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I am a beginner and recently found myself in a cartoon place in the clouds after asking my guide to take me some place that would be fun to explore. I was quite disappointed at the time thinking I must be dreaming again.

I have been to that cartoon place more than once.

I read elsewhere of the experiences of an extremely well accomplished Astral Traveler who reported very similar observations. I think he even used the words "cartoon-like" to describe it.

[the record looked somewhat like Stage 1 with REMs, but I could not be sure whether this was a waking or a Stage I record.]

Now here is where it gets complicated...

In Lab environments they have had people hooked up and they are in REM and dream frequency mode when they report their OBE. But there are many levels of dream stages.

In this one the OBE explorer read a 5 digit random number correctly during this dream state OBE;

At 5:57 A.M. the slow wave artifact was lessened and the record looked somewhat like Stage 1 with REMs, but I could not be sure whether this was a waking or a Stage I record. This lasted until 6:04 A.M., at which time Miss Z awoke and called out that the target number was 25132. This was correct (with the digits in correct order), but I did not say anything to her at this point;
http://www.near-death.com/tart.html

Just reading the numbers correctly is significant and whether she actually left her body or just got it by telepathy doesn't really matter.

I think I would call that a solid OBE simply based on personal report of being OBE and getting the numbers correct.

Yes, Szaxx, that is the sort of thing that enters the realm of possibility for 'higher realms', but without other markers it is hard to say.

If there are other details like a sound or type of melody/instrument like buzzing bees, flute, bells, running water, etc. the realm can be identified with much better certainty.

I have traveled to various places and only get the full Sound effects once in a while.
I think the Higher Self must like to keep me guessing.

Yes, the "over the top" type experiences for me were well beyond the RTZ. And they lasted a good long while.

I find that normally I exit directly into the RTZ now that I am using exit methods that I have learned in the last few years. Also the RTZ is the default entry zone and moving to the astral is more challenging and beyond astral can be very difficult.

I almost never see any AP descriptions on these forums that I would consider pure Astral level or above.

So we have consensus environments, because I spoke to people, asked whether they could tell that I was an OBE traveler etc and to me they came across as individualized separate entities, in other words, real people. And within this consensus environment I manifested content which could clearly be described as dreamlike.

This sounds like it is a full conscious projection, OBE style, that remained in the RTZ and would be at least an ultra-lucid dream if not a flat out OBE. I am not sure how to draw the line on something like that. I wonder if that little kid actually consciously saw you and heard you. ?

I have had various reactions by others around me when I tell them I am OBE and have a physical body elsewhere. Usually a "shy - look away, turn and leave" type reaction if it is just someone on the street. If it is a guide or someone that I sought out for help on something they act surprised and change their attitude toward me.

In a projection last week I was in mood similar to yours MDM, and I was floating around the front yard early in the morning investigating the phenomenon known as 'faeries', and the neighbor was pulling out of his driveway to go to work. I mischievously thought to get in front of his windshield and see if he could see me. But my subconscious must've thought better about it and manifested an obstacle to stop me.

I have had two hour or more OBE sessions before but they require a couple returns to the body in between. There are some experts who claim the two hour OBE trips are an illusion and they are actually much shorter. How certain are you the exit lasted that long? 

This is very interesting, Rudolph.  Could you point me to some reading material, please?  Like a 'book' book.

Here is the Sant Mat classic for westerners;

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_path_of_the_masters.html?id=ZecSAAAAMAAJ

I will look around for a more modern author. Hopefully one that does not get caught up in too much of the "my Master is the real Master" stuff.

I suggest buffering that work with some of Baba Faqir Chand's revelations;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Faqir_Chand

i.e. the Chandian Effect... where these so called "Masters" have no conscious recall of the experiences that their initiates are reporting of meeting them in the Inner planes and travelling into the High Spiritual Realms.

Beware the whole "Initiation Game" and the my Sat Guru is the real Sat Guru debates.

The Sant Mat Path Master lineage has splintered badly in recent decades.

or one's own attachment to the belief system.

Take responsibility for the condition and then maybe you can move past it... if you can let go of it. It is only "consensus" if you are participating in the consensing

Younger folks kinda have to participate in the consensus in this world but there is a way to walk the razor's edge....

"What a newcomer needs to understand is a detailed map of the lower levels to help them get started and reach the first milestone. Getting to the astral plane. ..."

