

I think if you're very credulous, you could take this story at face value, but I think a more honest and simpler explanation is that this was a dream he had that he's confused with reality. False awakenings are often remembered as real events. He even said (as did Campbell) that he started to get confused between fantasy and reality once he spent more and more time there.

If you want to gain super powers and "knowledge beyond the ken of man" through phasing, I guess it's a dead end for you. However, it's still a pretty amazing skill set: you can use it to get over your fears and phobias, practice skills you can use in real life, explore worlds and have experiences that you would never be able to attain in reality... You watch movies, right? You could visit any movie environment you wanted and play with the characters.

Also, lots of people believe the phase is some kind of portal to an objective reality outside our consciousness, and they claim they can heal people, see the future, go in the past, talk to dead relatives, etc. They make these claims despite having access to the phase for years, so it's obviously real enough for them to continue believing it.

I don't think anybody who's experienced the phase's true potential would dismiss it as having no use.

Why doesn't the author of the book take astral projection as proof of an after life? Or maybe I misunderstood what he was saying in the little Conscious Evolution book included in the SOBT download. Would someone else check it out? It's quite short.

He used to, when he first started having these experiences, and they had quite an impact on his life. After a while, however, he realized the connection between dreams, lucid dreams, and "astral projection." He says they are all different names for the same thing, which is an environment generated entirely by your brain. If something in your dream correlates to reality, it's just your subconscious making very realistic projections. He calls it "the phase" to avoid any of those mystical associations people create for these experiences.

That's why his books focus solely on techniques, statistics, etc. No nonsense whatsoever, just clinical descriptions and step-by-step directions. His closest analogue is Stephen Laberge.

Why don't you describe exactly what you're doing?

You should post your questions on the obe4u message boards instead of here. Michael can answer your question personally.

I think he said the longest phase he'd heard of was 20 minutes long. Since you don't spend any time in the phase doing things like traveling from one place to another, and action follows thought immediately, the rapid sequence of events makes it seem like you are spending much more time than you really are. A 20 minute phase would probably feel like hours.

I was in your boots myself until recently: messed about with meditation and trance states and all this lying down and trying to get our of your body for hours stuff made me very discouraged.

I would go to obe4u.com and get the free e-book and follow the directions for "indirect techniques" very carefully. You should get into the phase in a few weeks, any longer than that and you're not following the instructions correctly.

It's an ongoing skill you continuously work on. I was in the exact same situation as you, here's how you make inroads:

Set your alarm for 6 hours of sleep. Eventually you will start waking up BEFORE the alarm goes off, just because your internal clock will get used to it.

When you wake up, you will move and stuff, that's fine. Once you've realized "oh crap I've moved," just lie still and do the cycles of indirect techniques.

Do this every time you wake up and you have a few minutes before you need to get out of bed.

Eventually your subconscious will start to associate the sensation of waking up with striving for the phase immediately, and you will find yourself remembering not to move. For me it took about 4 days before I started waking up with the phase in mind. Another week or so before I started waking up without moving. I still move most of the time, but the ratio of moving to not moving is getting better.

It's been two days since I had this success, and one of those days I woke up with a hangover.

From reading people's accounts on the forums, it seems that beginners manage to get one every couple of weeks or so, and when they get some confidence and ability it goes up to once a week or more.

Advanced level would be 3-4 successes a week or so.

One thing that surprised me about my  recent success was the state of mind in which I rolled out. I honestly would not have thought I was in the phase yet, since I felt like I was just lying in bed and hearing noises. I felt like I was still in my body, but this was just an illusion. I'm starting to think maybe I had reached this state numerous times in the past but didn't realize I could have rolled out.

I don't know anyone who wouldn't benefit from meditation, or meditating more.

If your only goal is OBE, though, following the specific steps in SOBT seems to be the quickest, surest way there. He says in his seminars that he gets more than 50% of attendants to have an OBE after only 3 days. If you do the techniques properly he says 10 days, guaranteed.

Yes I had to take a hard look at my approach and admit to myself that "direct techniques" were not productive for me. When I started focusing on indirect techniques exclusively, I had quick success.

I hope it doesn't take that long for me.. but I think it's only a matter of time.. if it's gotta be 2 years, or more, then so be it!

There's no need for it to take that long. The author of the SOBT book says that if you don't have success after 10 days you are making serious mistakes and need only ask for advice. So far, after seeing this happen many many times on their forums, this has been proven to be true. A lot of people get it in under a week, some people take a couple of months, but those are the ones that don't read carefully and follow directions.

What's the full title of this book?

School of Out of Body Travel: A Practical Guidebook. It's available for free from obe4u.com

With this.. did you basically try to roll physically? I mean was the action, intention, feeling was like you were just going to roll over.. or was it more of a subjective, mental process that you describe as rolling? This is one of those things I don't really understand.. and was it a sudden, forceful thing or something that you did gently?

