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In the one or two interviews that i have heard with Jason Quitt, he seemed fairly straight forward with his discussions and didn't fall into a lot of woo woo.  I enjoyed them.  I used to listen a lot to coast to coast, but after a while they got a bit repetitive.  Yet, they do still have some good shows popping up now and again.  Thanks for the heads up.

Don't you know, we're all digital.  You're just seeing some of the framework sitting in the background.   

For those interested in the scientific research side of dreaming, and a fairly technical one, I ran across this very interesting study that you might like:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814941/    It goes into great detail about our brain's response during sleep, and it covers dreaming both in REM and NREM phases, contradicting some earlier studies that push heavily on REM dreaming only.

Proprioception and stillness. 

Stillness of body is a presumed concept in many descriptions of OBE/Phasing/Meditation techniques, but it almost always comes across as an afterthought.  But I believe it should take a position of high priority for anyone looking to Phase or simply meditate. 

The body never truly relaxes entirely until we achieve dissociation from it.  We can not achieve full dissociation until our proprioception is lost.  The only way to disconnect from our proprioception is through absolute stillness.  When we are absolutely still, proprioceptors stop firing, and we lose connection to our body.  We can no longer place the location of our arms or legs, etc., because their is no feedback.  Only absolute stillness allows this.  Once we achieve absolute stillness, only then can we truly dissociate from our physicality and enter the NP.

This happens over time automatically, if we allow ourselves to relax enough and in the right way.  However, through focused attention on our stillness, we can greatly speed up our decent into the NP.  As part of any exercise you use for OBE/Phasing/Meditation, cultivate absolute stillness from the very beginning, and you will achieve the necessary dissociation far more quickly, which means you will achieve entry to NP far more readily.

As stated, most people know this idea indirectly, but almost no one emphasizes its necessity.  Thought I'd share my observation.

Pulse wasn't just down.  There are a number of posts missing as well from Friday.  Couldn't say how many.

Thanks Lumaza, Lightbeam.  

Sorry to hear about MJ's situation.  It sounds like you've found a positive way to approach it.  

I'm sure I am over simplifying some of my statements.  I usually don't think in terms of a person's NP persona having contrary perspectives from their waking Self.  I have not spent much time digesting the idea of the NP persona as being as independent as discussed here.

I started on my journey back in '74 when I took a high school course called "Mysticism" and read Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi and started reading along those lines and meditating.  But I grew up in a military household and then went military myself and then went police.  The two world views were not in sync.  I'm a true Sagittarius, a split personality; I knew I had one of two paths through life to take, a military one or one of an artist.  I chose military.  It took a time to start focusing on the metaphysical, despite my efforts at meditation.  I joined the Rosicrucians while still in the military, but my mindset was still trained to pragmatism and logic, not topics related to the NP.  It didn't stick, despite AP being part of the Rosicrucian curriculum.

I blatantly have swiveled through a variety of views on the topic through the years, and I still find myself a bit adrift at times, since I am still looking for the 'one' right answer.  I know from experience that the NP is a very subjective environment, but my logical mind still feels the need for objective evaluation.  That, I think, more than anything else, has retarded my growth in AP/LD.  Of course, my peripheral neuropathy has a major say in the process as well.  I can get into the NP, both directly (meditation) and through dreams, but it's guaranteed that my neuropathy will snatch me back almost every time.  It does allow for a light sleep though, lol.  It's is said that LDing is like walking a tightrope between sleep and wakefulness; peripheral neuropathy is like a trip wire that you can't see until it snags your pants and you're already falling.

I have looked my entire life for a consistent ideology, or I suppose cosmology would be more appropriate, but my logical self will not allow any pre-defined religion/philosophy to hold up in my head.  They all have logic faults.  I've read in the past some posts you've made, Lumaza, regarding imagination, and I thought I understood them, but I was looking at them, as all things, from a purely logical bent.  Rereading your stuff seems to have opened my eyes to a few things regarding imagination that I thought I understood.  Logically, you and others have shared straight forward truths, but many of them require experience to be truly understood.  Intellectual understanding isn't enough.  I think most people fall somewhere into this general category.  

