How can you prevent OBEs?

Hi there. OBEs are very common in my family and seem to occur quite naturally. I'm not sure how far back, but I know they were frequent experiences for my great grandpa, grandpa, and my mother. I've had a few experiences before and let's just say they terrify me. I have a fear of not returning to my body. So, I was just wondering if anybody knows how to prevent these? I often have to force myself to wake up from a nearly successful WILD because I can feel myself drifting away or spinning around my room.

I for my part dont believe in this spiritual OBE stuff that puts your soul out of your body.
Lucid Dreaming and "OBE"'s are simply just chemical processes in our chemical super computer, aka brain.

I am sorry that you're terrified by them, but i want you to know that it is from my point of view
impossible to not return to your body. It's like sleep paralysis, just let it happen, you'll wake up or go into a lucid dream.

I dont think you can prevent them, but actually you can suppress them by finding out with what kind of technique you have the most OBE's, and then not doing them anymore, or fewer.

Can't tell you how to prevent them, but I hope you will get control of your OBE's.
Even better would be if you could enjoy them :)


so: dont get terrified by them, they are a part of you, and you cant harm yourself with an OBE or Lucid dream.
Try to have fun with them and dont look at it like some inherited disease or disfunction of your mind.

best wishes,

garf

Okay, thank you! It's just hard not to be afraid, I always feel like there's something unnatural happening. Like I'm doing something that I'm not supposed to... so whenever I think I'm about to leave my body, I force myself awake and it is stressful. (It feels like I'm fighting against something pulling me away and there are strange sensations in my brain, almost like I'm being electrocuted.)

And it seems to me a very spiritual experience, drastically different from any lucid dream. Does anybody have any clue why this seems to be genetic?

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And it seems to me a very spiritual experience, drastically different from any lucid dream. Does anybody have any clue why this seems to be genetic?

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Actually i do, please correct me if i'm wrong!

I guess you have been told many times, maybe already as a child, that many in your family had those experiences ?
Maybe then you started to believe its genetic and started to have those OBE's all the time.

I could be wrong but i think its all a matter of what you believe is genetic and what not.

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Originally Posted by LSDgarfield

I guess you have been told many times, maybe already as a child, that many in your family had those experiences ?
Maybe then you started to believe its genetic and started to have those OBE's all the time.

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Actually that's not the case! It happened to me a few times before I decided to ask my mom about it, and she told me it started happening to her when she was about 16 but she didn't tell anybody because she thought people would think she was crazy. We then tried to figure out what was happening and asked my grandpa, who said as a child he shared a bed with many siblings so he would float above the bed to get comfortable and have as much room as he needed. He also shared stories about his father. And I learned about all of this after I started experiencing it! Thanks for your time, by the way. :)

Wow, thats interesting!
puts the story in a whole new light.

It really sounds as if it was genetic, but still i cant believe it really can be.
But on the other hand dreaming is nothing else but a chemical process in your brain, so
i think there could be some special receivers / synapses / chemicals in your brain that make it easier for you, maybe you are producing a lot of vitamine B6 B12 or Tryptophan, or something like that.
but I am neither a scientist nor do i really care about stuff like that :P

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I force myself awake and it is stressful. (It feels like I'm fighting against something pulling me away and there are strange sensations in my brain, almost like I'm being electrocuted.)

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sounds just like sleep paralysis to me.
Every person is different, so everyone experiences it in another way.
Some just see creepy stuff and weird sensations,
some think they are "astral traveling".


Hope i could help and give you some other point of view to look at your OBE phenomenon :)


greetings

garfield

I dont think that Astral Projection Is dangerous, especially If you not afraid, overcome fear. And I dont thing or heard that anyone couldnt return or was stuck. When you Astral Project you consciously leave your psychical body and travel with your Astral body and there Is a connection between them wich will likely break after death. It Is a good thing that you are naturaly more spiritual, talended with this stuff. However not everyone believes in Astral Projection/OOBE, but Its real. Its very useful. You can find many answers there, experience trully great stuff. If you want to find more about this spiritscience.net | Science Spirit
Dont be scared, Its awesome! My friend have even seen his future, met with his higherselfs and changed his view of life in way better way! In my opinion when we all die we will be detached from our psychical bodes(silver cord breaks) and we will experience something very simialr to Astral Projection and It would be a good thing to be a little experienced with this stuff, to be prepared for life after death :)

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However not everyone believes in Astral Projection/OOBE, but Its real.

