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I've been a fan of Robert Bruce since 1995...I even remember his old website and the days of being able to speak with him directly through email.  He was (and hopefully still is) a pretty cool dude, with a very down to Earth attitude about these 'esoteric' things.

This whole OBE thing has been interesting to me.  Everyone has a different take on it, different interpretations and different meanings for the same basic experiences.

As for myself, I've been going through a period of self-realization recently.  My opinion, and this is of course highly debatable is that realizing who you truly are is very important...digging deep through all those emotions, good and bad, and recognizing them is very hard but very rewarding.  More rewarding than OBE, I think.  But Mr. Bruce has been essential in starting this process in myself - which is a *lot* of work and *very difficult and painful* but also rewarding.  

So, Mr. Bruce, if you are listening thank you.  To anyone else that's read this - sorry for my ramblings but I feel that this is the only appropriate forum for this kind of thing.  I feel comfortable here talking about this kind of thing, and it's a relief to just let this stuff out.

I am not a guru or anything - but everyone should go through a process of self-realization.  It is painful, and you will feel many 'bad' thoughts and feelings which you will have to learn to simply acknowledge.  You might even be amazed at how many aggressive and angry thoughts you have but didn't realize.

If anyone has done anything similar, please feel free to share.  I'd like to hear how it was for you, and how you dealt with it.  

Cheers....

I know this is off-topic, but this seems to be the busiest of the boards.

A friend of mine, Tim, passed away Friday night.  It was sudden, and quite unexpected.  

He had been going through some tough times in life and was just starting to pull out of all of the trouble he was experiencing when he left us.  It is somewhat tragic to me that his death occurred at the cusp of recovery but there was a reason for it.

I would like to ask everyone who is willing to pray for him, in whatever way you feel most comfortable.  I would greatly desire that his spirit find some rest and solace in the next life, something that did not happen to him much in this one.

Again, I apologize for being off-topic.

Thanks........

hello all,

I'd like to describe an incident that happened last night.

Before going to sleep, I did light meditation for relaxation.  As usual, the swaying sensations and hypogogic (sp?) imagery was present - this happens virtually every time.

I drifted off to a sleep state, but don't remember leaving my body.  I believe I was OBEing, again this is not too uncommon for me.  I have been naturally good at OBE (I believe low level only at this point) and especially lucid dreaming.  I do not remember specifics of the dream.

I remembered suddenly being 'wrenched' out of the dream into a darkness that I can only describe as being alive, and malicious beyond comprehension.  A fear had built up inside of me, an irrational fear that the darkness was going to destroy me.  I started fighting for my life against this darkness, and was pulled I believe back into my body at the same time which only made things worse.

I was flailing wildly, gasping for my very existance and feeling like I could not breathe.  I have NEVER been so frightened, scared and alone in all my life.  I remember flailing my 'arms' - and I was able to see my astral arms for the first time.  They were a pale milky white, translucent, but somewhat ill-formed.  They seemed to streak or melt when I looked at them.  Moving my arms was very difficult, I liken it to trying to move your real arm when it falls asleep.  It was sluggish, like a ton of bricks.

Pressed against my body, I opened my physical eyes and had the weird sensation of looking through two sets of eyes.  This only made things worse.  I remember then, in the blackest of black - a cloaked and hooded figure appeared.  It was thin, somewhat tall, and the cloak covered its whole body.  I could not make out its face in the cloak.  But I was intensely afraid of it, so afraid that I thought I might die.  The fear seemed to eminate from it, invisible, but I could feel it palpably as what I can best describe as 'waves of fear'.  

I told it to go away, and the fear got worse and worse.  I could now hear a rushing sound in my ear, like the sound of a waterfall.  The figure stood there, said nothing, but I could sense a hatred that is indescribable.  I tried to move my physical body at this time but was unable to for quite some time.  I wanted to RUN, I wanted to SCREAM.

Finally, the scene melted and as I awoke to my physical body the scene morphed back into my room right in front of my eyes.  I found that my eyes were already open, and had in fact been open for a while.

I hope this makes some sense.  It's hard to fully describe just how terrifying this was.  I am not easily frightened, I have a skeptical tendency and consider myself somewhat rational in my dealings with these things (to avoid delusion).  But I can tell you that this was very real, it was much different than a mere dream and it scared the living daylights out of me.

I'd like to know what anyone thinks of this.

I guess I should add another blurb here, something I forgot to mention earlier -

Everyone should question what they experience, but nobody should judge another's experiences.  You cannot fit yourself into that person's shoes and see what they saw, and experience what they experienced.  Most of this stuff is too difficult to put accurately into words, and conveying feelings of 'reality' is difficult at best.

A lot of people have had good experience with this.  I find my life easier, things don't bother me as much, I'm more patient and generally more relaxed, and I find talking to strangers easier.  It's almost as if I realize that we are all in the same boat, everyone is trying to figure out what to do and how to act and what to believe.

So I'll ask this - given the fact that this has been a life changing experience for the better, how can it truly be bad?

Be discerning with your personal experiences and how they mold your beliefs, but when you see someone that has been positively helped by this method how can you truly say that it's *all* a load of B.S.?

I'm not expert here by any means, but my 2 cents anyways.

I guess I'll answer, based on my own experiences.  Unfortunately the answer is YES AND NO.  

Your personal beliefs, mental stability, stressors, concerns and any and all drug use (including alcohol and caffeine) affect your dreams and I believe play a very important part in any OBEs you might have.

I've read about wonderful OBEs by people here, vibrant OBEs that are very real to them.  Come to find out they smoked a bowl, drank a fifth, or took LSD previous to this.  Of course, I'm not saying that everyone that has these experiences is unstable or a drug user.  I'm just very skeptical of the "reality" of experiences done while under the influence of mind altering substances.  Anything that alters the mind alters the experience.  

I have no doubt that there is something else out there, and I have had brief glimpses of them - again done totally sober.  I don't take drugs (prescription or otherwise), and I drink rarely and yet have still had some good experiences.  

Don't discount the experience outright, but do be discerning about what you experience.

Thanks for the info.  The website provided was very comforting to read.  I'm more inclined to believe that it was a creation of my own will and not a neg, Satan, Darth Vader, aliens etc.  I think it's very important to be discerning when dealing with dreams and altered states, hence my more rational stance on this issue.  A lot of the explanations in those articles mentioned symptoms that concur almost precisely to what I experienced.

To top it off, there's been a lot of stress in my life recently - something that is never good for sleep.

In any event, I feel much better having written about it.  I seriously felt like I was going nuts after that episode.[]