Artists, in my mind, are a perfect example of intuitive misunderstanding.  If you ask an artist who is superb at drawing images directly out of their head what it is that they do to make it happen, they will look at you strangely and say, "well, i just see it and draw it."  It doesn't occur (generalization) to them to explain that they are able to superimpose the image from their mind's eye right onto the page and then, essentially, trace right over what they have projected.  It doesn't occur to them to explain this, because the process to them is absolutely natural.  It doesn't occur to them that anyone would do it any differently, because they have no other frame of reference.  I think it is the same with teaching about imagination, visualization and AP.  Those who are naturally great at it discuss it in casual terms that make sense to them.  Those less inclined have to struggle to even understand the logic, and it takes a lot of effort to find out for themselves, through trial and error, what the teacher actually said, what they actually meant.  Only time will bring that kind of understanding.  As you and others have pointed out, not many people have that dedication, despite their overt desire.

So, I understand, from personal experience, what you mean when you say some people simply are not ready for certain information.

I have had a similar issue, LightBeam, regarding the mind awake/body asleep necessity.  I think that after rereading Lumaza's posts, I may (may) be at a point where I can get past that limitation.  We'll see.

Read your linked post.  Very nice.  I'm still working my way through the entire post, as it is quite lengthy.  Even the added information later in the thread bears reading.  Thanks for the link.  It's similar to my approach using meditation, though your focused, active imagination approach seems more practical, seeing as, on any given day, my meditation may or may not get me deep enough for Phasing.  It makes me want to finally finish reading Jung's Red Book.

Thanks for the responses.  I'll certainly read the link, Lumaza.  I agree that focus is critical.  Do you feel that extended work with the imagination is giving us a similar experience to being in the dream realm, thus strengthening our connection to it, and that we become more overtly conscious of dreams, while dreaming, because of this?  Interesting take if so.

To extend my original point, when I read about perceptions people have about Mindfulness, people seem to believe that just being aware of your awareness is enough (perhaps it is speaking purely spiritually).  But I never found this to be sufficient when it comes to lucid dreaming.  If it were, I think many more people would find themselves LDing all the time, seeing that millions are working on their mindfulness.  So many LD teachers love to say "just be present during the day, and you'll be present in your dreams."  Well, we can all see how well that advice works for LDers, if forums are any indication.

Wake-induced experiences (WILDs, OOBE, Phasing, etc.) are another matter, since they don't rely on the NP Self's dream-time recognition of events.

For DILD events to be consistent, practical, contrast must be created by paying specific attention to our 5 senses (call is ADA if you like), to include the feel of gravity on our bodies.  You must 'know' how it feels to be present in your waking Self, in your physical body.  Otherwise, your NP Self has nothing with which to contrast its own experience.  How it 'feels' to be awake is, I believe, a big deal for lucid dreamers who rely on DILDs to access the NP.

Of course, just my perspective.

I wanted to share a thought that bubbled to the surface, after the last two threads, about how 'feeling' the dream rather than waiting for waking logic to kick in was what we should really be focused on.

How Theta 'feels' could be the key for triggering lucidity rather than the 'logic-based' identification of dream signs, et al.  I believe that deep meditation is especially helpful here (meditation in the Theta state), because it gives us conscious practice in dream awareness.  This would also explain why Mindfulness helps LDing, because it emphasizes how living in the waking world 'feels', so the contrast between it and dream awareness begins to stand out, even to the NP persona, which triggers the 'Oh, shite, this is a dream' response.

We still have the hurdle that we have been discussing in the nearby threads regarding the NP persona, but I think the more conscious recognition of what the Theta state 'feels' like, the better our chances of nighttime lucidity.  

