I woke up paralyzed and tried my best to not get too excited about it. I had taken a nap during the middle of the day after reading a book about OBE’s (out of body experiences, astral travel or like some people call it projection of consciousness). I remembered the training, so I laid there calm only trying to move my hands. I realized that if I would try to lift them up, then I might snap out of the paralysis. So instead, I tried to push my hands down through the mattress and when I felt my arms going through the mattress I realized that I was already out of my body.
Most people get scared when they wake up in a state of sleep paralysis, but I could barely hold back my excitement. I was about to try to roll out of my body for the first time. I started to rock my body side to side with small movements and then it finally happened, I fell out of bed, yet at the same time my body remained in bed. I realized that my consciousness was now out of my body and I needed to get away from my body so I would not be snapped back into my body, still laying on my bed. I moved to the door of my bedroom and said “awareness now”. That is one of the ways to get more awareness to my astral body so I can go and explore this realm.
I remembered reading that I should try and look into the mirror, so I continued through the hallway and straight into my bathroom. I looked into the mirror and saw myself looking from the ceiling on to the top of my head of my projected image of myself in the mirror. I also noticed that the bathroom was mirrored. When I stand in my waking hours in from of the sink mirror there is another mirror on my right hand side, but now when looking into the sink mirror the other mirror was on my left hand side, yet it was the same one, just mirrored. I looked again into the sink mirror and now a saw myself as a scrambled image like you would see on a very bad television broadcast. Notice in this clip from the movie “What Dreams May Come True”, how Cuba Gooding Jr looks like at minute 2.40, that is exactly like I saw myself, and I had not seen that movie at the time (https://youtu.be/Gw2lzA9sy9Q?t=160).
Although it was quit a unique experience to see myself in the mirror, it was not as impressive to as to be able to feel my body still in bed and at the same time I was looking into the mirror and experience another realm at the same time. It felt like two consciousnesses, if that makes any sense to someone who has not experienced astral travel before. Then when I stepped outside of the bathroom, I was in an African Palace. I walked around and saw amazing flowers and trees growing inside the palace and wild animals strolling around the palace floor. I took a very good look at all the beautiful flowers and animals there. I was so absorbed into what I was experiencing I forgot the reinforce my awareness and for a split of a second my attention went back into my body on my bed and my consciousness was snapped right back into my physical body again. Now I was able move my body again. That was my first time I experienced an OBE.
Does the egg or the chicken come first? I guess it doesn’t really matter, but most people start by exploring the realms of lucid dreaming before experiencing an OBE. But for me, I did not know about the possibility of being fully conscious in a lucid dream at the time I started to explore the astral world. The few times I had a conscious lucid dream in my past, I did nothing with it, only knew I was dreaming and I did not know lucid dreaming was an actual thing, so I became part of the dream soon after realizing I was dreaming. I did not know that lucid dreaming has been practices for thousands of years here on earth, like dream yoga practice for example.
What is a lucid dream? It is when you become fully conscious during an unconscious dream. In a lucid dream you can explore the realms of your unconscious and subconscious mind. Each small suggestion, in this realm of you own unconscious mind, is very powerful. You can, stop doing things, start doing things, heal yourself or even heal others in a lucid dream and that is just scratching the surface of what is possible in a lucid dream, that you can carry with you into your waking reality.
How can I start to lucid dream? The best way to do that in my opinion is to start by creating reality checks during you waking hours to prepare you mind to make the same reality checks in your dreams. You can look at your hands and ask yourself: Am I dreaming? The more you practice that, the more likely you are to remember it while dreaming. When you do this test in your dreams, then turn you hands from your palm to the back of your hand again and then back to your palms. In a dream, you hands will change by doing it fast. My first time I did it in a dream, my ring finger bent 90 degrees to the left on my right hand and I knew I was in a dream. Then stabilize your dream by saying awareness now or stabilize my awareness, both work well for me anyway. You can also try to push your finger through your hand in your dream as you do the hand reality check. Another powerful way to stabilize you lucid dream is to spin yourself.
When my finger bent 90 degrees, it was my second fully lucid dream. Now what should I explore? I was walking outside and I called out my higher self to see and ask my higher self some questions I had prepared in my waking hours. As soon as I said it out loud to my dream, I wanna meet my higher self, a portal appeared in front of my eyes and many shapes started to appear in front of me in the portal. Almost like my higher self was trying to present it self but not sure what shape I would be ready to face and see. Then after a few seconds of changing shapes with incredible speed, it stabilized it’s form and funny enough it was a cartoon character. I went closer to my higher self and looked carefully at it saying I know this character. Before I could ask the questions I had prepared, I woke up, totally forgetting to stabilize my lucidity.
