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I'd say.. have a focus..

Whether it be a physical place or a person...

Basically somewhere or something that you know really well. Do your best to concentrate on everything about this place/person.

Let me know how this works for you!

Definitely possible! 

Here's some proof for you:

It was 1:05 AM when I slipped in bed. Before I went to sleep I decided I would do a little reading. I looked over the notes I printed out earlier on lucid dreaming and my old dream journal entries. Eventually, I started to get tired so – I retired. Because I had previously spoken to Abby about meeting her at the marketplace, I figured I would do a little meditation first and then start the phasing process.

I started off by pretending I was walking to the marketplace. I really tried to focus on the sensations associated with walking while at the same time visualizing my surroundings. I recall seeing Abby sitting at the table in front of the marketplace waiting for me. Suddenly, everything became real. I remember being shocked at how lucid I was. As soon as I realized the shift had taken place, the scenario shifted and I found myself moving in an upwards motion. I was being snapped back to my room.

I find myself in my bed, faced downwards feeling the usual symptoms of a traditional OBE. In the blackness I saw a number "3" etched in pinkish-yellow light. I think to myself, "its backwards" (it wasn't).  As I twirl in midair, I remember my mission to meet with Abby. I tried to get back to her but with no luck. Instead, I ended up being pulled upwards, through the ceiling and into the sky.

I wake up and think it's over. The lights are on and I pick up my i-pod. I decide to listen to it while I go back to sleep. I put on a Tool song. Soon, I start to feel strange sensations. My eyes are vibrating, much like they would during REM sleep. My brain feels funny and my wrists are bulging. I soon find that my thoughts are creating my reality. Quickly, the realization that I was enduring a false-awakening dawns on me. Yet, I still wondered how the music sounded so real.

I must have lost a little lucidity here because when I went downstairs, I thought about getting a pen and paper to write down my experience down. When I reached the bottom floor, the house was lot bigger than usual. I saw my dad sleeping on the couch. He was non-responsive and I covered him with a blanket. For some reason, I had a strange desire to rearrange the chairs. The "dream" shifted and I soon found myself in Reno, Nevada.

This took place a few years ago... my friend Abby and I ended up talking the next day. She verified everything. The only difference was in that when I was walking, in her "dream", we were floating.

Anyway, hope this inspires you...

And if it doesn't happen when you intend it, definitely don't lose all hope. For all you know, it could happen spontanously... which.. for me at least, it usually does.

I remmeber awhile ago experiencing something like that. Except it seemed more like a portal of some sort. Basically my blanket was like.. 3Dish, surging with electricity. Very Strange.

But I have to ask, have you ever seen Donnie Darko?

I watched it for the first time last night (can't believe I waitied so long to watch it..) and what your speaking of reminds me a lot of what Donnie was experiencing. It was like this thick invisible..or rather, translucent.. energy matter that would come out of his.. and other peoples chest. Very worm like too.

But yeah. you should check out that movie.

I love Tool. Happened to see them live for the first time two nights ago. 

I'd say it was well worth the price.

If what you are doing is working for you, I see no reason why you should stop.
What may not work for others may work for you, and vice versa.

It's okay to tweak techniques.

I think it's totally possible. I've had so many dreams where instructors have come to teach me stuff. Most of it's random, though. Take ice-skating for instance. I had about 5 dreams in which I learned to ice-skate professionaly, each dream taking my learning to the next level. If I had actually written some of the stuff down, I could have probably used what I learned here. Who knows. Then there were the music lessons. Most of my recollection is vague. Probably beacuse the content of these lessons were extremely in depth -complicated when I think back on it now. Thought at the time, it made complete sense.

Point is. Learning stuff in altered states can definitely be done. Whether or not you can remember all the stuff you learned is another story. Like many have already said, practice would make such things much easier. And so would persistance. I mean, it would be pretty kick a** if you could for instance, lay down enter some sort of trance/dream/whatever, focus your attention on what it is you want to learn - learn it -wake up and the experiences you went through during that state would stay with you as if they occured in real life. And then to be able to put it to use - it would just be amazing.

So I went to the ER last night to find out just what exactly was wrong with me and I found out I got scarlet fever. How? I have no idea. Basically, I've got a rash thats continuing to spread all over me, my hands/feet are swollen, i've got a mild fever, and nausea and vomitting from the antibiotic they prescribed me. Obviously, I am feeling pretty crummy. I hope that some of you out there would we willing to send your thoughts/wishes towards me.

I really would like to feel better soon...

Thanks in advance,

Leilah

Seriously, it's pretty close to acid. minus the colors.

Yeah, I was just about to say that.

lol.....

interesting read...

CAN'T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD: BRAIN DISORDER CAUSES MYSTERIOUS MUSIC HALLUCINATIONS
The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, February 28, 2004
Janet Dilbeck clearly remembers the moment the music started. Two years ago she was lying in bed on the California ranch where she and her husband were caretakers. A mild earthquake woke her up. To Californians, a mild earthquake is about as unusual as a hailstorm, so Dilbeck tried to go back to sleep once it ended. But just then she heard a melody playing on an organ, "very loud, but not deafening," as she recalls. Dilbeck recognized the tune, a sad old song called When You and I Were Young, Maggie.

