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"If you're rich, you can even buy an EGG biofeedback thing to check the frequency. I would love to get one of these to be able to test what techniques works best."
me too

i sure could have used this article last semester :/

oh well..

if you fake yourself into a mental facility they will probably drug you, yes you can try and you know, hide the pill in your lip toward the back of your mouth, or under your tongue, and swallow the water... they might not notice...

but being put on anti-depressants might as well be like being put on heroin, it's not something you can just stop doing, without worrying about serious health problems... death... etc.

plus like the article said, if they diagnose you with something, that diagnosis sticks.... you know?

I applied for a job once and one of the questions on the application said "have you ever been admitted to a mental hospital?" I think it's really screwed up that they can ask that... is it even legal? I put yes... never got the job, but... I'm glad, it would have been at a horrible time in my life to have one in the first place...

I suppose if I acutally want a job in the future I'll just lie... I think my records are supposed to be sealed since I was a minor and it was not a long term stay.

and i'm not sure if i was ever diagnosed with anything... one doctor said i was mildly schizotypal... i suppose I might agree, based upon the solid definition itself.

but labels are largely useless and excessively punitive.

just now i was trying and i faded into seeing some sort of doctors room or something, only i could hear my normal thoughts, which I think were a mantra, that were still going, and I felt kind of aware, it got very deep and then for absolutely no reaosn at all, it just abruptly ended and I jolted back into normalness.

I was thinking differently or anything, I was just passively observing, almost unconscious, but not quite... and when I came out I realized that if I had been able to stay there long enough I may have been able to at least have a lucid dream.

So I don't know what is going on with this. Before that one of the times I came out of it, there was a bright flash of white light and the jolt was extremely violent, like being hit with a hammer or something, as if I had been going very deep and suddenly aborted.

"Prolonged and regular use will cause the primal area of your brain to secrete a mucus-like substance that you will feel at the back of your head. It is somewhat like a hung-over feeling. Those who easily see auras will also see this mucus extending into the subtle energy bodies. That has to be of some concern."

do you have any medicinal proof to back up this mucus claim?

yes I try to AP alone..

I guess it COULD be apnea, but I never find myself gasping for breath, perhaps my body is doing something weird when I fall asleep though.

About 3 years ago, around age 14-15ish, I started sleeping on my back, and I'd frequently wake up gasping for breath, so I stopped doing that and it hasn't happened since..

I know what you are talking about with the paralysis and not being able to breathe, that is really scary and I get it on my stomach sometimes too, but I think (at least for me) it's just in my head... that I can really breathe I just think I'm suffocating because my face is up against the pillow.

But I try not to ever be in that same position either... once in the car I woke up into paralysis and felt a bunch of drool slowly sliding down my throat... I thought I was about to die with my entire family around and there wasn't a thing I could do about it... I think I fell back asleep and woke up into paralysis several more times before being able to move my head to a better angle.

I think that if you started to inhale drool your body would immediately wake up and cough it up though? Well anyway, it was scary.

I don't have anyone to sleep with ( [] ) and if I did I'm sure they would hate me because I tend to hit SP and come out of it punching at things that aren't really there, and I have so many false awakenings that if someone was trying to talk to me during one of them I'd probably freak out on them thinking they were... you know... not real...

I could see myself injuring someone pretty badly due to that, actually....

but I don't have any friends that could just watch me try to AP or anything either... I have a teacher that meditates and I could talk to her about it, but I lack the initiative and confidence to really initiate a meditation conversation with her.

Some good old alcohol would fix that... but you know... I'm old enough to be drafted to die for oil, but not old enough to drink.

land of the free?

now when you say "visualize"

do you actually see it like it was a vivid dream, or do you just very loosely pretend you are on a roller coaster but you don't really see it very well... it's kind of like halfway buried inside your head and fades in and out (that's why my "visualizations" are like)

that sounds really great that you can make yourself feel like you're on a roller coaster though... I did that while dreaming about one last night.. I finally got on it but I forgot what the layout looked like so I had to make it up while I was going along... the physics were completely fake but we went into some sort of loop that twists into a barrel roll at the top then vertically spirals down into a really tight curve...

it was great, though it only felt maybe 75% real...

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prolonged exposure to adrenaline is bad because it wears out your body.... adrenaline keeps you in the "fight or flight" scenario, which is stressful for the body to be in for long periods of times, which is why stress is very bad for you.... as is anxiety.

doing this at night probably isn't even remotely close to being a problem and can be good for you, but you shouldn't spend hours doing it or anything like that.

[I cannot NAP no matter what]

well part of the reason i can "relax" so quickly is that i have severe .... something... problems... i guess you could call it chronic fatigue? I don't know... just general lack of energy unless I have just been immediately excercising, it's probably related to my horrible diet...

but I tried yelling... I went crazy inside, but it all died anyway.

See, I think there is a form of insomnia related to the falling asleep then jerking awake, and I think something is wrong with you if that happens every single night, etc..... so I think if I were more "normal" in sleep cycles, etc... then I would not be having this problem.

Because I tell you, I cannot NAP no matter what the best I get is 30 minutes half awake/half asleep....