The Sant Mat Masters teach that wasting any time at all on the Astral plane is a huge mistake. They observe that too many otherwise capable students waste an entire lifetime trying to master the game of tiddleywinks once they see a single throw.

One big giant waste of a lifetime.

BEYOND Supercausal is the ONLY worthy Goal for beginners and the only concern of the capable Aspirants among them.

Those who can effectively explore the astral would do well to drop the astral entirely and pursue the Atmic and beyond if this lifetime were to amount to anything meaningful in the eternal scheme of things.

Yes I have noticed this! People just walking around in the street like they are sleep walking. I wonder if we all go out-of-body to what Robert Bruce calls the real time zone (RTZ), and then we dream from there (enter a more subjective focus of consciousness).

This is a more Intermediate and maybe advanced skill...

Judging the "awareness" quality of familiar characters in OBE state...

The ones walking around are doing better than most. My experience is they are mostly hanging out a few inches from their physical body and totally clueless about anything going on around them...

pretty much the way they are in waking Life!

In Lucid dreams you can get up to all sorts of mischief, in OBEs there are boundaries, usually imposed by other conscious individuals sharing your environment and there are limits to your energies, depending which dimensional level you are operating on. You are no longer almighty. People often report problems with flying, only managing hovering a few feet above the ground etc.

Yeah baby!... now we're talkin'

and even then...

its all pretty much Jungian imagery designed to help the Seeker take the next step.

And the failure to fly 'high enough' is still totally within the LD realm, imo. But it has at least crossed into the realm of being useful on the consciousness level. Real actual learning is taking place, almost... some of the time....

Rudolph if you wish to become more aware in your Lucid Dreams, try practicing different techniques in the day time. Program your mind with Brain Entrainment. I find rubbing my hands, listening to the sounds of the friction then asking myself am I sleeping or awake works pretty good. You do it so many times in the day while awake that you start doing it as habit in your dreams as well. But in your dreams it won't be the same, so you will have your answer.

rubbing your hands?! weelwee?! no shpit!??

then what?, Lionheart?

So then what do you do ?

Thanks Rudolph. I am not religious, but very spiritual. Would this prayer still be effective? I don't really believe anything in the bible etc. I do believe in angels etc but not how the bible puts it. Would this still work for me?

Intent.

Its the thought that counts.

http://www.preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Basics/AngeleDei.html

I said this at bedtime a few thousand times over the years.
It takes about 5 seconds... what have you got to lose?

I just do not have this problem with negs that so many others report on these AP forums. I asked myself "why?" and this short recitation popped into my head.

sweet dreams...

Rudy.

My definition of the difference between a Lucid Dream and an Out-of-Body experience is that in a Lucid Dream you can make love to Angelina Jolie whereas in a OBE she will slap you if your try.

This one works for me...

on several different levels.

That's a really good point.
It'd be nice if people pointed out "where" they believe the difference lies.

Like in your statement that there's a big difference between an LD and a D... each person might be sitting there nodding their head in agreement with you, but each having a different idea about what is "different". 

I like the rest of your post as well.  Just wanted to point that out too. 

Well, it is pretty simple. A lucid dream is a dream where the dreamer knows he is dreaming.
I think we all knew that, mostly. The myriad nuance elements that one could introduce are just obfuscation.

We also hear that an LD can be morphed into an OBE.
But in reality, this is not as simple as it sounds. I have done this with varying degrees of success on multiple occasions. I know that some wisely recommend against returning to the body once Lucidity is achieved, and I agree for the most part, but if I want to get a real hardcore, full conscious OBE I find that (in my experience) a return to the body and a full conscious projection works best.

Yea, I think the major problem in regards to that is a lack of consistent vernacular when we talk about this stuff. Many people (especially beginners) relate higher lucid awareness experiences to OBEs and lower to Lucid Dreams, but many of us know this is hardly the case.

I think it would be helpful if folks could provide examples to clarify the point they are trying to make along these lines.

I think there is no denying that there is a big difference between a Lucid Dream and a regular dream.

A full conscious OBE that begins with conscious exit from the body has different characteristics compared to an LD but it can quickly degenerate into an LD. In fact, based on what I read across many forums, that is exactly what happens most of the time. I think that is why so many want to say they are basically the same. For them it basically is.

