Can some tell me what it's like to now become aware of your

[Donal]

When I relax I listen to some music for about 30 minutes and my body is extremly relaxed. When I do this I do not even have to stretch my muscles, but lay for 30 minutes still and my body would get this relaxed. But how long would it take for it to completely asleep, to the point where you cannot feel it at all?

And do you think thinking a little bit can interfere with relaxing your body to that level? (since mind and body are sometimes linked)

[upstream]

Actually there is a great difference between falling asleep with awareness intact and just falling asleep as normally.

The more you think in an associative way the quickly you fall into unconscious sleep. Careless, free-running, associative thinking is the way how our waking personality naturally disassembles itself at the onset of natural sleep. It literally falls apart into problem solving complexes that in turn initiates different dreams to deal with these problems. Unfortunately, this means losing "lucidity" as well.

Though it's perfectly possible to utilize this process of falling asleep it's not for those who just started OBEing. They need first to practice inner silence and deep relaxation to cultivate "clear sleep" states and spread out their waking consciousness to yet unknown states.

There is no direct relation between the degree of relaxation and the amount of time needed to fall asleep. People can fall asleep even while driving.

Stretching is a good idea before and after sleep and every OBE attempt as it stimulates communication throughout the energy body, or between the mind and the body if you like.

I also hesitate where to put biological cycles within this forced dualism. Defining mind and body or the process of falling asleep is not an easy task since level of relaxation, state of consciousness, general arousal and deepness of sleep can change almost independently.

For example, inner silence, physical relaxation and expansiveness of consciousness can progress quite out of phase in any given OBE attempt. You can attain perfect silence still enclosed in your head if you don't identify yourself with your energy body as a whole (by focusing on lower energy centers and the process of breathing, etc.)

[Donal]

Thanks for the reply!

So do you think I should relax my body, clear my mind and go into an altered states of consciousness before attempting to OBE, to get a feel for what they are like?

[upstream]

Yes, definitely, that's the way to go.