So it's like, I know I'm getting deep enough since I can sometimes feel the paralysis rushing in, but while it is rushing in I'm waking up, so there is no point to it... the tiem to leave the body is the time when MY mind is sleeping, and my "Unconscious" is rambling on and on.

It's like an off switch is flipped in my head... I mean... when I get to the borderline state where I know I'm not going to be "awake" for more than half a minute I can just go crazy screaming in my mind, trying to do rope, saying over and over again "your mind is going to stay awake while your body goes to sleep"  but it JUST DOESN'T WORK...

i spent hours this morning upon waking up messing around with it, and yes I eventually ended up in non-lucid dreams, which eventually led to lucid dreams... but... I mean I remember I was saying a mantra about staying focused over and over again, and all of a sudden an hour had passed and I had been half awake/asleep and dissconnected from myself, and I was like "what happened to my mantra? Was I asleep?"

I just do not have the capability to focus my mind at all really, not when it starts the process of going into sleep frequencies.

Unless I happen to be in sleep paralysis or somthing during the normal night anyway.

and I tried it sitting down in a comfortable chair and the same thing happened last week, I could try sitting on the floor but I think I'd either fall down when I hit paralysis, waking myself up, or that I wouldn't be comfortable enough to get there in the first place.

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also I dont' really use any method to get to this state, I just let my mind do what it wants to and keep the desire to get there in the back of my mind.... rope and such is completely pointless for me until i'm actually paralyzed, mainly becuase i can't focus enough to even imagine a rope once i get near the state.

it's called a myoclonic jerk and is related to hypnagogic hallucinations while falling asleep...

it's perfectly normal, why it happens is anyone's guess though..

it could be your astral body separating, you could be falling asleep so fast that your body thinks you are dying, so it sends a huge jolt through you...

it usually happens when you are imagining that you are like walking down the street or something and then you trip, and it feels just like you tripped, and you know the tripping in the dream happens right when your body is shutting itself down, so it jerks you awake.

but it's normal.... and I hate it, it keeps me from OBEing.

[this light is not my own]

all beliefs are equally valid/invalid... and all beliefs are equally likely.

since there are 6 billion people in the world, and each of them have different sets of beliefs, even if they adhere to an organized religion... and since mankind has been around and developed religions since the beginning of time, which is.......... i have no idea how long... thousands of years...

those are thousands of billions of different belief systems.

the chance that any one of them could be precisely right is extremely obscure.

and in my darkest moment fetal and weeping
the moon tells me a secret, my confidant
as full and bright as i am
this light is not my own and
a million light reflections pass over me.

if you were born into christianity, your beliefs are NOT your own, they are direct reflections of your parents, preachers, teachers, etc.

Think about it. Imagine you were born in the middle east.... you'd be saying the exact same thing right now, except you'd be questioning Islam (providing you were an exact duplicate of yourself, just in a different location.

If you were born in India you'd probably be a Hindu. If you were born in Africa you'd probably be a "pagan" but regardless of where you were born, YOU THINK YOUR BELIEFS ARE RIGHT.

They aren't even your beliefs to begin with. I could take a kid and convince him the sun is God, very very easily, so could you, and that is precisely what society and especially our parents to do us.

They take THEIR beliefs (which they got from someone else) and they tell you that they are right, and force them into your head before you know any better.

If you kept a kid locked in a woodshed you could convince him nothing exists outside the shed and that if he stepped out of it, he would die... it's like that Greek philosophy story about the people that refused to leave the cave.

There is nothing wrong with questioning and even abandoning your beliefs, it's the only way for you to establish your own identity. You aren't thinking for yourself if everything you know about life is shaped by a book that someone else conditioned you to believe to be true.

If there is a God, and he is even remotely "loving" and "forgiving" like the Bible wants you to think, he is not going to send you to hell for trying to find the truth for yourself... he's going to praise you for it.

Think about it... why would God want people putting blind faith into something that they were raised into? I mean... seriously... corrupt, horrible people, have controlled organized religion since the beginning of time.... look at the horrible things that Church did in the middle ages, do you really think that they wouldn't alter the Bible, WHEN THEY ARE THE ONLY ONES THAT HAVE COPIES OF IT, to suit their well beings and to better control people? It is widely thought that the whole concept of hell was invented by the church during those time periods to scare people into doing what they say.

God does not want you being a blind sheep.... it is that blind faith that makes tyranny, oppression, murder, etc. possible. God doesn't want you saying Heil Bush, or Heil Hitler, he wants you looking at why you believe what you do, and trying to make sense out of all of it, he doesn't want you sending fuckloads of money to televangelists just because they say JESUS in a nice, sentimental southern accent.

"To think for yourself you must question authority."
But I don't know how to put this rant any simpler than to quote reflection.

and in my darkest moment fetal and weeping
the moon tells me a secret, my confidant
as full and bright as i am
this light is not my own and
a million light reflections pass over me.

If your beliefs are worth having in the first place they will survive open minded and objective questioning. God doesn't want you blindly trusting rich, murdeorus, corrupt people (Bush/Osama, using God as a reason to kill, for example), nor does he want you trusting people that are making money in his name.