It's difficult to describe. Since you're in a weird, dissociated mental space, you won't be thinking about it the way you are now, wide awake. Instead you will just think to yourself, "I should try to roll out now, NOW, NOW!" and just try to do it. The attitude of "JUST DO IT" is spot on, as recommended in the book. You may feel resistance but just push through it. Like I said, I felt mild resistance, like emerging from liquid.


I don't think all the meditation I did over these last couple of years was a waste of time, since it's improved me greatly as a person, but it has very little to do with getting an OBE. You just don't need it. It helps you focus once you're already out, but Tom Campbell's insistence of spending months or years of expanding your consciousness is unnecessary, elitist, and off-putting to a great many people. In my opinion.

I've been trying to do this for about two years now through meditation and various wake-induced methods, and although I've had a lot of tantalizing near-misses, it's been without success.

Recently I decided to read the SOBT e-book from obe4u.com and follow its instructions to the letter, and two short weeks later I had a perfect phase experience. Here's what happened:



I woke up at 6AM, went to the bathroom, and then lay back down immediately to try to sleep. I usually have difficulty falling asleep, so this time, for the first time, I put on earplugs and a facemask. After about an hour, I was still quite awake and running through ideas for my class in my head.

After an hour I wasn't falling asleep but I was very physically relaxed, so I tried forced falling asleep (technique from SOBT). After about 10-15 seconds, I felt a strange dislocation and numbness settle over my body, which felt unusual. I immediately tried listening in, and heard a very loud ringing sound, like fire alarms going off. I listened to it and it got louder and then seemed to peak. It was very loud, but nothing else was happening so I switched to observing images for a few seconds. Nothing, and the ringing got quieter, so I went back to listening in. It got louder again, and again it seemed to peak.

Then I realized that it was so loud that I was probably already in the phase but didn't realize it. I tried rolling over with a sudden jerk and BAM! I was out of bed, standing on the floor! I can't describe how unexpected this was: I had no idea what rolling out would feel like, and it turned out to be kind of like climbing out of a pool, about that much resistance.

I was very excited, but I remembered the SOBT advice to immediately deepen. Everything was grey and I felt nothing, heard nothing, saw only grey silhouettes around me. I started rubbing my hands together firmly in front of my face and they slowly came into view, along with everything else in my room. I started peering at my hands and fingers, and my vision became crystal clear. My room came into perfect lifelike focus. I walked around my room peering and palpating everything I could find. Since it was my first time in the phase, I examined all the random objects lying around on my shelves and table and they all appeared perfectly real, even the writing on them (I didn't stop to try to read the individual words because I didn't want a foul). I continuously reminded myself that I was dreaming, so as not to lose consciousness and fall asleep.

After spending about a minute looking at everything and being amazed by the simulacrum of reality, I decided to try to do something with the experience. I didn't have any plans beforehand because I was not really expecting success, but I decided on the spur of the moment to try flying. I looked up at my ceiling, then down at my feet, took a deep breath and tried to levitate while looking at my feet. They slowly rose a few inches off the floor, and as I exhaled they went back down. Perfectly controlled, as I expected. I tried again, with another deep breath and this time a jump, and I launched myself through my ceiling like superman, fists extended. I didn't want to pass through my ceiling insubstantially, I wanted to blast out, and I did, through about 10 floors of brick and plaster which exploded in front of me like a multistory pratfall in reverse.

Then I was out, above my house. I was not in my neighborhood, but in some kind of huge cave that housed an entire city. I didn't recognize anything and didn't have any plans of where to go, so I just flew around a little bit and eventually zoomed in on a window where some "friend" of mine (I don't know who it was, they were just labeled "friend" in my dream consciousness") was watching a movie on television. At this point, since I didn't have anything to do, and I was just hovering outside the window with a pause in my actions, I fouled and woke up in bed.

Not sure going by color is very productive: you'd have a 50% chance of being right, so you'd need to do the test dozens of times to get any meaningful results.

Instead of numbers or letters, which are very hard to read in dreams, you should make a deck of about 10 or 15 flashcards with obvious, recognizable symbols on them: a star, a dog,  an X, a half moon, etc.... Then just put a random one face down somewhere and look at it later.

I did place it face down by accident, I actually thought it was face up when I did it, that's why I was so surprised to find it was face down whilst in an obe, and in the physical. 

I have actually placed another card there now, (definitely face up!), I just hope it doesn't take another five months to obe again!!! 

Sorry I didn't mean that it's likely that your mistake was accidental, I meant that it was very likely that you might make that mistake, and thus the odds of it being face down were probably around 40-50%, not too unusual. Your dream had a 40-50% chance of correlating to reality.

I wouldn't call it a success, it's actually quite likely that you placed it face down by accident since it would not have been something you were in the habit of doing correctly.

You should do this test a few more times, however, it would be interesting to see the results of repeat experiments!