  Maggie was her mother's name, and when Dilbeck (now 70) was a girl her father would jokingly play the song on their home organ. Dilbeck is no believer in ghosts, but as she sat up in bed listening to the song, she couldn't help but ask, "Is that you, Daddy?"

  She got no answer, but the song went on, clear and loud. It began again from the beginning, and continued to repeat itself for hours. "I thought, this is too strange," Dilbeck says. She tried to get back to sleep, but thanks to the music she could only doze off and on. When she got up at dawn, the song continued. In the months to come, Dilbeck would hear other songs. She heard merry-go-round calliopes and Silent Night. For a few weeks, it was The Star-Spangled Banner.

  The music often began when she lay down for a nap, or when she drove her car, and would last for hours. Like most people, Dilbeck knew what it was like to have a song stuck in her head, but this was different. The music sounded as vivid as that coming out of a radio or an orchestra pit. The only way she could make the music stop, she found, was to play the radio. "Fight fire with fire," she thought.

  For the most part, Dilbeck kept her perplexing condition to herself. And the melodies were more than just annoying; they had a strangely sinister quality. Once she began to hear a song -- even if it was one of her favourite pieces by Chopin -- she could no longer bear to listen to a real version of it.

  Dilbeck endured this mystifying condition on her own for months, until she paid a visit to a San Francisco doctor. She had come to see him about her Lyme disease, which had plagued her since 1993. As they reviewed her symptoms, she told him about the songs. Her doctor informed her that she had a little-known medical condition called musical hallucinosis. She belonged to a small but significant number of people who heard music that simply wasn't there.

  Dilbeck's experience is typical -- if not universal -- among people who have musical hallucinations. Many sufferers are elderly and the songs often emerge from the deepest recesses of memory. One patient heard Italian opera that her parents used to listen to. Others hear hymns, sea shanties, jazz or pop tunes.

  And while some people get used to the music and even enjoy it, to most people it is alarming and disorienting. Sufferers try to stop the sounds by closing the windows in their house, blocking up the chimney, stuffing cotton wool in their ears or sleeping with a pillow over their head.

  "It's not a joke at all," says Timothy Griffiths, an expert on auditory disorders at the Newcastle University Medical School in England. "It's distracting and horrid."

  Musical hallucinations were invading people's minds long before they were recognized as a medical condition. "Robert Schumann hallucinated music toward the end of his life and wrote it down," says Diana Deutsch, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego. "He said he was taking dictation from Schubert's ghost."

  The biggest survey of musical hallucinations to date was carried out at a Japanese psychiatric hospital in 1998. There, researchers found that six out of 3,678 patients had the condition. This one-in-600 figure is unlikely to reflect the prominence of the condition, however, because the doctors only looked at people with serious psychiatric disorders.

  In fact, people who are otherwise of sound mind also experience musical hallucinations. Other studies have linked musical hallucinations to a range of things including old age, deafness, brain tumours, drug overdoses and even liver transplants. And it is thought that many people who have musical hallucinations may keep the condition to themselves.

  "My suspicion is that there are people who have it who don't come forward; they can be a little embarrassed about it," Griffiths says.

  Despite these confusing patterns, one thing is clear: Musical hallucinations shouldn't just be lumped in with other hallucinations, such as hearing voices or seeing visions.

  A person can hear musical hallucinations every hour of the day without any other distortion of reality. That's because our brains process music, neuroscientists have discovered, through a unique network of neurons. When sounds first enter our brains they activate a region near the ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more complex features of music, such as rhythm, key changes and melody.

  Research has shown that these neurons can go wrong without affecting any other part of the brain. Some people who have suffered brain damage lose the faculty of music while remaining otherwise normal. Other patients cannot recognize or remember musical tunes. Others can't tap time to music.

  Griffiths has taken this research further. He studied six elderly patients who developed musical hallucinations after they began to go deaf. The music they heard ranged from rugby songs to the hits of British singer Shirley Bassey. Griffiths scanned his subjects' brains with a technique known as PET (positron emission tomography). He injected a radioactive marker into their bloodstream, which accumulated in the most active parts of the brains of his subjects. Each time he scanned his subjects' brains, he asked them whether they had experienced a musical hallucination during the scan. If they had, he asked them to rate its intensity on a scale from one to seven.

  Griffiths discovered a network of regions in the brain that became more active as the hallucinations got more intense. He was taken aback by their pattern. "You see a very similar pattern in normal people who are listening to music," he says. The main difference is that musical hallucinations don't activate the primary auditory cortex, the first stop for sound in the brain. When people hallucinate, they use only the parts of the brain responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music.