We have to remember that for a dream sign to trigger lucidity we must already be conscious enough for our logical, waking mind to come to that recognition.  Feelings, on the contrary, are emotional responses, responses that the NP persona is quite well equipped to handle without our conscious mind's input.  Allow the 'feeling' of the dream to trigger a logical response.  In other words, we are playing to our strengths while dreaming if we approach it with a feeling-based modality (emotional) rather than expecting our NP persona to suddenly gain logical insight.

How many times have you read about a 'Natural' lucid dreamer who says, "I don't know how I get lucid.  I can just 'feel' that I'm dreaming."

Work your meditation.  Work with your Mindfulness.  'Feel' what it's like to dream and to be awake.

Thanks for reading.

This thread was spurred by the conversation in my adjacent dream memory thread.  The scientific perspective for dreaming that I most often run into is that dreaming is about memory consolidation, a way for our mind to properly order our experiences in long-term memory from our daily experiences. 

I've also read on numerous occasions of people who awaken from coma speaking fluently in other languages.  No one has given much of an explanation for this.  What if the scientists are right in one respect?  What if we do indeed use dreams as a consolidation method, only the memories we are accessing to consolidate are not 'all' from our current time line (dimension)?  This would also explain why we have so many dreams that are snippets of what seem to be past events, only the events are tweaked in ways that are not correct from your memories.  But what if they are correct from another time line?

This would explain quite easily the coma patient with a new language.  During the coma, or from whatever trauma put him/her into the coma, something shifted in their mind that allowed a memory from another time line to infiltrate the current time line.  The patient taps into one of the alternate realities that their other 'Self' exists in and wholly downloads the knowledge of the other language.  Call it a cross-wired event.

The patient doesn't pull the entire personality of the other 'Self'; they just download a section.  Why language rather than something else, who knows.  (ooh, schizophrenics with multiple personalities?)

It is said that if we are not allowed to dream that over time we go insane.  Perhaps what is happening is that we are not being allowed to properly consolidate our various 'selves' by incorporating the events, the learning events, that are being stored during our dreams.  We essentially fragment, and without the defragmenting protocalls of dreaming, we can no longer properly access our memory functions, just as a computer will slow down over time if the hard drive is not defragged to properly order its memories.  Our brain is just a bio-computer, after all, that is accessed by our consciousness.

I'm just thinking out loud here.  As stated, these thoughts ran through my head after getting interesting input from Szaxx, Lumasa, and EV on the last thread.

Thanks, Szaxx.  That gave a lot of clarity.  I appreciate the in-depth example.  It falls along the lines that I have read about emotions being key to accessing the subconscious.  The idea of creating that emotional connection from the deeper meditative state sounds right.  I've attempted something similar but rather than getting the proper emotional state, as you point out, into play, I relied almost exclusively on intellectual input.  I've been accused of dealing with issues on too much of an intellectual basis.  This plays right into that, lol.  I'm definitely going to give this a go with emphasis on the emotional input.

thanks Szaxx and Lumaza.  this whole concept of a secondary personality is both perplexing and feels right at the same time.  The parallel universe thing actually makes sense.  It explains why we have such a time communicating between aspects of our Self.  And Szaxx, i don't mind the slow way of programming, if that is what it takes.  I certainly have no better solution.  It's good to know, Lumaza, that it becomes automatic after a time.  Can i assume this means that the dream Self and the waking Self naturally merge, to some degree, after we've spent enough time acknowledging and encouraging the union?  Is that what is meant by not having to fight for lucidity with dream signs, etc.?

I have to say that all the signs are there that the NP persona is a unique personality (still 'me' but unique unto itself), but standard scientific upbringing doesn't express along these lines, lol.  Bringing them into sync matches my idea of pulling the two unique memory threads into alignment, which I suppose is what you are suggesting by using daytime programming for the stolen car, Szaxx. 

When looked at from the NP distinct personality perspective, dreaming is quite shamanic in that becoming lucid in dreams seems to allow us to pull together our fractured Selves, or I suppose soul shards would be a shaman's term.  A very interesting take on dreaming, and one I quite like.  Thanks for the perspective, all.  I think it makes a huge difference for the outcome when we approach a situation from the proper perspective.