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Sure, it seems to be pretty real when thousands of people report doing it.
You may leave your body, but you can not watch events happening in real life like so many think.
for example you can go out of your body and watch a friend cooking diner or what ever but he will definately tell you that he did something totally different there.
Maybe i got this whole oobe stuff wrong, but it still is just a dream, in which you can see your own body lying in bed.
just a different kind of dream.

Hmm, it's definitely not sleep paralysis, I was just describing what happens when I try to prevent an OBE, not the actual OBE. And if it really is just a dream, it wouldn't scare me as much! It just feels so real and, well, scary. I've never actually left my room. I have put my hand through a wall but I fear going too far.

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Originally Posted by RoseDream

So, I was just wondering if anybody knows how to prevent these? I often have to force myself to wake up from a nearly successful WILD because I can feel myself drifting away or spinning around my room.

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I would suggest not focusing too much on your body.

I tend to think of OBEs as dreams of leaving the body, so I think of them as OBDs/OBLDs(out of body lucid/dreams). I've had these experiences straight after a lucid dream ends when I find myself in the blackness as if I have my eyes shut. So I don't move a muscle and I think about my body and rock it with my mind, it feels like I'm physically moving until I roll out of body and find myself on the floor(so OBE). And I think because I'm focusing on the body my mind is creating the experience and scene from memory and expectation of going out of body. So if I didn't focus on the body at that stage I think I would just go back into a lucid dream.

I've even had it where I've gone 'out of body' and felt myself walking around my room but I haven't been able to see anything(like having eyes shut). Then after a moment and jumping through where I guessed the window was the scene of being outside was created.

nothing to worry about as far as "coming back" or anything of the sort. has anyone in these experiences you've talked about said anything that would make you think otherwise? the more experiences you have, the more you realize that there is no real difference between a lucid dream and an OBE.

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Originally Posted by Runeword

the more experiences you have, the more you realize that there is no real difference between a lucid dream and an OBE.

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Well yehh Lucid dreams and Astral projection Is kinda similar, the whole mechanism Is kinda same(Your thoughts and desires manifest). But the difference Is that In dream you create virtual world and experience your mind created unreal experience and the Astral Projection Is the same but It Is real, you actually experience this stuff, Its not just In your head but just in higher place with spiritual(astral) body.

And RoseDream, I dont say you should practise or abandon Astral projection. It depends on you, but in my experience If you can experience this you shouldnt abandon this, there Is a meaning for this. You sayed you afraid of Astral projection, so you should learn, practise more about It, till you have no fear.

So the general consensus here is that OBEs are really just lucid dreams? That does make me feel a lot safer. It just feels so real, not like a dream at all!

RoseDreams,

best thing you could do is to educate yourself about OBEs. Your family had them, were they also scared? Why don't you have a talk with your mom about this. How did she cope? What did she do? Did she go and explore?

My opinion based on my experience.....Yes astral projection and out of body experiences are both types of lucid dreams, and you don't have to worry about getting stuck outside your body. However, it does not follow that there's nothing else going on during the experience besides the relatively superficial lucid dream aspect of it. And it doesn't follow that doing it a lot is good for you, that you won't develop some kind of dissociative disorder. If you have a feeling like its not healthy for you, maybe its not. I don't find people's assurances that its completely harmless to be very convincing when nobody can more than partially explain what the experience is.

Everybody has slightly different definitions for 'astral projection' and 'OBE', but here are mine. Astral projection is when your tactile mental model of where your body is goes out of agreement with where your body actually is. OBE is when you transfer your visual/cognitive sense of where you are to the perspective of a third person witness. It may not have quite the same wow to it as the astral projection experience, because that third person perspective doesn't have as strong of a full body touch component to it. But various experiences are possible that blend different aspects of this.

