Out-of-Body
From Dream to Out of Body
My wife and I woke up at 3am, and meditated the rest of the night, trying to have out of body experiences (OBEs).
Even though I just had one yesterday, I thought I would still try, even though I was a little worn out.
It took a long time, but eventually, I slipped into a dream.
It was a wake initiated lucid dream (WILD), which means that I saw the dream materialize in front of me, and was completely lucid the entire time.
It starts as an idea: I think of walking around an office setting, but don’t see anything. Then slowly the images fade in, but I don’t feel embodied in the environment. I reach for an umbrella, but it starts to feel like I’m not imagining myself reaching, but I’m actually reaching my arm out… I grab the umbrella, and now I’m fully immersed in the environment.
It’s still very dark, and as I walk around a little more, the environment comes alive, and fills out my vision.
The scene reminds me of the game Half-Life. I go into a corner office, and think about what to do. Since I’m imagining a video game, I know that zombies will appear soon. Instead, I decide to try and leave the dream, and get out of body.
I close my eyes, and focus on bringing my mindful awareness back to my body in bed. The dream quickly evaporates, and I start floating outside my body.
I get my non-physical vision working, but this time I decided to try and get two streams of imagery, so that I could construct a 3D environment (like how our eyeballs work in our physical body).
It works and I see things take on a 3D appearance. But something goes wrong, and the objects in space start to distort wildly. I snap back in my body, and the experience is over.
This was a really interesting experience – usually I get out of body, then descend into a dream state. This time it was the opposite; I started by dreaming, then transitioned to out of body.
What this tells me is that I can recover from the dream state and return out of body, if I can maintain lucidity and use my mindful awareness.
In fact, I think mindfulness could be the key skill to maintain stability while out of body.
It was also interesting to see the stark difference between the dream world and the OBE world. Whenever I read descriptions of OBEs, it sounds like a dream, but the actual experience feels very different. Dreams feel like dreams. OBEs feel real.
I think I will practice mindfulness more during the day, and hopefully that will instill good habits for my night time adventures.