Thanks EscapeVelocity.  My thoughts have run in similar directions to the NP personality.  I have to say that I have not done any work with guides or teachers in the NP.  I have frequent lucid dreams, but as a rule i spend more time following the existing plot line more than taking control.  If I am highly lucid, I try to focus myself and look to stay lucid as long as possible.  My lucid skills vary, usually depending on what the dream was leading up to becoming lucid.  i should probably try to spend more time developing them.  Your idea that your skill level at these dream skills increases your overall ability to stay lucid sounds like a good one.  i have a couple very strong, repeated dream signs that I'm trying to grasp as easy access to LDs.  For some reason, alien craft floating overhead always kicks off my lucidity.  Maybe my penchant for SciFi.

I'm sure you're right about the missing/stolen car being a metaphor for my lack of control, both in-dream and out.  My number one project right now is finding the best method of awakening the NP personality naturally to these dream signs.  I keep talking about using meditation as my tool (meditating on the dream sign as a dream), but I have yet to implement it on a regular basis.  I allow myself to get too scattered, trying multiple approaches and getting bogged down by too many.  In WOW, they would call it alt-itis, lol.

The dream scenario that set off this train of thought is the dream of having my car stolen.  I've had this dream a number of times.  Different car.  Different scenario.  Or sometimes i just forget where i parked it in the dream, and i chase around trying to find it.

The gist here is that in each of these dreams, I remember that I have had my car stolen numerous times, and it pisses me off that it keeps happening.  The issue is, I've only had them stolen in my dreams, never in waking life.  I don't relate to the fact that each memory of a stolen car is a dream memory.

This is not an isolated idea.  I've come to realize that i have a distinct set of memories that are solely, it seems, connected to my dream Self and independent of the waking.  It's as if there is a separate mind, or at least a partitioned off portion of the memory, that is only active while dreaming.

It has occurred to me that the path toward a greater number of lucid dreams is learning to consolidate dream memory with waking memory more directly, so we don't have to use logic skills to recognize the dream but rather simple memory to realize that we are dreaming.

The only path that I have come to is meditation and/or trance states as a means to access the subconscious directly and influence the deeper memories (dream memories) by inputting a rational aspect that says if 'X' happens, know that it is a dream.  I'm still playing with this idea.

Has anyone else run into this same truth about a separate set of dream memories from waking?  Have you done any work with them?

This entire field is filled with coat tail riding.  Other than, maybe, Monroe, I haven't read a single author who has had anything truly unique to say.  Even Monroe could have pulled from Muldoon or Fox.   Every book is a regurgitation of existing information, and almost none give credit beyond their 'personal' experience.  The most important difference is how well one writer explains his subjective experience in comparison to another.  I don't agree with Raduga's philosophy, but he explains tech well.  Dr. Susan Blackmore, a contemporary researcher, has a materialist scientific explanation that I do not agree with either, but even she has information that make her worth reading.  Suck it all down and sift out the crap.  And enjoy.

Thanks for the responses.  Appreciated.

Visualization is like any tool.  It's not good for everything.  Use as needed.  The reason I posted was simply to point out to people who are trying to OBE/Phase/WILD using visualization techniques that it doesn't have to be as hard as people point out.  The only thing hard about visualization is the effort you must apply to perfect it.

I'll check out the reference Xanth.  Thanks.

p.s.  Read the article.  It had a good example of creating imagined scenes in your mind, but he plays a bit fast and loose with his 'visual' semantics, if you will.  His personal opinion regarding 'seeing' with the mind's eye is technically correct, only in the sense that we never see anything with our mind, we only sense and interpret it.  But you could say the same thing about physical sight.  We don't see with our eyes; our eyes are just lenses through which we gather vibrational data within the visual spectrum, transmit it to the visual cortex, and the visual cortex translates the data into impressions that we have learned to call 'sight' or images.  If you want to be technical with 'seeing', we never see anything.  We only interpret.  So trying to re-interpret the word to push his point can be confusing for people not already familiar with the topic.  But it was useful for people who didn't understand the relationship between visualization and imagination.  It was a good effort on that front.