If you want to start experiencing lucid dreaming there are a few steps that are crucial to have better chances of success in doing so. Firstly create reality checks during your waking hours. Secondly start a dream journal. Write it in the first person in present tense. After you start dream journaling you can start to see reoccurring dreams and that will also serve as a reality check for you while dreaming. Like if you dream often about you deceased grandmother for example, you can start to have the epiphany during a dream like, oh it’s my dead grandmother, I must be dreaming. Then you can proceed with the hand check to make sure you are dreaming and then stabilize your lucid state by words or by spinning your body. Third thing is to set your alarm for at least four and a half hour into your sleep, wake up and write down your dream, then set your alarm for 90 minutes and go back to sleep repeating the mantra, “Am I dreaming?” or “I am lucid dreaming” or even “I will remember to see my hands”. Then when you wake up again repeat the process. Write down you dream and then set the alarm for 90 minutes and go back to sleep with your mantra, whatever feels right for you. After I started this process I can now remember 2-5 dreams each night, which I write down in my dream journal. It’s important to get the 4,5 hours sleep before starting the 90 minutes cycles, so you can get into the deepest state of recuperation for you body. Reading about the topic right before going to bed will also increase your chances of becoming fully conscious in an unconscious dream.
What can I do in a lucid dream? There are no limitations to what you can do there. If you have bad eyesight for example, you will experience a full 20/20 vision in you lucid dreams. You lucid dream will be crystal clear and so real, and that is why we often do not realize it’s a dream. You will feel pain, pleasure, smell, taste and all the other known senses in a lucid dream. Yet at the same time, you control your feelings with you intentions. If you for example walk through fire, you will feel the heat unless you decide and expect to not feel any pain. So pinching yourself in a lucid dream will not work as a reality check if you expect to feel pain, because you will feel the pain, until you set your intention to not feel the pain.
Here are a few things you can do in a lucid dream. You can meet you higher self or your subconscious mind which will most likely be presented as a dream character in your lucid dream. You can fly, which is the favorite activity of many lucid dreamers. You can walk through walls. You can walk on water. You can heal yourself, and I mean on a deep subconscious level, so that you will physically heal yourself in the waking state also. You can practice what you have not dared to do in you wake, like for example there are examples of doctors performing medical procedures in a lucid dream before they actually perform them, boxers fighting opponents in lucidity before the actual match, scientist making experiments before they actually try the experiment, or regular people practicing the job interview they are about to go into. You can learn to meditate inside you lucid dream and when you do so, then a 5 minute meditation will be as powerful as a few days of meditation in you waking hours.
You are in direct connection with you unconscious mind in a lucid dream and every single suggestion you have in your lucid dream is as powerful as going to a professional hypnotist and going into a hypnosis session. In a lucid dream you can make your own powerful hypnotic suggestions. Many people have experienced a lucid dream, but yet they do not use the opportunity to reveal something important to their journey. The next time you know you are dreaming, you can simply say out loud to the dream: Show me what I need to see, something of great importance! That’s enough to see something or experience something that might easily change you reality as you know it.
Most people start by exploring the realms of lucid dreaming and then often by chance they will experience an OBE. Usually at first they will not know it’s actually an OBE, because it kinda feels like a like lucid dream. When you are flying for example in a lucid dream you can fly and say: Fly out of my body and that could easily trigger a spontaneous OBE.
What is the differences between OBE’s and lucid dreams? When you experience lucid dreaming it will most of the time not happen soon after you fall asleep for the first time at night, but OBE’s can happen that way. Usually if you are conscious by the time you start going out of body, you will feel a great energy surge, especially around your head. But that does not happen when going into a lucid dream, there you simply realize that you are already somewhere.
When you lucid dream you will have a body like you have in your waking state or similar, but an OBE body is more like a projection of a body, energy like body or sometimes only a point of consciousness without a body.
When you lucid dream, you will most of the time not remember the correct timeline of the dream but you will most likely do so with an OBE. When you have an OBE experience you can interact with your current reality. That is how they managed to prove scientifically that people were actually having an OBE’s. One of the most famous study was done by people writing something on a note and placing it somewhere up high on furniture. Then the person that had the OBE, would fly and go to the note and read what the note said and then when awaken, tell the researchers what was written on the note. Scientifically proving that one can become fully conscious in a unconscious dream, was done by deciding a certain set of eye movement, if the person would become lucid, so it could be recorded and seen by the researchers. It’s known that the US government spend a lot of money on training military in the craft of OBE for espionage purposes. In the later part of the 20’s century many researches were done on frequency in the brain. One study on 16 highly trained monks showed that when they are in deep meditative state, that they have higher frequencies than other people. They reach a level called Gamma, which is over 40 Hz. While for example our Theta frequency is 4-7 Hz, when we are between wake and sleep. This is all so interesting, but what I think it really fascinating that when we become lucididly aware in our dreams, our brain is working on a higher frequency than the highly trained monks could reach with their years of experience. You can reach that state sooner that you think! Think about it, you could have higher frequency in you brain, expanding your awareness and diving deep into you spiritual journey within weeks from now or even sooner.