During your normal waking life, you experience a sort of internally generated cartoon of the external world. That cartoon includes information from the external world, but you're not experiencing the external world directly. So for instance color is roughly assigned to different objects depending on what wavelengths of light they reflect/emit, but light itself doesn't have color, that's a part of the cartoon. The waking experience is very much like a lucid dream, the difference is that when you're awake, your mind works to keep the lucid dream closely aligned to what's going on around you so that you can use it to help you interact with your environment. When people realize 'Oh my god, life is just a dream', they're recognizing that their experience is a dream, and usually failing to recognize that there's an objective reality beyond the dream that the dream represents. I think that the 'objective reality' is a dream too in a sense, but its a more collective dream with a lot of inertia and a way that it works that can't be easily changed by your personal dream.

During the waking life experience, in addition to the 'I am here' mental simulation of yourself, you also have a sense of how other people might perceive you. This is sort of like court awareness when playing basketball, or how socially aware people know the effect their appearance has on other people. My claim is that this is the kind of mental model you're using during a typical out of body experience, but you're transferring part of your first person perspective to it. It doesn't have as strong as a tactile component because the tactile component is how you control you body, and the model that you use for imagining your body from another vantage-point never has that.

A person could quibble and say that there's really just one reality, and the personal 'cartoon' of reality is a part of it, rather than drawing a division and saying they are two different things. I think that's sort of true, one's personal experience is a part of reality, however, if you pay attention to how vision works, for example, you find that there are a lot of ways that it approximates what's going around you and doesn't tell you a completely true story. So I think there's a natural division there, even if its not absolute.

Almost everything I've said so far makes it sound like I agree with the people who say that astral projection is 'all in your head', so to speak. The reason I don't agree with that, is I have precognitive and telepathetic experiences that many people would consider to be impossible. So when other people report similar experiences during astral projection or out of body experiences, I'm inclined to think that they're not all entirely deluded. And it seems to me that the sort of thing that I do with my sense of identity that facilitates my experiences isn't entirely different from what a person does when they astral project or otherwise go out of body. Yes its a lucid dream, but no that isn't the whole story.

I don't agree with people who say that the astral experience is entirely 'real' either. In my experience, messing around with it, there is definitely a degree of disagreement between what my 'astral' experience is telling me is going on and what is really going on physically. A person can just assert that the astral experience is 'real', but I don't see any reason to say its more real than any other lucid dream, other than that you may have more kinds of sensory imagination involved, and its superimposed on your present picture of where you really are. Even having objectively verifiable paranormal experiences while astral projecting doesn't make it more real than a lucid dream, because people can have paranormal experiences while lucid dreaming also.

I am interested in understanding 'astral' subjects better. But generally when I question people about what they know, it seems that they've had basically the same experiences as me, dressed up by a lot of assumptions that they've read in books. Plus those thoughts are a part of what makes the experiences to start with. Since my experiences don't fit entirely within the 'astral plane' paradigm, it seems to me that it can't be totally correct. I remain open to people describing new angles on this that I haven't thought of though, or helping me understand where I err in some of my thinking about it. So my current thought is that the 'astral body' is a mental projection, and its a mental projection that has some kind of power that we don't understand, and that's all I know. I guess this doesn't necessarily contradict the thoughts of people who think in terms of astral bodies and whatnot.

A possibly peculiar characteristic of my dream life is that I don't have recurring dreams. Dreaming is a very big part of my life, but I only dream of something once and that's it. If I dream of the same thing twice, that's unusual and usually there's a point to it. Astral projection has been like that for me also. I've had several different kinds of related experiences, but have not repeated any of them. So when I say how something feels to me I'm just reliving a vivid experience in my mind.

The first time I astral projected it surprised me and I was scared I wouldn't get back in. Also I could see and hear all kinds of creepy things, such as one might sometimes feel in old houses without being able to see or hear them, and I found that unpleasant. The next experience I had I inverted my audial and spatial sense of inside and outside, so that outside was inside and inside was outside. A weird aspect of this is it happened with one hemisphere of my head at a time, flipping back and forth, and sometimes both sides together. Maybe this doesn't sound like astral projection, but its the same sort of thing, screwing around with a mental map. Next experience I levitated out of my body, and experimented with it, going back and forth until I convinced myself that I was just manipulating a mental model and not really going out of my body. It wasn't until years later that I realized that just because I can describe one aspect of something doesn't mean I understand the whole thing. The last experience I had was more recent, and it was what I'm calling an out of body experience.