Wasn't sure where to post this, so here goes.

I wanted to put out a quick post on my view of visualization, because I keep seeing so many articles that make visualization into something hard or promoting a way to develop it that is either outright wrong or is far harder than it should be.

Up front, if you can see an image in your mind when you close your eyes and think about the room you are sitting in, then you can visualize.  If you couldn't visualize, you'd be forever getting lost because you wouldn't remember what your house looked like, and you'd spend your afternoons after work wandering aimlessly through the city.  And very importantly, visualization doesn't mean that you stare at the blackness behind your eyes and draw silver triangles and squares or whatever.  If you are using your eyes, you are not visualizing.  You are staring.

The simplest way that I have found to start a visualization session is one of two ways: visualize, see in your memory, the room you are sitting in, or pull any other memory from you mind.  This automatically puts your 'sight' into your mind instead of into your eyes.  You stop looking physically and start looking through your mind's eye.  Once you have the scene pulled up as it actually is, add an ingredient to it.  If you are looking at your bed, put a basketball on top of it, or whatever you choose.  You are already in the right mental space, so adding items becomes easy.  This is simply a way to jump start your focus.  Once you start adding visual elements, you can do whatever you want.  Add, subtract objects at will. 

Initially, you are probably not going to see everything precisely.  Not a big deal.  Everything takes time to develop, but by pulling up a memory to jump start your session, your stress level diminishes and your efforts are rewarded right away.  The easiest way to improve clarity is to focus your attention on a specific point rather than taking in the whole scene.  Zoom in.  Look at the lines on the basket ball, look at the little nubs.  This, with practice, will give you clarity.

A final point on clarity.  Most people believe that they see quite clearly, assuming you don't have a visual deficit.  But if you look carefully, you will find that the only clarity in your vision is directly in line with your focus.  The rest of the room is actually blurred and out of focus at all times.  You can test this easily enough by looking with your peripheral vision while maintaining your forward focus.  Your eyes are just so well adapted to their job that they refocus with such speed that you don't notice any blurriness as you look around the room, so you falsely assume that everything is coming in with clarity.  So, when you close your eyes and visualize what you remember about the room, your mind doesn't play favorites and gives you the entire room, out of focus.  Because, in reality, that is how your mind gathered most of the data: out of focus through your peripheral vision.  That is why it is necessary to focus on a specific spot if you want to gain greater clarity; you are looking at a memory as a whole and are not focusing on a specific target as you would be if you were using your eyes with your eyes open.

One of the best practices to improve visualization and visualization's clarity is to practice looking at items around your room very specifically, drawing the lines of the object with your mind, looking at the particulars, mentally feeling the patina.  Learn to be more precise with your normal viewing of your world, and your inner world will become clearer and more defined as well.

thanks for the read

Everyone loves to talk about how mindfulness and meditation and ADA increases our ability to become lucid in our dreams, in our lives.  But the impression that I get from most posts and articles and books is that through some magical process of being more aware during the day we will manifest more awareness during dreams.  Few if any that I have read are specific about why it happens.  Because I don't think it is a matter of habit being transferred to the subconscious.  Not entirely.  Though that was my initial belief as well.  And I'm sure it still has a degree of truth.

What I want you to think about are the fMRI studies done on meditators using various forms of meditation and how it impacted the brain.  I don't believe that simply by having more focused attention during the day that the sleeping mind becomes more capable of instigating rational thought.  Not on its own.