  Griffiths has used these results to build a hypothesis: The music-processing regions of the brain are continually looking for patterns in the signals arriving from the ears. As these regions recognize a tune, they amplify certain sounds that fit the music and minimize extraneous sounds. That's how you can hear the melody of a piano in a noisy lounge. When no sound is coming into the ears, Griffiths argues, neurons in the music network sometimes spontaneously fire off random impulses. The brain can seize on these signals and try to impose some structure to them, rummaging through its memories for a match. A few notes may suddenly turn into a familiar melody. For most of us, these signals may only produce a song that is hard to get out of our head, and with a constant stream of information coming in from our ears, this false music is suppressed. But deafness cuts off this stream, and in a few people the music-seeking circuits go into overdrive. They hear music all the time --not just the vague murmurs of a stuck tune. It becomes as real as any normal perception.

  "What we're seeing is an amplification of a normal mechanism that's in everyone," Griffiths says. "I'm really talking about that tune-in-your-head phenomenon, but it's so amplified in these people that it is abnormal."

  This theory could explain why sufferers so often dredge up music heard early in life. These melodies may be the most strongly encoded in our memories and thus most easily summoned up by the music-perception network. But it will take much more research to explain the musical hallucinations of people such as Janet Dilbeck who are not deaf.

  Diana Deutsch is planning new research. Unlike previous studies, she will scan her subjects with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which can catch second-by-second changes in brain activity. "It might be a while before we have results, but it's certainly something I'm very excited about," she says. "We'll see where it takes us."

  Deutsch has had no trouble finding volunteers. That's probably because people suffering from musical hallucinosis are given little help within the medical community. "Doctors don't take it seriously, or put it down to tinnitus: a ringing in the ears," she says. "But you don't get the Battle Hymn of the Republic from ringing in the ears. Often these people don't get the sympathy and the care they should."

  In some cases, doctors can treat musical hallucinations. Partially deaf people seem to get some relief by using better hearing aids, according to Griffiths, perhaps because they can then suppress their music circuits with outside sounds. Some research suggests infections of the brain, such as syphilis and Lyme disease, can trigger musical hallucinations by inflaming parts of the brain. Curing the diseases sometimes cures the hallucinations as well. And in other cases, the songs just stop. "People have written to me to say, 'A wonderful thing has happened; they've gone away,' " Deutsch says. "People need to have the hope that it's not going to remain with them forever."

  But hope is a long way from a cure. When Dilbeck tried a new antibiotic for her Lyme disease the songs stopped, but the side effects of the drug were too much for her. Since she went off the antibiotic, the hallucinations have returned. For some reason they are milder now than before -- often just a few notes over and over again -- but they're still a burden. "I'm resigned to them," Dilbeck says. "But I'd give $100,000 -- if I had it -- to make them go away."

Copyright 2004 Carl Zimmer

I thought this was interesting. This used to happen to me a lot. Mainly when I would practice guitar hours on end. When I'd finally go to sleep at night, all of a sudden these crazy guitar (and saxophone?) solo's would just start playing away - crystal clear. It was lovely. I don't practice much anymore and I don't hear the music in my head as often as I used to. I'm sure some of you here have experienced this. Its pretty funny though. Seeing how some consider it a disorder.

hell yeah! im going next year! I can't wait lol

but speaking of 666 whose going to see The Omen?

i used to live in tampa, fl

i feel bad for em

lmao

Never heard that one before. Guess I'll have to taste my tears next time a cry tears of joy.

Yeah. I really didn't know. I asked my mom what my name meant she said it had to something to do with nightfall - and that it was Persian. She never went in depth. I wonder why I've never done a search online. (didn't realize that until now actually..)

But yeah lol. Its pretty ironic. Seeing how I have the perfect avatar that symbolizes the meaning behind the name "Leilah/Leyla/Layla/etc" and yet I had no idea. Thanks for posting all that information!

That's odd. A couple months ago I had a very similar dream, where i was getting attacked by bees. And then that same week a bee smacked me in the face as I was walking home. (Didnt get stung thankfully but it was still crazy). I panicked too, thought the dream might manifest or something but I remained calm and went on walking.

It's a cd cover for Sigur Ros. What did you think it meant Leyla?

And yes, the sparkly dot thing is like watching a butterfly. Once I saw one twittle around (it was gold) other than that they usually just linger in the air for a few seconds and then just vanish.

I wonder what they are.

Somewhat off topic here but would a bright blue dot/sparkle be considered an orb? or something? Maybe I'm just losing my vision.

Greatoutdoors, why don't you just provide the link?

HMM. That's definitely interesting. The other week, my friend told me about an experience she had while going out of body. She said she felt as if her entire body was burning, as if she were on fire.
So, I guess your not entirely alone on this one?

Hmm. Not sure if I can answer that question. The being submerged in water with the hands thing makes me think that whoever or whatever was covering your eyes and mouth was doing so (possibly) to teach you to face... death? Maybe even to teach you to be... OK with having no control.

Yeah. I don't even think you asked for an analysis but I thought I might as well.  I've only encountered "the hands" once. They were uhm... massaging my back? It was very random. I wonder if this hands thing is common.

Well. I think your right. This is probably a personal technique, and a personal one only. At least that's how it is for me. I've tried twisting this method in several ways (and times) and I can never seem to get a lasting effect. I suppose I will have to invent my own procedure. So, if anything, I'd like to thank you for inspiring me to do so.