It's just your distorted perspective with which you are looking at this excerpt. Nowhere in the text does it say anything about the "realness" of OBEs.
Like any person grounded in the scientific worldview, I'm pretty sure that these guys consider OBEs and NDEs to be NOT real. With the discovery of WILDs they realized that the phenomenon of lucid dreaming serves to explain the vividness of OBEs and NDEs.
These scientists were actually intending to prove that OBEs and NDEs are just a special form of lucid dreaming and thus NOT real.
When they say OBE in the text, they are not actually refering to the actual concept of a spirit leaving a body. They are refering to the phenomenological experience of OBEs, the subjective experience of leaving your body. That's why they are using the word phenomenological in the text. Even I have had a short OBE, it's nothing really special. It's just that now you can explain it with lucid dreaming.
You thought they tried to explain lucid dreaming by equalizing it with a spirit leaving a body, but it's actually the other way around. They are explaining OBEs by exactly the opposite, nothing leaving anything.
Also WILDs or OBEs are not the natural thing that happens when we go to sleep. The natural thing is sleep paralysis and that's it. When you're unconscious, everything happens automatically from there. When you're conscious you have to emulate that which usually happens automatically.
 Originally Posted by h0merg0mez
On the lucid dreaming wikipedia page, it talks about near-death experiences and OBEs associated with the original WILD tests in 1991.
"In a study of 14 lucid dreamers performed in 1991, people who perform wake initiated lucid dreams (WILD) reported experiences consistent with aspects of out-of-body experiences such as floating above their beds and the feeling of leaving their bodies.[9] Due to the phenomenological overlap between lucid dreams, near death experiences, and out of body experiences researchers say they believe a protocol could be developed to induce a lucid dream similar to a near death experience in the laboratory.[10]"
After everyone here seems to say that it's just the natural thing that happens every time we go to sleep, this is a bit startling. Any stories/information on the subject?
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