I mean either a huge chunk of the world is predestined to hell and God is a big bully, or he understand what people are going through and as long as they try and find their own spirituality, he's happy... he created them in the exact circumstances in which they live in after all, so he should certainly understand what they are going through, he's supposed to be omnipotent... how can he expect you to randomly choose from 3 or 4 mainstreamed religions and just HOPE that you picked the "right" one?

Questioning your beliefs is a key step in achieiving your own idenitity, and this goes for OBE beliefs too.. why do you even believe in a belief zone just because you've read about it, for example?

Even if you manage to go to one while out of body it could just be the result of your subconscious recreating something that you had previously read about.

Question everything.

well the falling feeling can last a very long time...

but the actual feeling you get when you know your body is asleep and you are paralyzed, that only lasts very very shortly.

my normal mind stops thinking and my unconscious/subconscious mind starts wandering and making me hear voices and see things.

and when that happens, i almost fall into a trance, but i since my normal mind has fallen asleep, i can't stay in it and i jolt out of it really fast.

it's almost exactly like when you are going to bed and you start to dream that you are walking. and then you trip on something in the dream and it makes you jerk awake.

i think i have a sleeping disorder or something because i have this problem a lot, i automatically jerk awake whenever i start falling asleep.

but my problem with trying to OBE is that I can't keep my mind awake while I put my body to sleep,  basically.

from my experience it works with limited success...

when i went lucid i "meditated" within the dream and i said to myself "this is a trance, when i want to go back here, all I have to do is say xxxxxxxxxx"

and then when I woke up, I said it, and instant paralysis.... but come morning time it didn't work anymore...

I think that is how hypnosis tends to work though, suggestions via cue words work for a while, then they wear off.... but maybe if you are in one of those "proper" hypnosis states that are really deep, you can give yourself a word that will work over and over again, providing you want it to.

I did this twice, and both times it seemed to work only during the immediate hours after the dream.

The problem is I used common phrases, such as the word "trance" itself,a nd I mean, I think the word TRANCE so much when I have no intent in going into one, that it could negate the hypnotic effect it once had.

So maybe making the hypnotic cue somethine like "antidisestablishmentarianism" might work better... I don't know.

hypnotist probably has something to say about it.

and as for other suggestions such as "talk to girls more" i don't know... I think it'd help more to just find a dream girl, try and convince yourself she is real, then talk to her.

i don't mean to criticize your views but there are an infinite amount of other solutions to your nightmares rather than "evil spirits", you shouldn't limit yourself to that way of thinking.

I mean it's like if you see something bad in real life, like a buildling blowing up, then you fixate upon how bad it was, you are going to dream about it over and over again.

If you have a nightmare about something, and you convince yourself it was a spirit and that you are being haunted, you ARE going to have more and more dreams about that "spirit" but it doesn't necessarily make it a real spirit.

If you see a scary movie that really bothered you you're going to have a lot of dreams about it, etc... it's the same principle.

Whether it is a real spirit or not, if it keeps bothering with you, YOU need to deal with it, have faith in yourself, don't try and hide, don't run to others for help... look to YOURSELF for help, if you aren't big enough to help yourself, how is a preacher or God going to do it for you?

I'm not sure what religion you follow if any, but you've probably heard the phrase "God helps those that helps themselves" ? If the spirit could kill you, you'd be dead by now, so fight it... seriously, why should you let it control you? Fight it, beat it, stop thinking about, stop worrying about it, and it'll rarely if ever show up anymore.

I went through some weird things with "negs" but getting caught up in worrying about whether they are real or not makes no difference. If they are real, you're screwed, if they aren't, you're still screwed because they wont' leave you alone. So in the end it doesn't matter the slightest whether they are or aren't, what matters is overcoming them, and the only way to effectively do this is on your own, you can gather support/faith from other people, deities, etc, but the ultimate factor lies within YOU defeating them yourself.

I mean, for example... if I put all my faith into this styrofoam cup I have right here, and I believe that if I ask it to, it will protect me from spirits in my dreams, and then I ask it to tonight, I'm probably not going to have a bad dream, becuase I feel secure in knowing that the cup will take care of me.

But how long is that going to last? You have to have faith in yourself in order for faith in other things to work. Have some fun combating these demons in your dreams, it is very satisfying, though hard to do at first. But like I said, if they could hurt you, you'd be hurt by now, so there isn't much to worry about if they confront you, give them a good beating and tell them to leave you alone, and try and keep your mind open to other possibilities.

You don't know whether they are real or not, they could be representative of problems in your life, or watching too many movies, being malnourished, etc, etc.... so think about the other options, too.

also, stay out of the psychic self defense forums, garbage in, garbage out. Reading those forums made me become preoccupied with the fancies of "negs" and voila, they started showing up. Stearing away from that kind of reading stopped it.

It's like I could tell you a story about certain really bad things that can happen to you while dreaming, and then you'd be likely to experience them because you worry about them. And all it takes is one quick bad thought during a dream to turn it back like "I hope I don't fall into that pit of alligators" while flying over them.

So expose yourself to positive stories about angels, maybe, things like that.