If you think astral projection is a problem for you and it happens involuntarily when trying to lucid dream, my suggestion would be not to lucid dream in the conventional sense. I realize this is complete heresy on this site, like telling people not to smoke on a weed website, but right or wrong that's how it looks to me. You can be conscious while you're asleep without trying to create a lucid virtual reality experience. Just think about things, explore different kinds of experiences without trying to control the sensate aspect of your dream experience. Technically that's still a lucid dream, because you're asleep and you know you're asleep, but it seems less likely to me to lead to an unwanted out of body experience. It works for me anyway, though of course I'm not you.

As a side note, of course these types of things tend to be hereditary, just like athletic ability or math skill or schizophrenia or practically anything else.

As another side note, I haven't used drugs or alcohol during any of these experiences, and I think that if a person wants a sober understanding of what this stuff is, its best to do it sober. Also, if you have unwanted dreamlike experiences of any kind its probably best to lay off any substances such as people use to stimulate desired dreamlike experiences.

Along similar lines, if you try to suppress unpleasant thoughts or emotions without facing with them in an honest way, that stuff will tend to force itself out when it gets a chance, such as in weird dream experiences. If you're psychologically healthy, and honest in your interpersonal relationships, I think the less pleasant dream stuff tends to go away. Everybody is a little bit different of course.

I hope that helps somehow.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Almost everything I've said so far makes it sound like I agree with the people who say that astral projection is 'all in your head', so to speak. The reason I don't agree with that, is I have precognitive and telepathetic experiences that many people would consider to be impossible. So when other people report similar experiences during astral projection or out of body experiences, I'm inclined to think that they're not all entirely deluded. And it seems to me that the sort of thing that I do with my sense of identity that facilitates my experiences isn't entirely different from what a person does when they astral project or otherwise go out of body. Yes its a lucid dream, but no that isn't the whole story.

I don't agree with people who say that the astral experience is entirely 'real' either. In my experience, messing around with it, there is definitely a degree of disagreement between what my 'astral' experience is telling me is going on and what is really going on physically. A person can just assert that the astral experience is 'real', but I don't see any reason to say its more real than any other lucid dream, other than that you may have more kinds of sensory imagination involved, and its superimposed on your present picture of where you really are. Even having objectively verifiable paranormal experiences while astral projecting doesn't make it more real than a lucid dream, because people can have paranormal experiences while lucid dreaming also.

I am interested in understanding 'astral' subjects better. But generally when I question people about what they know, it seems that they've had basically the same experiences as me, dressed up by a lot of assumptions that they've read in books.

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Yeah I agree with this, its kind of where I'm at right now. I've had some very obvious precog dreams and shared dreams so I'm not sure how that fits into it all. So I don't like saying its 'astral' much(like its a separate experience)because they are dreams/dream like. So I'm somewhat on the fence with those types of experiences.

I don't understand synchronicities either. For example, Saturday I drove for 3 hours, and just as I passed over a dead skunk, the ad on the radio said "what's that smell?" in an "eew gross" kind of voice. If this sort of thing happened occasionally, it might plausibly be "just a coincidence". But it happens way too often for that, and it tends to be connected with precognitive and shared-thought kinds of experiences, like its the same kind of thing. I would like to know the purpose of it, or if it has no purpose, why it happens.

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Originally Posted by gab

RoseDreams,

best thing you could do is to educate yourself about OBEs. Your family had them, were they also scared? Why don't you have a talk with your mom about this. How did she cope? What did she do? Did she go and explore?

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Thanks, that's a good idea. We had a pretty long conversation about it, she told me that it only happens to her if she goes to sleep when she's emotional. Like when she goes to sleep mad or upset about something. She said she would explore our house and that's it. She doesn't seem to like the experience very much.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

If you think astral projection is a problem for you and it happens involuntarily when trying to lucid dream, my suggestion would be not to lucid dream in the conventional sense. I realize this is complete heresy on this site, like telling people not to smoke on a weed website, but right or wrong that's how it looks to me. You can be conscious while you're asleep without trying to create a lucid virtual reality experience. Just think about things, explore different kinds of experiences without trying to control the sensate aspect of your dream experience. Technically that's still a lucid dream, because you're asleep and you know you're asleep, but it seems less likely to me to lead to an unwanted out of body experience. It works for me anyway, though of course I'm not you.