You sense of time is also quite different between an OBE and a lucid dream. When you have 5 minutes of experience in a lucid dream it is roughly the same amount of time you experience in you waking hours, but in OBE’s you might experience 60 minutes of OBE experience and it’s actually just 5 minutes in waking time. In OBE your soul is out of you body and there is no concept of linear time.
My best approach so far to have an OBE is to listen to self-hypnosis audios, when falling asleep.
Lucid dreaming is such a clear vision that most of the time it’s more clear than in your waking hours, everything is so crystal clear there. A lucid dream can also be a collective thing to experience. Sharing dreams is something really interesting. You can enter into a dream of an unconscious dreamer or vice versa. But the most powerful is likely to be when you both become fully conscious in a lucid dream and share the experience. There is only one consciousness and we are all connected, remember that.
One of my first OBE’s I had, I called out a name of a person while the energy surge came over me and as soon as I said the persons name I was in their house. I went up to the her laying in her bed and tried to talk to her without luck. But when I touched her hand, she woke up scared. I went closer and said: It’s OK it’s just me! At the same time I used my emotions, not on purpose, but yet did it anyway. I felt empathy and tried to calm her down. She did calm down pretty fast. Then I was snapped back into my body in bed and when I woke up I wrote down the OBE experience and the time it occured, it was around 6am that morning. The next morning I sent that person a message and asked if she had been aware of something that night. She said that she woke up exactly at 6 am, feeling really hot and took her cover off to be able to fall back to sleep. You cannot interact directly like that with people in a lucid dream.
I have read many different experiences about OBE’s from many different people and they all seem to agree, that sounds do not good, but touching someone in an OBE state can be felt by another person.
One seminar in lucid dreaming I read about, was very interesting. The instructor told the people at the workshop to try and eat a chocolate cake while lucid. When they woke up again they said their chocolate cake tasted much better than they had ever experienced. The instructor said that it did not surprise him because the taste was purely mental and not interpreted through the tongue, even though it felt like it was in the lucid dream. This is pretty awesome, but what followed, is what I think is the most remarkable thing about this experience. The next time the participants had chocolate cake in their waking state, it still tasted better than ever before. They had altered their perception of reality with this simple experience while sleeping.
Lucid dreaming has been practiced for thousands of years, but not everyone does it the same way. For example when I spoke with a Buddhist monk from Thailand, he explained that when they go into a lucid dream, they do that through their meditation, sitting upright. Some people believe that by exercising lucid dreaming they are preparing for death or should I say the next phase after death. That is actually one of the things you can experience if you want to. To contact someone who is no longer alive and get them to tell you something you do not know already. You do that just to prove to yourself that you did not just make this whole thing up in you mind, then make sure to verify whatever it is, after you wake up.
Just imagine how much you can carry over into you awakened state by amplifying your abilities in a lucid dream.
There are also concepts like shadow figures that are common in lucid dreaming. A shadow figure is something that you have in you subconscious, but yet might have consciously discarded. The best way to deal with a shadow figure is to show it love. By showing it love, you can integrate it back into yourself and become more whole after the process. A shadow figure will most of the time be presented by a dream figure or an animal in your lucid dream. Just remember that the state of lucid dreaming is perfectly safe and you have great control in there, yet you do not control the dream. You just control your focus in the dream. You are like the sailor on the ocean, you can’t control the sea, but you can control where you sail. You can tell the shadow figure to stop, come here or simply just tell it that you love it dearly and want to integrate with it. Dealing with fear in a lucid dream will have great beneficial impact on you daily life. Remember also how powerful you hypnotist suggestions are in your lucid state. You could for example tell yourself that the next time you taste something you want to stop eating, that it will taste awful to you.
If you just want to experience something fun in you lucid dreams, you can have sex, fly, walk through walls, lift up things with you mind, change the shape of things or parts of the landscape just by deciding it and so on, but just think to yourself, what will be your spiritual gain by only doing that. All I am saying is mix it up, keep the balance and have fun and actually experience something what will help you grow as a person spiritually or heal your wounds. Many people get “hooked” on experiencing better sex that ever and being able to fly, but eventually that will get boring. Why not look at this as a tool to add some extra hours to you spiritual journey and by doing that you also know that in a lucid dream it has much more power because you are working directly with you unconscious mind. Talk to your dreams and ask them to show what will give you most growth, what will benefit you most and so on. You can talk with dream figures but it’s more powerful to talk to the dream directly.
I hope you enjoyed this reading and hopefully you will remember some of these tips to start practicing your lucid dreaming and OBE’s. Don’t be afraid of your own subconscious mind, it’s beautiful and it will never show you anything that you cannot handle.
Here’s to you success and the great experiences that lay ahead on your path.
