Observation in Dreams:

[fURIX]

Many here believe that you are out of body every night when you dream. I strongly doubt that, coz like you I have also become more frequently aware at the end of my dreams and have also observed that it is nothing like re-entry from an OBE at all. It feels like you are in your body, even though you can still se the dream, and its just a matter of opening your real eyes and there you are, awake. What I do believe on the other hand is that one can be out of body and then dream, or you can dream and the get out of body. I have experienced both of these things but Im not shure how this works. Think I need to do some research on that.
Point is, I do NOT belive that every dream is an OBE like many people here seem to think. But Im open for discussion...

[Leviiathan]

Alright, before I begin, I establish the following:

1) I meditate 1 - 2 hours every night, around 10 - 1:00 (in between those hours), with the rarest meditation session being no more than 1/2 hour.

2) During meditation, I often use some sort of a hemi-sync or bw gen plugin to relax my body automatically. I do this as a conditioning process to allow myself to slowly develop the ability to phase out of conscousness. Ultimately, my efforts have yielded me increasing results with the "time-gap" effect. That is, I appear to be aware that I am meditating, but when the session is over, I cannot account for distinct periods of it (meaning I feel unconscious without knowing it, and also regained consciousness without even realizing it. It is as if the time gaps did not happen). These time gaps usually last 1/2 hour to an hour (so I wake up 1/2 - an hour after I supposedly fell unconscious). They can also be as short as 15 minutes.

3) I lay down.

4) When I meditate, I also make a few projection attempts (at least one), and some times exercise my mental hands to develop the awareness (also to help in relaxing my body).

That said, I lead into my subject: Dreams.

Over time, I have realized my dreams growing more vivid and vivid. They seem more real to me and I am more aware of having them... though I do not often remember having them at all (quite the paradox: how can one remember having dreams if they do not remember having them at all). It's hard to explain, but while the dreams themselves become forgotten in memory, the notion of them still lingers. "I know it happened!" <-- that is the case.  I remember experiencing something, but cannot remember the experience.

Moving on, I have found that I have experienced the stage of falling into sleep and having the dream happen (or rather, begin). This is rare. I have had dreams open up entirely in this way, but have not become enveloped in them as a participant. At this point, it's only a visualization process that has turned into vivid, dream-like hypnogogic imagery, and not a dream itself. In this case, the hypnogogic imagery is as close to a dream as it can get without being a dream at all (i.e. like watching a movie, one that is vividly defined, with things happening, and very nice colors at that). Not that this is important. I just wanted to say that I've had one or two experiences with this :3

What I really want to get at is that I have experienced entirely transitions between the dream state and waking up. In fact, this appears to be happening more and more frequently. At the same time, this causes me to question the theory as presented by many Astral Projectionists.

The reason why: the transition periods go as follows. Below is an example of one I had two days ago:

Just before I wake up, the dream entirely became lucid. I was aware that I was dreaming, but the only thing concerning my mind was that I was going to wake up. As with all dreams, I observe them in 3rd person as an observer somehow caught in that three-dimensional dream reality. I am there, but also not there. To wake up, all I did was open my eyes (not within the dream, but outside of the dream). My explanation is important because I want to point out that I was not experiencing the dream first hand. In opening my eyes, I could not have done this first hand either (as many writers, authors seem to depict in either stories or fiction of AP-like experiences). In opening my eyes, I opened them physically (naturally). And then I was awake. I experienced no fall back into my body, no amazing re-entry that could be related to any of the supposed theory expert AP'ers, such as Robert Bruce have come to observe. I was like I had never left my body in the first place.

My conclusion is that I was not astral projecting into an alternate dimension to have dreams (as stated in Robert's treastie). It is more believable (especially by what I seem to experience often) to say that I am in my body all along, merely in some inner state of consciousness/reality.

So what does everyone else here think? For those that believe the AP concept, I'm open to hearing some second opinions. If, when i dream and I go to the Astral Dimension, should there not be some sort of a re-entry process when I wake up? In this case, I merely opened my eyes.

For those who have pointed out the need to try and AP as one wakes up, I can say that there was no such pre-wake up state involved. In blunt terms, if dreams are delta waves, and waking state is alpha, it was like:

Delta ---> poof! (opens eyes) ---> Alpha.