I'm not saying that there aren't spirits out there, or that the PSD forum goers are crazy, but dwelling upon negative entities is only going to make you encounter them more, real or imagined. It's best to go about those things on your own and make your own conclusions, so if you want to stop experiencing "negs", stop thinking about them, and especially reading about them, and when they do come try and figure out how to defeat them on your own.

Some people will disagree with me here but I went through it and it more or less worked. All it takes is a few passing thoughts about a thread you read about negs to cause a nightmare about them. The key is positivity.


having said that.. probably my worst "nightmare" ever was my first episode of sleep paralysis with visual hallucination... I saw a cloaked figure with a huge sword floating at the foot of my bed at around age 12, and I really thought I was about to die, like it was the grim reaper for real or something, becuase I couldn't move and I was awake, and I had no idea what could be going on.....

It terrified me for a long time.

quote:Originally posted by kiauma

Yes, follow the falling sensation.  If you set the intent of OBE, it will happen.

or you'll lose focus and fall halfway asleep, then jolt back into focus, accomplishing nothing.

basically, it won't happen, from my experience.

but i guess the more you have it the more likely you are going to be to eventually succeede with it... but i've played with that state for 3 months and have had no success.
(during the day)

but are you saying you can just create a fake falling sensation, or you can actually produce the real thing that you get via shutting your body down at will? Because if you can do that you should probably be able to instantly fall asleep or into a trance (if you can focus enough) whenever you want, instanteously.

the very subtle falling feeling doesn't really do anything from my experience though, but it can sometimes be used to trick my body into producing adrenaline, which is fun.

and prolonged exposure to adrenaline is bad for you, so if you're triggering adrenaline (if what you are talking about is a full blown myoclonic jerk [like when you are almost asleep and you feel like you trip over something] then you are) which is why stress is horrible for you.

but in small doses adrenaline is great for you, so if it's just briefly done while trying to fall asleep/meditate/etc... it's fine for you as long as you don't have a heart condition or something.

I'm not sure I've ever been able to project from involuntary sleep paralysis, but self induced paralysis during the night, yes, all the time.

The best way to enter sleep paralysis is to have a lucid dream during an early stage of REM sleep (for me this is harder than the last stages) basically... the stage before you ever wake up at all during the night...

like
*falling asleep*-------->dreaming------------->wakeup, back to sleep------>dreaming------->wake up, back to sleep------>dreaming-->wake up

that's kidn of what my night is like... so the first or second dreaming sessions, when you are really deeply out of it and the dreams seem the most "coherent" (they tend to have elaborate plots for me, but are the hardest to remember)

if you somehow trigger lucidity during those stages, and force yourself awake, after dealing with dozens (possibly) of false awakenings, you'll finally "awake" into paralysis.

It can be a false-paralysis within a dream though...

also right in the morning if you know you need to get up but you don't want to, and then you worry that you're late, that usually triggers paralysis for me since I feel like I need to get up NOW but my body disagrees.

it's really just best to when you wake up from a dream in the morning, to roll over, focus on your body, clear you head and feel it paralyze... it doesn't always work but if you're in the right state it's very easy.

I am very familiar with the hypnagogic state as it is a roadblack on the way to OBE for me.

I can get there within ten to fifteen minutes on average, during the day... I do suspect that with proper motivation I could do it whenever, except maybe right after sleeping for 12 hours.

The problem is it is a passive hypnagogic state... I made a thread about this that is currently around page 8 of the general OBE discussion, it's called "something something hypnagogic state" if you want to search for it.. I also just now made a simpler one about my current troubles.

But basically my unconscious takes over and my conscious dies, and so then all of a sudden I'll get a myoclonic jerk (falling feeling) and I'll be back in my normal mind...

it's like a bouncing ball.. it takes a long time to hit the ground the first time, but after that it happens more and more and more and more and you go deeper and deeper and deeper until you can't stay conscious for more than 15 seconds at a time.

Then if you move after getting to that point it dies and you spend a considerably longer time getting back than you did in the beginning.

But you know... I just cannot stay "awake" or "alive" or "focused" or "thinking" and I can't get my unconscious to shut up (I often tell it to while it's "thinking" while I am still loosely awake)... so it's like... when I'm paralyzed there is no use, becuase I'm not awake to make use of the paralysis, then when I jolt out of the half asleep state my paralysis dies.

I've tried everything to keep my mind awake, if you have any tips please post them in my "falling asleep" thread or my hypnagogic state thread both in general OBE discussion.

as for how I get there... I find that you get there by causing gaps in your CONSCIOUS trail of thought... the problem is you cannot be aware of these gaps until they are already over.... I basically like to just loop something in my head over and over again... like if I'm making a breating pattern sometimes a weird string of sounds/words/thoughts pops into my head that goes along with what I'm doing, and I just kind of put that on loop, and say it over and over again... and then all of a sudden I'll lose track of myself and get close to the hypnagogic state.

Trying to imagine a figure climbing down a ladder works real well at first, and it hits a point where the ladder starts spinning around in a circle and you can't even begin to try and make him climb down it anymore, that usually gets you fairly close.

Imagining there is a little stick that is spinning around in your head (and trying to visualize it) helps get me groggy sometimes...