There are numerous studies delineated on-line that show an increase in neuronal activity (new neuronal pathways) and a measurable increase in grey matter both in the prefrontal cortex and elsewhere.  I believe that it is actually this increase in physical brain mass and neuronal development that brings about an increase in awareness, both during sleep and while awake.  Through our persistent and increased observation and intake of stimuli from our environment, we are exercising our physical brain as well as our minds.  And like any muscle, the brain responds by growing denser through use.  More brain mass, more neuronal connections, more capability. 

So, if you want to become lucid in dreams, start pounding out some time with ADA, meditation, mindfulness practices.  Most people's brains are barely useful enough to get them from point A to point B at work, and then home to stare hypnotized at the television or their computers.  If you don't expand your physical brain through mental exercise, don't whine about not being capable of doing cool stuff like lucid dream and OBE.

Exercise the brain.  Grow the brain.  Become lucid.  Remember, no matter what you think the mind is, it must function through the intermediary of the brain to accomplish tasks in the physical world, and mental techniques are only useful if you have a brain wired properly to use them. 

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about brain states, etc.  Anyone else spend time on this and have the same or different opinion?  Thanks

Good information Lumaza.  I follow to a degree, but don't use, the new technical equipment that is out to have any useful comment.  I restrict my work to meditation.  As a general rule, I use some form of single-point meditation or Vipassana, though the former for me is more effective for deep meditation.  They each have their effectiveness. 

One of the best descriptions I can give for the feeling of deep meditation (Theta if you will) could be described using Monroe speak for convenience.    I would best describe it as being similar to F-12.  You have perfect clarity and a loss, for the most part, of physical body input.  The reason I use focus 12 versus focus 10 as my base description is that one of the most annoying aspects of getting deep, just as it is annoying for projecting, is the swallow reflex.  When I hit deep meditation, the swallow issue evaporates as well.  I have a perfect sense of calmness, a lightness if you will.  It's not an awareness state that I confuse with anything else. 

Another thing I realize as I am coming out of a deep meditation experience, is a feeling of entering a new world.  It's very similar to how you feel when you wake in the morning, still in a dream-like state (probably a solid Alpha).  You swear you are fully conscious, but then you open your eyes.  And bang, true waking reality hits as Beta waves start developing.  It's almost a physical jolt. 

I don't know if others have the same experience.  It could just be my personal experience with it.  Good luck with your studies.

Thanks Lumaza.  I do something similar.  When I sit down to meditate, at the very beginning where I'm still trying to get thuroughly relaxed, I mentally project into the room.  I wander through the house, focusing heavily on various items in an attempt to bring them into 3D/HD focus.  I see this as my practice that is similar to what you describe.  I believe this practice will come in quite handy when I eventually acquire the ability to immediately drop into Theta state and project at will.  I believe that to be entirely possible with practice.  Thanks again for the response.

Thanks for the replies.  I was just trying to be more specific about the internal result of meditation and it's nuts and bolts.  People have the tendency to gloss over particulars, usually because they don't know them, and regurgitate generalities.  Generalities are not of much use when multiple interpretations can be made by everyone reading them based on their personal background.

Taking the term 'meditation', its definition gets very clouded by all the gurus sharing their mystical views and formulas about it and what it does.  But what they are doing is intermingling actions and goals when they give their descriptions.  Various sects use meditation as a means to reach enlightenment, or so they state as their objective.  But that doesn't describe meditation.  I simply describes the goal of a group who uses meditation in an attempt to achieve those ends.

Meditation, at the nuts and bolts level, is simply concentration with a particular focus.  Once you come to understand that, you can then use meditation for all variety of purposes and disconnect your purpose from the mystical. 

I view the frequency basis of deep meditation, and its correlative activities of LDs/OBEs, in that same light.  If you understand that achieving primarily the Theta state is your goal, then you more readily can apply technology (mental or physical) to achieving that specific goal rather than a more amorphous one, such as the advice "well, just relax and go deeper."  Deeper where? 

Xanth, it's as you've point out on numerous occasions about techniques; they all come down to shifting your focus inward and away from physical input.  We can't let the goals of a technique get confused with the technique itself, or we scare people away.  Meditation, simply focused concentration, is not religious by nature.  It's merely a mental tool to clear and focus our minds.  How you use your mind at that point is up to you.

