I've been thinking something.. I've heard, and experienced this on my own, that most people seem to project/OOBE when they are already dreaming or entering hypnagogia unconscious, but then for some reason they "wake up" from unconscious awareness into the expanded awareness state. It's almost like you let yourself go to sleep naturally without practicing any method or technique, and then at some point losing your conscious awareness and entering deep delta unconscious sleep. Then, suddenly you become conscious again like you are waking up from something because your unconscious body is perceiving being in another state.
Does anyone know of a technique or method that could be used to do this? To me it sounds like it has something to do with the power of autosuggestion and somehow training your mind so rigorously to "wake up" once it unconsciously perceives it being in a state other than normal wakefulness, perhaps by sensing the vibrations or sleep paralysis that normally occurs during sleep?
I am sure that every night when we go to sleep unconsciously we experience the vibrational state numerous times but are not aware of it happening becuase the mind is not trained to recognize it in any meaningful sense.
Would it be possible to somehow train the brain to "gain awareness/lucidity" once it unconsciously experiences this vibrational state from an unconscious perspective? Maybe by somehow telling it over and over again and playing a run down of it that when it experiences vibrations, it will take up and become lucid?
I will experiment with this some more as I get a chance. So far I've been focusing on a variety of random run downs with no purposeful meaning in an attempt to phase but have not gotten anywhere with it. Focusing on the vibrations on the other hand though may lead to something. I'll let you all know how it goes.
That's mostly how affirmations are used in this discipline (OBE induction).
programming the subconscious isn't uncommon
Take a look at www.vehram.com and buy his ebook for just $10 - I think you will find it interesting. It certainly works.
Maybe try and convince yourself that it's really important you do it.
If it's really important that I dont oversleep I always wake up early. If I really have to remember something then I somehow do even though I have a terrible memory.
If your computer is in your bedroom you might try setting it to play a soft recording of your voice at a set time telling you, "Wake up," or, "Its time to become aware of your body now and obe". I've no idea if it woud work or not, its just a thought.
Affirmations do this as CFTraveller pointed out, but they're not consistantly effective in my experience. Sometimes they work really well and other times have no effect. If there was a way of "rewiring" the brain to always recognise and respond automatically to one aspect of the transition process it would be a great technique. The fact that the mind can wake us up 2 minutes before the alarm goes off every morning makes me think that this sort of subconscious re-training could work quite well.
I agree with blis that attaching some sort of importance or urgency is important too. It seems to put the subconscious in a state of alertness, as if it's waiting for an event to occur.
Maybe a technique could be developed from the inside out ie; from within the out-of-body state rather than from the waking state (or is that the outside in? lol).
In my teens I learned a trick from my mother to wake myself in the morning before school. While preparing for sleep I would repeat a "changing" mantra - "at five o'clock I will wake up, I will wake up at five o'clock, I will be awake at five o'clock" and so on. This almost always worked. I used to brag about it to friends and I would change the time sometimes just to see if it worked. My internal clock is pretty well primed because I occasionally reset it by testing whether I know the time without looking at a timepiece. I still do not need an alarm clock to wake me although I set one just in case.
I see no reason why a person could not do the same with waking in a dream. I certainly don't see any harm in it. I believe consciousness is pretty easy to program with a little training. You might program a queue like "when I see a (queue) in my dream I will become lucid, I will wake in my dream when I see a (queue),etc." I'll give it a shot. Never really thought about doing that. I usually just awaken in the dream when I realize I'm dreaming but it can be pretty hit and miss. Wouldn't hurt to bolster the process.
Thanks for the great idea.
I've been using an affirmation every night while I fall asleep and during the day while I meditate.
I actually got this one from Greytraveler, "I will recognize when I am dreaming".
So far it's starting to net me more than my usual number of Lucid Dreams each month... which are, right now, my primary method of Astral Projecting.
~Ryan :)
How exactly do we lose conscious awareness when we go to sleep? I have been trying to observe what happens as I am going to sleep as Frank did in his early experiments, and I am unaware of exactly how conscious self-awareness is lost. There seems to be a lot of scattered debate about the subject, with no clearcut explanation as to what exactly happens.
Could the mind become scatterbrained, drift as we are falling asleep and then at some point it loses awareness that way?
Could the mind actually shutdown at some point as we enter deep NREM delta sleep, and as we approach hypnagogia we are mostly unaware of when we actually "black out"?
How exactly does the mind lose awareness, and at what stage does this usually occur?
It's assumed that we've been doing it for so long that it's just an autonomic response to the stimulus we provide our bodies when we lie down to "go to sleep".
~Ryan :)
http://www.sleepfoundation.org/
Sorry. I am only briefly familiar with this site. Used it at work for a little patient information. It has more about "sleep" than anyone might want to know. Don't know how technical you want to get.
http://www.sleepfoundation.org/primary-links/how-sleep-works
It doesn't describe how our conscious awareness is actually lost. Steven LaBerge has done a lot of research on the methods used to induce lucid dreaming, and he does state at some point that WILDs (Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming), which are the exact same precursors to having an OOBE/AP, can be induced at will once mastered even persisting through delta sleep. So..I figure if I want to try to induce hypnagogia and remain conscious while trying to fall asleep as naturally as possible.. understanding exactly how we lose consciousness or why will be a big help in trying to find a solution to retraining the mind to fall asleep consciously.