When I hear this suggestion I suspect the speaker really has not ever had a full conscious OBE where they travel to a very real astral 'location' and explore it and return with solid recall of the reality there that can and will persist over time. Or maybe they had one or two of those types of experiences and then backslid a bit to the standard LD type OBE and without further experience they lose that experience as a solid reference point to refer to and make a meaningful comparative differentiation among their experiences.

Beyond the astral there is the mental/causal type consciousness and many say that it does not exist. Well, for them it might as well not exist since they have never been there.

Beyond that there are other levels, but again, for those who have never been there it may as well not even exist.

I recently went to a place where a voice began giving me instructions or 'lessons' of a sort. I could call him G2 on level z12. But then I read MyBigTOE and I recognize where Tom Campbell experienced essentially the same thing. I have no problem with giving the "place" a name that can become part of a belief system. It is only a belief system for those who have never been there. A descriptive name does not change that particular realm of Consciousness for those who have experienced that corner of Consciousness.
But reducing it all to the same type of experience by fiat LD = OBE basically throws the baby out with the bathwater, from my point of view. But for those who never had a baby in the bath in the first place it will make no difference.

what IS the difference between a F10 and F12 state, etc.This is what fosters progress

I don't even know what F10 is and I project OBE on a fairly regular basis. I have experienced all kinds of problems and have gotten past them without any sort of "F" style nomenclature at all. I can see that they are just as much a hindrance to progress for some, as they might be a help for others. I do not see how the nomenclature helps to solve any of the real "doing" type problems. It facilitates communication if done well. That's it.

If I use a word, and you don't like the word, you will not like the model and can say it is wrong/not...

The same thing can be said about an "F" system of numbers. Especially if it jumps all over the place and doesn't make sense.

the Monroe F## Model fits this necessity rather brilliantly.

Can you give an example or two to clarify this? If I am assembling a piece of furniture and the instructions say "fit joint J1 to J2 and secure with bolt style B3 I can see the sense of it. But in the AP activity I do not see how the "F" system is functional at all.

Yes, this takes some research and some practice, but that is what is needed in any discipline to become adept

The Sant Mat charts that I linked to were formulated by a line of Adepts stretching into antiquity and they have mapped out the subtle regions in a manner that makes the "F" style description look ridiculously confused imo.
I think Monroe himself realized what a disjointed mish-mash his F system had become and abandoned it later on. One of his later instruction sets used "Condition A,B,C,D"
Also totally meaningless... oh well
...whatever...

http://www.facebook.com/notes/sant-mat/charts-of-the-heavens-exploring-the-higher-planes-the-inner-space-within-you/392868416160

I like the one near the bottom with the Hubble images under the Physical realm.

The delineation showing where we hit the realms beyond duality could be instructive for a LOT of OBEers.

The upper levels of the Astral are still very low on the scale for these Masters in the Sant Mat tradition.
Physical -- Astral -- Causal -- SuperCausal -- [Great Void crossing] -- and then you start to get into the Eternal Realms

...
The immaterial world would be past these belief structures, ~F27+, when you start experiencing the great oneness. This would be we would find the elusive Akashic records and so forth. Most have described this as a completely immaterial oneness. A whole new level of being "pluged in".

Anyway, that's what a brief analysis looks like too me. Hope it helps.

Before I started trying to go OBE I would have spontaneous projections that went to a variety of places related to work on Consciousness and Awareness exercises that I was doing at the time.

I believe they were mostly way beyond the Astral realm.

Since I have started trying to project I find that most of my projections go right into the "Real Time Zone" as Robert Bruce describes it, the thin etheric layer next to planet Earth. To reach the Astral or Causal requires a special kind of effort beyond the common RTZ projection.

Reading in various forums I get the impression that 95% of projections go to this RTZ realm. So slicing it up into dozens of layers is really not very useful for most OBEers.

I think RTZ--Astral--Mental/Causal--Atmic--Buddhic/whatever,  should suffice 99.9% of the time.

A couple days ago I projected into the "floating blackness". I recorded it in my journal that way.

These focus schema are not intuitive and I do not see how it can improve my ability to project or help communicate my travels in a more meaningful way.

In my experience they just confuse people. Sometimes I see someone reporting an OBE experience on these forums and they use these focus numbers which only makes sense to those who have gone to the trouble to memorize them... which means most people won't know what they are talking about.