If I can hear my unconscious but I'm not going deep enough, talking to it works wonders.. it'll say random nonsense like "John went to the refill" and I'll say "What refill?" Or I'll just repeat what it said back to it.. and then it'll say something else... and that makes me really tired and disconnected.

But all these things work at shutting down my conscious and jump starting my unconscious, so they might just put you to sleep.. I don't know.

i agree with you but when you are in the experience it isn't the easiest thing to stop and analyze, especially since you've been sleeping all night and your brain is "mushy" so to speak.

something like this happened again a day or so ago, though not as disorienting.

here is what I wrote, i briefly did a search/replace to filter some profanity but there may be some in there uncensored, I don't think any of you care but the profanity seems kind of absent on these boards so i thought i'd give a warning



Of importance though was a very strange dream/OBE/sleep paralysis/ I don't know what the hell it was.

I was lightly sleeping and I heard a ringing, as if my phone had a low battery... it gradually shifted me into an angry consciousness and I wondered why I had my phone right there by my head like that. I got up and picked it up while looking at the clock, and it read (to the best of my recollection) 7/29 6(followed by random number gibberish that made sense yet simultaneously didn't)

The first thing to strike me as odd was the date. I thought "I don't remember my clock having the date on it." then I thought "these dates and times don't make much sense" then I thought "I wonder if I'm dreaming." I watched the clock passively and it started rapidly (and seemingly chronologically) shifting through times.

I had to be dreaming, but the question is how? I've had so many false awakenings that I am fairly damn good at noticing them (unless they are part of a dream within a dream) and I really didn't know why I would out of seeming nothingness transition into hearing my phone beeping (given I'm not very familiar with hearing such things) and having it WAKE ME UP... it was very vividly and flawlessly executed. I mean... it was perfect.

let's say Freddy Krueger existed and he wanted to lure me into a trap and kill my butt... this would have been flawless work at its finest. I mean I didn't just see the numbers and go "whoah, it's a dream" I saw them and sat there obvliiously contemplating my state of reality for a while... I mean... man.. the transition, the "waking up" it was just...

So real. I've never ever transitioned from a state of more or less non dreaming sleep (i suppose I could have been dreaming and not rememebered it, or been half dreaming) into a FALSE AWAKENING. I mean damn, this is good stuff.

So anyway also of further interest is I normally wake up frequently from 3 a.m. to whenever it is I get up, 6:30 in todays case. This did not happen, to the best of my recollection I had my 3 a.m. ish awakening then the next time I woke was right before the alarm went off.

So I mean, perfect deception, I expected it to be a typical wake up every 15 minutes scenario, it was so trippy (in retrospect, I didn't think it was too trippy at the time)

Back to what was happening... after realizing the clock was f*cked up and that is a sure sign of dreaming, i still had my doubts. I had to establish that I was indeed dreaming by getting up and flying around my room, and even then it felt odd, kind of surreal.

I remember thinking something akin to "i'm flying, this can't be real so I can go jump off the stairs, it won't hurt me" but I was so reluctant to do so.. I'm floating about my room yet I still am a bit uncertain as to whether this is "real" or not.

I realize that if I can fly I can jump off of something with no problem, so I do it... only I don't come to the nicest of smooth landings, I hit the ground at seemingly full force, it doesn't hurt though.

I go outside and fly around and I see a rainbow in the night/dusky sky.. I'm thinking "sweet, I'll go visit the rainbow" so I fly toward it, insanely slowly like I'm not moving... yet I get there within 15 seconds.

So when I get closer I notice the colors are all wrong, mainly just red and green... and I also notice that it isn't a rainbow, but fireworks streaming through the air (probably due to the video I watched of those kids shooting fireworks at that kid wearing a target)

Well.. I realized I shouldn't be in the midst of about to explode fireworks, and of course they started exploding.. it was pretty despite mild pain and burning sensations, and I scrambled to get a farther away vantage point.

I then told myself "the next rainbow you are going to see is going to be a real rainbow, not fireworks."
So that did the trick, I immediately found another one and flew to it.

When I got near it it would have seemed to me (as of now) that I transitioned into a building of some sort, though I was still very much flying.. the rainbow was kind of painted (though it existed as an actual rainbow) on a wall, and the top half looked semi normal and pretty and the bottom half was horribly horribly distorted and stretched and convulsed (this happens to me when I try to read cards in dream that I have taped to my window in real life)

I didn't think much of it other than wishing it was vivid and real looking, and I flew into this opening inside the middle of the rainbow into an alice in wonderland like cartoon room.

It was fairly small and looked like an animatronic set from disneyland, like say in Toon town when you go in Minnies house.... there is a robot like (though very cartoon and alice in wonderland trippy looking) cat in a chair, and some sort of old time disney-esque cartoon playing on a loop on some sort of tv or maybe it was projected onto the wall. It involved a black car and some sort of character to the best of my recollection.

I wasn't really interested in this place and I looked around it briefly, there was a cartoonish stove or something in the room (REALLY remniscent of going through the Toon Town attractions in disneyland) and I looked at the rainbow entrance which I had come in with the intent of leaving, only to find that the entrance was roughly the size of a small post office box.

