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Oh, wow, good thing he's okay.

Guys he can't respond he's paralyzed.

Very interesting description. Dreams are usually boring to read because they are just a random sequence of non-sequetors, but you made it engrossing by describing the dream in terms of phasing techniques and their effect on your perceptions.

What are your tips for getting into paralysis?

Glass is a liquid thats why old windows are fatter at the bottom 
:NoY:

I always thought this was a cool fact until I recently found out it's not true
Wikipedia:
Although Glass does flow at elevated temperatures as it is an amorphous solid, and does have some chemical properties normally associated with liquids. Panes of stained glass windows often have thicker glass at the bottom than at the top, and this has been cited as an example of the slow flow of glass over centuries. However, this unevenness is due to the window manufacturing processes used in earlier eras, which produced glass panes that were unevenly thick at the time of their installation. Normally the thick end of glass would be installed at the bottom of the frame, but it is also common to find old windows where the thicker end has been installed to the sides or the top. In fact, the lead frames of the windows are less viscous than the panes, and if glass was indeed a slow moving liquid, the panes would warp at a higher degree.

Hey buddy,

Congrats on your minor success. You may have noticed already that relaxation is the key here, and that "waiting expectantly" and trying to achieve a goal is actually counter-productive and may cause people to lie still for 90 minutes at a time and grow increasingly frustrated as nothing happens. Sound familiar?

If you are physically very relaxed but still thinking very lucidly and clearly, you are not in the right mental state yet. You're going for that loose, slightly disconnected state you get when you're very tired and on the verge of sleep, where your thoughts seem random and daydreams intrude upon your consciousness. If you've ever been a passenger on a long car ride and find yourself slipping around on the border of wakefulness and sleep, jerking at sudden sounds or images, that's the feeling you want.

The preceding state can be characterized by an awareness that is:

1) Receptive to anything that might occur
2) Passive, not trying to achieve anything
3) Flexible to shifting forms of awareness

This is a tricky balancing act because it means you are mentally walking on a ridge with alertness on one side and a deep chasm of sleep on the other. You know you're there when random thoughts and images or sounds flit through your mind, causing you to "snap back" to awareness. One way to get to this point, once you're very physically relaxed, is to start daydreaming about random things. Eventually you should run into a lapse of awareness or a few frames of dream sights or sounds. That's how you know you're close. The rest of the job is to maintain awareness in this delicate state without falling asleep.

NOTE: Please take my advice with a grain of salt as everyone is different and although this seems true for the vast majority of people it may not apply to you in particular.

When you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on
You see devils tearing your life away
But if you've made your peace
Then the devils are really angels
Freeing you from the earth

Sounds like he's waiting for you to leave your body so he can take over.





I'm just kidding, I agree with Ryan.

I view the brain as the filter through which our consciousness experiences this physical reality.
When the brain is "damaged" in some manner, depending upon the severity of the damage, it can impair how you experience this reality.

So brain damaged people who project no longer have brain damage in their astral bodies?

What do you think happens to people with brain damage? Do their souls get brain damaged?

I come from the same place as you, very skeptical and scientific-minded. It seems to me that astral projection and OBEs are a type of lucid dream, entirely created by our brains.

That said, I've read Monroe's books and his reported experiences suggest otherwise. That means he's either deluded (possible), lying for personal reasons (also possible), or correct in his beliefs (also, I must admit, possible). Since he seems like a very lucid and self-aware thinker, I'm reserving judgement until I get proficient at this myself and do some tests according to my own standards of evidence.

It's too early for you to be having a crisis of beliefs. Everything you've read is second-hand hearsay evidence. Your situation is like a Christian missionary arriving in Syria and saying to his compatriots "Holy crap, guys, have you read this Quran? I can't believe nobody told us about this, what have we been DOING?"

If you are hearing a noise when you concentrate on the sound of silence, you are picking up the "line noise" of your aural system. Kind of like if a radio station has dead air for a few minutes, it sounds like silence, but if you turn the volume on your receiver way up you'll hear some very clear static that's always there in the background.

I have found that I can focus on this sound until it gets quite loud. This causes my body to relax, and for my attention to be drawn away from the physical. At that point I can imagine a sound (usually a short piece of music or a word someone says) and it will repeat and morph into other sounds, getting louder and more complex. After a few minutes of this I lose my body and feel vibrations.

If you're hearing this noise all the time and it's distracting, that's something else, usually tinnitis caused by hearing damage (rock concerts, driving with the windows down on the highway, blows to the head or ear infections, etc). I'm not sure it's helpful to focus on this for AP purposes. However, meditating on it may cause it to be less stressful in your day-to-day life.

For an early morning alarm, this sounds kind of nutty but it works:

If you sleep in the same position without moving around much, you can set your cell phone to vibrate and tape it to your chest or belly or leg (with masking tape so no sticky residue remains). The vibrations should wake you up silently.

I do this when I need to take a short nap, except I don't bother with the tape since I can just leave it resting on my chest or hip bone without it sliding off.

Sounds like you're dedicated and patient enough for long-term effort.

I think you're missing the passive focus you get from meditation. Practicing some simple meditation, such as mindfulness, for about 20 minutes every day will help you relax and it will prevent you from falling asleep while you practice having an OBE. It sounds like you're too focused on technique right now and are not getting the prerequisite amount of relaxation (both physical and mental) that you need for success.