Page flipping or doing anything tactile with the hands is a good way to enhance lucidity in an LD or OBE.

If I do a motion in OBE state that resembles the position/motion that I used as an exit technique, it usually lands me right back in my body. It is like a toggle switch. For example if I used a falling back flip to exit my body and then I start flying while OBE and do a falling backflip for fun it will often land me right back in my body. This has happened to me plenty of times.

Speaking of 'best' experiences... mine was too awesome for words.
Back when I was part of a kinda Rosicrucian Gnostic cult I had several trips to the astral plane that make me think there really is an astral realm that has real people in it that have a life there that goes on whether I am there or not. Places 'above' the astral too. I know many expert projectors don't buy that story but I am keeping an open mind on this. I need to just keep up my efforts and keep moving forward. I am learning a lot with all this.

Well I almost always dream about how I move my hands like a bird and fly in dreams... Anyone know what is it mean? thanks

Moving your hands in flight  sounds like you have a lighthearted approach to things and a great sense of fun.
I have always flown in my dreams for as long as I can remember. I have noticed that when I get very involved in a difficult project and things bog down and aren't going well I will look at my journal and notice that I am not flying around much.
When I overcome difficulties and move on with the next project I will often get a self congratulatory dream where I am not just flying but enjoying hugely exhilarating joy in the flight.

When I started going OBE I also found it simple to fly around place to place. But there were times when I also felt the same lethargy, poor vision, etc. as others often report. When I read Astral Dynamics and other OBE books and even these online forums, I was surprised at the number of projectors who have trouble moving at all once they get out and flying is like some advanced navigation technique that requires incredible effort.

I think much of it reflects how a person is dealing with the day to day conditions in their life.

I have had it all my life.

I have successfully used it to get OBE.

[absolute]

I think we should all keep an open mind, while not succumbing to 'group think’ and embrace our individual expression.
Everyone is in possession of thoughts, call it what you will, opinions, truths, beliefs, facts etc.
but understand this, when you enforce what you believe onto others as being the only absolute 'truth', without respecting and
understanding their experiences, you are condoning censorship and the possible beginnings of
an 'Orwellian' society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

People will resonate to certain information/ideas, so let all opinions be communicated, and conscious minds will think for themselves.

This line of argument is ridiculous.
The Nazi SS resonated with pushing Jews into gas chambers. They were thinking for themselves. (...gosh... maybe that's just their 'truth').

There is nothing Orwellian about precision with language. In fact, abuse of language is practically the DEFINITION of 'Orwellian' in common usage. " Less is More!"...
Or "True is False"
Your reversal of the definition is Orwellian!   

"when you enforce what you believe onto others as being the only absolute 'truth', without respecting and understanding their experiences"

There is the Deceiver's trick again... reply to something no one said. No one has claimed to have "absolute truth".
And I "enforced" nothing on others. I merely pointed out errors (usually bigoted type Lies).
Pure deception.

Simply pointing out blatant error is not a claim to "absolute truth".

[biased]

People who study 'Linguistics' can aim to use language precisely, but then they will be communicating to others, most of who don't have such control, finesse and  ambition. Ultimately assumptions are being made by both parties that certain meanings are implied, individual reference points of view are true, recorded history (according to whatever country/records) are completely unbiased and objective in its reporting ie 'fact'.

Well, one can see by watching so called news today that 'truth' and 'current history in the making' is often biased,
and years from now todays news will be recorded as 'fact'.

Dreamingod, this is a great example that makes my point (note also that you rarely give examples to elucidate your point -- because in attempting to do so you might discover how wrong you are. And then you would have to start working harder... ohhhh noooooo.....).

If those who lack linguistic discipline are unable to know truth that is just an unfortunate reality. I for one will not indulge them.

Recorded history is not always unreliable. We can be pretty sure that Alexander the Great really did conquer Egypt.

Hitler really did invade Poland.

etc.

get a grip.

As far as assumptions being made?... speak for yourself.

", recorded history (according to whatever country/records) are completely unbiased and objective in its reporting ie 'fact'."

There is the deceiver's trick... reply to something no one said.
No one claimed reporting is unbiased. Bias is irrelevant at this point.
You can say that Nazi journalists were biased on their reporting of the invasion... but, So what? That is not relevant at this point.
Here you are just attempting to cloud your error with obfuscation.