I was at first concerned about how to get out but realized size doesn't really mean a damn thing and if I was good enough I could simply will myself through the walls... as soon as that realization sank in the cat said to me something like "you know you cannot go back" or "you are not going to back" or "you will not go back" but it sounded kind of ... well.. epic and omniscient, kind of fearful in a way.

I of course knew he was full of sh*t and I could do whatever the hell I wanted, but as soon as he said it involuntarily woke up.

or, so I thought. This is where it gets trippier.

I seem to recall getting up and noting that it was roughly 6:00, maybe 6:06 to be exact, I did not test the clock by repeatedly looking at it to see if I was awake because I assumed I was.

I tried to go back into dream, and I initiated a semi state of psychological paralysis, much like the state I hit when I try to meditate into astral projection during the day (but never succede)

Now I have to stress the psychological part of this, becasue I have been in that state enough to know that though my hands feel completely paralyzed, they in fact aren't and can be willed to move easily.

I took this as a sign of defeat that I wouldn't be reentering the dreams before I had to get up at 6:30, and I got up to look at the clock again...

But here's the kicker.. it felt as if I had just left my body (i think) because I immediately prompted myself to do a clock test, and it looked just like it did before.

This bewildered me to no end becuase first:
How did I leave my body by entering PSYCHOLOGICAL paralysis, a state that I "knew" was not for real and thereby would not have intiated a projection on me.
Second: I'm not sure that it ever felt like I left my body, I do believe it felt like I just normally got up.... so this brings into question: did I ever even wake up from the cat dream? If so how did I convince myself, whilst looking at the clock, that I was awake?
Third: WHAT THE HELL WAS THE CAT TALKING ABOUT... I sure as hell didn't go back, that was for sure.

I forced myself awake (for real this time) and it was 6:11 or somewhere around there.



Now.. this really f*cked with my perceptions of reality... it made me think that maybe all the times I meditated and thought I wasn't paralyzed, maybe I was.. and maybe if I had done reality tests during those sessions I would have discovered I was really out of body instead of just thinking I had still failed at hitting a trance.

But if this were so, why were clocks always accurate and why was everything so vivid? The clock test seems to only fail maybe 5% of the time, and that is even if you only look at it once. Given I tend to look at the clock at least 3 times throughout a meditation session I would think if at any time I were not in the physical realm the clock would be chornologically wrong to a huge degree (like saying 69:00 or 11:00 when it's only 3:00)

So then I thought well okay maybe that state of paralysis is not real and this morning you just never really woke up from that cat dream.

That makes enough sense, but then I have to wonder, how on earth did I know it was 6:00 while I was still dreaming? I thought at the very latest it was 4-5... maybe my subconscious keeps track of time, but if so, time should always be accurate while dreaming.

And didn't I look at the clock? The odds of it being right seem so small if I never woke up? If I didn't look at the clock how did I know upon FINALLY waking up, that the "false awakening" from the cat dream happened at more or less 6:06? I wasn't alert enough to do math in my head.

"I think in trying to do self-healing I surfaced a fear, I think neg-related. So going straight to the astral is "safer." The fear was probably always there, but overriden by my joy in trying. And now my life is so busy I need all the deep sleep I can get. "

What I'm about to say is going to be unpopular but:

Stay away from the psychic self defense forums. The same happened to me for a while, I got caught up in all these stories of negs and it made me think things like "are these dreams I had caused by negs? Is something really bad happening to me?" and this caused me to dream about negs and to have lots of bad experiences.

I don't t hink they are real. They could be, but I really don't care at all. My advice is to not worry about it, treat it as nothing more than a creation of the mind and if it happens a lot try and find some proof maybe.

I can't get proof. No legitimate conversations, nothing.

So basically I think it's a bunch of nonsense... negs may very well exist but you shouldn't worry about them. Just fight anything bad off and unless it's a recurring experience, don't let it get to you.

If it is keep all possibilities open and try to hold conversations with them.

interrupted sleep is no problem for me, it's a piece of cake to project during the night

the past two nights in a row around 7 a.m. I can just say "hey i'll go into paralysis" and do it at the drop of the hat.

it's very light though and i'm not out very long, usually.

though last night my recurring themes of being raped popped back up... i  completely beat the thing down and set him on fire and did all sorts of stuff then talked to him, it's obvious to me he isn't real (though i think he is at the time) but I'm not sure why this started happening again other than that I wrote about it in a paper last night.

It might be due to feelings of gas or something biological going on in that area (given that I am a male and i called the figure a he you should be able to figure out how that could cause me to dream about such things being done to me) is about all I can think of, as the issues that would seem to make it manifest I have already more or less dealt with and accepted.

But anyway this was a somewhat isolated incident and it may have just happened due to me interpreting a weird experience and expecting it to be that old famliar thing going on again.

My problem with meditation (if you can call it that) is during the day, the hypnagogic state is NOT an interactive experience. I will be thinking, and I will verge off rack and lose focus. After a short or great while of time spent doing this passes, the time spent rambling off track starts becoming done unconsciously, sometimes taking on a different voice.