And what do you do for your mind?

Keeping track of the numbers while I'm counting my breath keeps my mind occupied. When I'm done counting, I'm essentially doing mindfulness meditation on the different parts of my face and head, which keeps my mind occupied.

When I'm sufficiently relaxed I start visualizing. I also meditate daily so losing focus isn't as much of an issue now as it used to be several months ago.

EDIT: I should say that by the time I'm starting to visualize my mind is in a slight daze and it doesn't want to concentrate on anything. It's like the way your mind flits to random images when you're really tired and trying to stay awake.

Just a note: Don't post your method here if it doesn't actually work. "This method looks promising" or "lately I've been trying this" is not the point of the thread. Please be detailed and post how long it takes you.


My method is to lie on my back and count my breaths up to 20 and back down to 1. With each exhale I relax my body a little more. By the time I'm back at 1 my breathing is very subtle. My body's not asleep yet, though, so to get that "heavy body" or "numb body" feeling I mentally go through relaxing each part of my face and head one by one, finishing with my eyeballs. The way I relax each part is to be mindfully aware of any tension I feel, without trying to actively release the tension. After about a minute the tension completely dissolves on its own. This whole process takes me about 15-25 minutes.


If anyone else has effective methods I'd like to hear about them and give them a try.

Thanks again for another great post, Cententeo. Your advice is spot on. The other day I got very relaxed and tried to just let my mind run with whatever random images that came to mind (like you were watching a rapid montage of unrelated television scenes).

I had results very quickly: felt my body fade away as the visuals became more immersive. Unfortunately I had a bad cold and it kept me from progressing.

Cententeo, if you are interested in consciousness (specifically self-awareness, the observing-ego type that animals are missing) an interesting concept to wiki is Strange Loops (Douglas Hosftadter). The theory is that self-awareness is the result of feedback in the brain, where neurons are stimulated by other neurons, and their reaction fuels their own input, etc... Most systems have a stimulus-reaction setup, but when feedback occurs the reaction becomes the stimulus for further reaction.

Animals can be said to be in a dream-like state, merely experiencing things as they happen without developing a self-referential perspective on events. Creating a strange loop might be the holy grail of artificial intelligence research, as it would create a system that is able to analyze itself and gain self-awareness.

I've had some interesting Phase experiences...but I don't claim that they are proof of telepathy, precognition or contact with the dead, because I am aware of other possible explanations more rooted in the mundane.

I wonder if we could do some kind of poll on several categories of well-defined phase experiences and correlate them to each reporter's interpretation. The majority of people who post about them online are the opposite of Summerlander, but maybe that's selection bias at work?

He's got some circular logic there:

- I've noticed what appears to be evidence for psi phenomena
- It's REALLY, REALLY convincing. I have tons of evidence and it convinced my scientific and skeptical mind.
- I didn't keep the evidence because it wouldn't be convincing to anyone but myself.
- Because I've demonstrated psi-phenomena to be real, the AUO has to be real.
- From the AUO and other assumptions I can extrapolate the existence of the PUP which explains why evidence of psi phenomena is so hard to create.
- If you try to discover your own evidence, you will find it.
- It's REALLY, REALLY convincing evidence.
- It won't convince anyone but yourself....

etc, etc... Xanth you may have noticed that I've been in some discussions on his forums but the people there strike me as being either very defensive or tending to regurgitate concepts and sound bites from his book without displaying any deeper understanding of what they're talking about.

I have a few problems with his theory, the main one having to do with the internally imposed rule set on his AUO cellular automata, which seems to be a logical contradiction.

The PUP also makes me uneasy because it backs away from a basic requirement of a scientific hypothesis, mainly that it can be experimentally proven false. Tom says a person can collect data and experimentally prove the existence of psi phenomena, but due to the PUP it doesn't work the other way around. While I accept this may be true since he's saying the basic tenets of the scientific method aren't valid in this case, it would be easier to swallow if he bothered to keep any of this huge volume of experimental data he claims to have amassed during his time at the Monroe Institute.

Sure, if he correctly guessed at a number written on a blackboard one time I'd not accept it as evidence, but if he did it twice that would be a different story. So far this concept of "evidence is only useful to the individual" is just turning a blind eye to human being's ingrained tendency towards confirmation bias and cherry picking of evidence.

No need for arguments. Enlighten me. I'd like to think that I'm a reasonable man. What's the problem?

I'm criticizing a logical problem with his argument, while you're deriding all of physics and their tangible results (including the computer you're using) as nothing but "little pictures" complete with 

If you don't see the difference between what I said and what you said we probably shouldn't have an argument about it.

When someone expresses disdain towards another person's views or methods and then proceeds to call them close-minded, it's hypocritical.

I'm open to all ideas and judge them on their merits, so when someone speaks with smugness or ridicule it's like a red alarm warning me to be skeptical.

His theory also states that these effects (although they can be said to exist) cannot be proven to exist, therefore the Scientific Method is still internally and externally consistent. Any attempts to prove these effects will be prevented by the PUP.

Basically the PSI effects are about as relevant to the Scientific Method as the china teapot floating in the asteroid belt is to ontology.