By Josh Langley © 2014
In the early days of my consciousness exploration, my first OBEs were instigated from dreams. Now that I‘ve had over 40 lucid dreams and 15 or so Out of Body Experiences, I can say that initially they felt completely different, but now the nature of both kinds of experience has changed to the point where I can‘t tell one from the other.
Even though my first few OBE‘s were instigated from dreams, I wasn‘t lucid at the time.
The dreams contained some strong kinetic movements, like driving a car really fast, spinning around, or jumping off something. That would lead to a physical ‘turning inside out‘ sensation and my awareness popped out of my sleeping self and I was in my bedroom at some point above my bed. Other times I‘d fall through the bed or roll out of it. My vision was often blurred in one eye and I had to ask for ‘clarity now’ to bring things into focus.
OBE indicators were:
- Dreaming of kinetic movement.
- A physical turning inside out sensation.
- A strong sense of ‘I‘ awareness outside of my physical body. Just a point of awareness floating and/or astral body movements (i.e: feeling my arm or leg moving).
- Being very excited.
- Blurred vision.
- The experience not lasting very long.
- Not waking up, just opening my eyes.
As time went on, I could go lucid in the dream and consciously create the kinetic sensation that triggered the turning inside out experience.
Usually, I achieved this by jumping up and down on the spot. Strangely, I learned to fear the sensation and would automatically pull out of any exit attempt. It seemed that I was definitely crossing over into some new territory and that frightened me.
Since then, I‘ve mainly focussed on lucid dreaming to achieve my goals, but after a while I‘d have the OBE ‘separate point of floating awareness‘ feeling occur in the lucid dream, where I was like a ball of consciousness floating instead of exhibiting human characteristics, or I felt astral body movements without having any of the vibrations or turning inside out sensations. Sometimes I could put my hand through a wall and sometimes I couldn‘t.
At times I‘d ‘wake up‘ with the awareness of astral movements, like the classic teeth falling out, and from there I could move into a lucid dream.
When I successfully attempted the WILD technique on a couple of occasions, I found that I could have multiple experiences going on simultaneously.
One of the creepiest aspects of the blurred lines between OBEs and lucid dreams was the couple of occasions I held out my astral arm while in a black, void-like space and asked for someone to pull it to instigate an OBE. I felt a definite sensation of someone else grabbing my arm and pulling it. I obviously freaked out, aborted the attempt and woke up in a cold sweat!
In hindsight, I feel that the early strong OBE sensations indicated entry into a plane or astral field relatively close to the physical earth plane, hence the strong physical sensations.
A lucid dream could be more in the higher mental plane where it‘s easy to transition into without any physical symptoms.
This is just a theory and needs a lot more fun investigation.