So it's like, how are you supposed to do anything if you aren't conscious? There has to be a way to get into a LUCID hypnagogic state, I mean I can be aware that I'm hallucinating sometimes but If I try to do anything to it it stops.

So.

The answer may be extremely intense focusing and not allowing yourself to think at all, but I find that impossible. I can block verbal thoughts after a while, but then the unconscious ones take over, and I get too groggy and disoriented to try to silence them.

Breath awareness is perfect for that point in time but the problem is it is an energizing form of meditation, it seems to pull me away from the sleep state of mind, instead of going down (as in, down into paralysis) I go up... wherever that is.

Concidentally that "up" is very close to the hypnagogic state, it just has extremely different vivid but focused and non dissociated traits.. and the only hallucinations are floating colors, which I haven't had success in using to project. If I focus on them then I drift into unconsciousness, if I focus on breathing and them I just stay there forever and it eventually fades into a normal state of mind.

It's all very confusing.

I think I have something wrong with me in terms of sleep becuase it's very hard to stay asleep for more than 3 full hours, usually 2. And I don't ever seem to go very deep. So maybe this is why I am jolted out of the hypnagogic state no matter what and I can't get deep enough in it to come out into vibrations.

The only way for me to fall asleep in a directed manner is to initiate the state then stop caring about it and to move around a bit and fidget a lot...

otherwise I tend to just think forever and never get tired.

well i still can't get there and i don't think i actually progressed at all

when i start drifting in and out of consciousness i apply the breath awareness and stuff and it makes me feel kind of weird but i never go into a paralysis and stuff, it just eventually brings me back to a normal state of mind.

i have no idea what i'm doing wrong

quote:Originally posted by Nomus

Hi

I didn't have time enough to read through all the pages so, If this has already been mentioned, then it was my mistake.

Wouldn't it be proof enough if you saw your own body, lying in bed (or wherever you ap)? To actually be able to see your own body when you know for a fact that you are outside of it. Wouldn't that be proof enough?

Kazbadan: Is that a ball lightning?

Well it would be nice..... and frankly it hasn't really happened to me that I can vividly recall.. I remember forcing my body onto the bed by  expecting it to be there and thinking "okay my body HAS to be in my bed" but I didn't look quite right and after much inspection I noted that my clothes were different than what I was wearing at the time.

That's kind of the same way I encountered astral feedback... I dreamed I had gone OBE and thought "hmm I wonder if astral feedback is real, let's see" and I expected something to happen... it did and it was weird, painful, and cool... but of course it was based entirely upon what Bruce describes it to be, hence I don't know that that is any real "proof" ..

plus it was all going on within a dream.

I really really really really really want to be able to go to real places in the physical realm and see what is happening in them in real time... like find a hot girls house and explore it, maybe enter her dreams or try to pull her out of her body.

Or maybe like...go to Magic Mountain and ride REALISTIC recreations of the rides there.

That would own.

when i try to make a psi ball my hands feel extremely heavy and "movey" ... well all my energy feels weird, I don't know if it's because I lack focus or what but it will rotate clockwise a bit then randomly switch to counter clockwise and twist around and remain unconstant, and I find it extremely hard to sometimes direct it in a circular patter, I can do a detached imagination of it but to make the energy try to kind of "obey" to spin right doesn't work...

so basically I just go with whatever it wants to do but try to stimulate that area in as many different was as possible

so anyway my hand gets really heavy like it was paralyzed, only it isn't, sometimes my whole arms do...i can instantenously channel "energy" through my hands but I really have no idea what use to put it to and whether it's real or not... I cannot make a psiball... the energy is INSIDE my hands and well sometimes I can get a flat floppy feeling formation between them but I never feel like I'm actually holding a ball so to speak.

When I'm dreaming it's effortless to make and see psiballs, and I use the exact same technique, so I wonder if there is validity to what I'm doing in the dream (i.e. i'm using "dream energy" ) or if it's just what I think a psi ball should techically look and feel like.

?

One time I felt a little bit of heat in my hands but with the intense haviness i feel in them with little effort put forth I would think if a "psi ball" could be made and something could be done with it, I would have figured it out by now.

[?][]

interesting about the christmas decorations, i once had a few chains of OBE's (or maybe WLDs?) much like that with seeming exact replicas (though how can I know? It was just my impression that it was supposed to be in the past) of how they were laid out.

one thing I've found about cars is they are extremely good tools for flying, sense you expect a car to go fast it tends to be more efficient to fly in a car (or in my case my uncle's truck which I kind of borrowed without permission and almost crashed into a variety of rooftops with) than to try to fly on your own.

that might be because I expected cars to be faster flying that I normally would be though, but man it was fun and weird... kind of like I was in charge of mentally changing the elevation but the truck controls were in charge of keeping it going and steering.

Well think about it...

say you OBE and you aren't sure if it's proof of the afterlife but it eases your apprehension and makes you less afraid of dying.

Well say death isn't the ultimate OBE, oh well, at least you weren't as afraid while dying... you know?

Sure you could say that about any religion under the face of this earth I guess, but the difference is this is YOUR OWN SPIRITUALITY not someone elses that has been fed to you.