Despite the clarity of your advice Xanth, most people skim over your understanding and chug on looking for something new.  I think more people would use meditation, for all its benefits, if they simply understood its true nature rather than the mystical one that gets self-promoted. 

Had to throw that out.

I may have stretched the intent of the original post a bit, but I think it all pulls together.  Thanks for reading.

Earlier this year, a user called 'WW' posted and talked, in part, about a long series of random images he could watch but not necessarily step into.  He referred to this as a form of Phasing, or at least asked questions along these lines, not to put words in his mouth.

I get these random HD/3D images often either when meditating or trying to Phase/OBE, either faces or scenes, usually outdoor related.  But I never looked at them as Phasing.  I always viewed them as hypnogogia or hypnopompia.  I've never considered any event Phasing if I didn't actually step into the scene fully and become part of the event.  I've always looked at the flashing scenery as a preliminary bout, something to get you ready for the main event.  Not a very scientific perspective.  Just convenient.

Anyone else look at this as hypnogogia/pompia?

I agree with your post.  It's quite amazing how if feels to simply follow your actions consciously and to be truly connected to Self.  I didn't really understand what it meant to be mindful until I stumbled on the fact that being in the moment meant being conscious of not just your actions in general but your intent specifically, the movement of your energy as an action takes place.  When you reach for a cup or flick off a light switch, you have to track your energy (metaphorically if you like) as it flows through your arm.  This directs your intent and attention, and truly puts you in the moment, puts you in the action so to speak.  Just casually watching the Now doesn't get you there.  Full involvement with the process of motion, the moment-to-moment accomplishment of intention, is required.  Thanks for the post.

I haven't seen this discussed specifically, so I thought I'd bring it up here. 

One of the reasons that meditation is an effective enhancer of dreams in general, and lucid dreaming/OBE in particular, is because meditation is deep state practice, particularly Theta states for deeper meditation.  For deeper meditation, you should at least hit Theta as a primary state.  And the more time you spend in Theta consciously, the more conscious control you acquire.

People like to claim that OBEs and high-end lucid dreams are just as clear as the waking state.  But clarity doesn't equal control.  Clarity just tells you how pretty it was or how realistic it seemed.  It's your perception of the experience, your feel of it, not your control while there.  They are only similar to the waking state because in a waking state Beta waves are the predominate brain frequency, not Theta.  In OBEs and Lucid Dreams, Beta waves are still present, but they are not the predominate frequency.  This lack of Beta function reduces our ability to have purely rational, logical thought and decision making, whether we realize it or not.  In other words, in a dream/OBE our decisions are based more intuitively than logically.

The lack of high-levels of Beta waves is why we tend to lose focus more readily, and either revert to a normal dream state or transition out of the OBE/LD more quickly than we prefer.  In other words, we are far more easily distracted while in a predominately Theta environment.  The smallest distraction can trigger a random thought, which can trigger a random visualization, which can trigger a dream-world version of a daydream.  And off we go into unawareness or full wakefulness.

Meditation, not the trivial oh I'm going to relax for 10 minutes meditation, but truly deep meditation that carries us down into the deep Alpha and Theta states is a training ground for our mind.  It trains us to consciously know what it feel like to be in the Theta state, which is what happens in a lucid dream or OBE.  The more time we spend consciously in Theta, the less distracted we become when we are there in the dream.  The more practice we get at controlling our thoughts (meditation) while in Theta, the more readily we will enter lucid dreams and the more readily we will stay in them after we manage to arrive. 

Just another reason to meditate daily.

A point that I didn't highlight enough is that continuous action is what draws your attention the best.  Even something as simple as flipping a coin over and over into the air and following its path with your eyes.  Your focus on the continuous motion is what keeps your attention within the envisioned environment and doesn't allow your mind to so easily wander back to the physical.