It's up to you to decide what to make out of these experiences really.

I haven't the slightest clue whether they are real or not, sometimes I'm inclined to think so, sometimes not. But I mean there is just so much that I can't really explain at all that I would think something "spiritual" is going on.

I mean in the field of lucid dreams I've been able to get sometimes accurate information. I recently remembered a model roller coaster company in development which I had long forgotten about, and started dreaming about them, and then looking for them (to no avail) well in a recent dream I somehow gathered that they were still in business and would be releasing their product in March (or sometime this spring I guess, I don't remember) and a few days later some search on some RC forums dragged up an amazingly sweet looking project (not by the same company though) that is due for release IN MARCH. In fact they and their amazing model were really brought to light in the coaster community in mid January about when I first started wondering about these things and having the dreams.

So I mean... explain that? It seems vaguely familiar that I've seen these types of models before but I don't think I knew that someone was working on a commercially available kit... the other business has kind of stagnated but I mean... to pull a date out of my unconscious would prove that either I'm psychic or lucky... but it seems more like it was yanked from a sort of collective unconscious.

Sure it can just randomly grab a near by date as I would be hopeful for it to be out ASAP but I really didn't think any such projects existed and kept wondeirng why I was so willing to believe they did in my dreams.

Yeah anyway that might have been a bit too detailed of an account but little things like these really make me wonder... if I live my life searching for answers only to find out there are none then oh well, it's better than remaining bound by an oppressive belief system that was brainwashed into me as a child... and I hardly think if there is a God ou there that he'd punish me for being reluctant to trust authority figures in foricng me into the correct religion.

I could burn in hell I suppose... but if he's that way I don't really want to bow down to him in fear anyway.... and given the vast amount of belief systems out there it's unlikely yours is the correct one...

I mean it's unlikely THERE IS A CORRECT ONE since in order to know "the truth" you probably wouldn't have a need to be human anymore...

But what I'm getting at in a rambling manner is if you find your own answers you'll live an interesting and hopefully peaceful life, and if you're wrong you probably aren't going to lose much anyway.

So just explore and find something, or find nothing maybe... but I encourage people to look and "think for themselves".

And if you want to know whether OBE's are real or not try to find information from your friends that you don't know about them while lucid or out of body, etc, and try and have them validate it, such as mother's maiden name, etc... I'm loosely working on doing that right now with someone I barely know, if I get an answer it'd be awkward randomly talking to her and asking her her mother's maiden name though, but I figure it's my best shot at accuracy since I'd have almost no way of randomly making it up or unconsciously already knowing it and not remembering.

quote:Originally posted by kiauma

HR to classify any sounds as hypnogogic halucinations is a bit premature I think.  It is true this occurs while in the hypnogogic state, but I would not presume to say with certainty WHAT the source of the noise is for every case.  I have had experiences that were hypnogogic halucinations, and they are very real, but the context told me it was just a halucination.

In the context of OBE, I have experienced several times while in deep night paralysis trance with vibrations that my hearing would suddenly seem to 'open up', as though I had been deaf all my life and suddenly I could truly hear.  It could be argued that this was halucinations but I think it was Clairaudience, the ability to hear psychically.  The noises then were running water, tapping sticks, and low, muffled chanting.

As to distracting noises while attempting OBE, my advice is to learn to just ignore them.  You don't know what they are - they may be halucination, they may be something in your house, they may be something in the astral plane - but whatever they are they are a distraction, and need to be ingnored.

If it's a robber just be thankful you will die in your sleep.

(Yeesh, sometimes I have the darkest humor. [] )

Well those don't really sound like typical exit sounds... I agree that hearing can be heigthened when in different states of mind and it might not have anything to do with hallucinations, but exit sensations most certainly do.

I mean if you take the AP stance, we leave our bodies whenever we sleep, which would explain "hypnagogic hallucinations" in astral terms. If you take the science stance, our mind starts hallucinating when it enters various stages of sleep. In either case, violent, sudden, loud noises are heard while exiting body and while falilng asleep/waking up...

And frankly exiting the body is exactly like going to sleep (well the very quick heavily vibration induced rapid exit feels like it to me) in the physical and mental way, just that you stay alert and take it a step further and intiate motion outward (or inward to a lucid dream, etc.)

So it's just semantics.

Anyway about the hearing opening up... that really is something else. Usually it's so subtle that I don't notice it, but I remember a day ago while doing something, either trying to sleep or trying to project, I was hearing my fan reverberating off the wall.. I mean.. it was so quiet and faint.. often times I will hear this in sleep parlaysis and it's even that much louder and sounds like alien clicking all around me and eventually when I get my senses straightened out it dims down and I notice it's coming from the fans sound bouncing off the wall... but still, to pick up on something that subtle is pretty amazing, especially since my ears are so clogged up.

melatonin might help (taken at night) since it's supposed to be what the body releases to put you to sleep

personally i have taken around 6+ things of it at once though and not really noticed any effects... i'm not sure if tolerance is built but if i only use it once in a blue moon a normal dose sometimes seems to work

it might just be a placebo effect though.

Where can the drinkable kava kava be bought? A pharmacy?