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That was really interesting to read, thanks for sharing your experiences. It definitely helps. The only problem here is that I often don't lucid dream intentionally. This is something that happens to me most of the time when I'm normally falling back asleep in the early morning/late night. It starts when I feel vibrations in my head (this is a daily occurrence). Sometimes I ignore it and manage to fall into a non lucid sleep cycle, which usually turns into a DILD. Many times it leads to a WILD which I have very much learned to enjoy. The other times it leads to an OBE/Astral Projection, which I don't enjoy at all and which I would like to prevent. The only way I have found to prevent this is to force myself awake, which doesn't work every time, is stressful, and prevents me from reaching a WILD. See my problem?

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Originally Posted by RoseDream

The only way I have found to prevent this is to force myself awake, which doesn't work every time, is stressful, and prevents me from reaching a WILD. See my problem?

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If it were me, I would lose interest in the WILD, since its almost the same thing as the astral projection, and it might not be possible for you to do one and not the other, even if it seems to be possible for some people. Your interest here has a significant effect, its not just a matter of what you actively try to do. Controlling my interest is pretty much the only way I control my experiences.

For me there was no ringing, buzzing, or spiraling out of control with the astral projection. My sister has had something like that a few times though. If she has any suggestions besides what your mom already said I'll post that later. She is an an emergency room doctor, so has a lot of stress and irregular sleep schedules, which probably contributes. That goes along with what your mom said.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

For me there was no ringing, buzzing, or spiraling out of control with the astral projection. My sister has had something like that a few times though.

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i used to get intense vibrations every single time but not anymore at all. sometimes i'll notice noises. i don't quite get the fear you have though if you find lucid dreaming pleasant yet you are scared of "astral projection". that's a hype word that's giving you issues i think. the experiences are the same. i think you really need to do some meditating on what you're actually afraid of and then work towards facing that fear and overcome it. i realize mom had some experiences but she definitely does not sound like an expert to be getting your info from.

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Originally Posted by RoseDream

Okay, thank you! It's just hard not to be afraid, I always feel like there's something unnatural happening. Like I'm doing something that I'm not supposed to... so whenever I think I'm about to leave my body, I force myself awake and it is stressful. (It feels like I'm fighting against something pulling me away and there are strange sensations in my brain, almost like I'm being electrocuted.)

And it seems to me a very spiritual experience, drastically different from any lucid dream. Does anybody have any clue why this seems to be genetic?

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It's easy to be scared of something we don't understand, I get that. I'm not claiming that I know what OBEs are.

Not sure if you are interested, and it's ok if not, but I'll share with you what my understanding of OBEs is.

I believe, that we live in multidimensional place. Right now, we are in physical reality, where matter is dense. That's why we can't walk through walls. Other realities are of different densities. Each reality has different vibrational frequency that corresponds with the density. Each reality is right here, occupies same place as we do right now. But they are out of synch with us, becuse they are of different frequency.

Example - energy planes as radio waves and our body or subtle body as a radio. At any moment, all radio waves of all different frequencies exist at the same time, and pass through the radio receiver. But we can hear only one station at the time. One we are tuned into.

Our physical body has certain frequency, so it can stay only in dimension with that vibrational frequency. But we have more than just a physical body. We have a few subtle/energy bodies, that have different frequencies.

Some believe, that one of our subtle bodies, the one closest in density and frequency to the physical, separates from physical body every night. It hovers just a few inches above our sleeping bodies and receives energy to regenerate our physical body.

The vibrations we feel when WILDing/OBEing are the vibrations of one of our subtle bodies, the astral body. It happens, when we are raising our frequency to match that of another dimension. Another plane. When we match that frequency, we can see it and feel it. We are still in our bedroom, but we can see the energy copy of it. Our astral body can also travel to higher dimensions, where things are less and less physical and more made out of just energy.

Depending on which frequency we raise our subtle body, that astral plane it's able to visit. Or should I say "see".

Latest string theory says, that smallest particles that everything is made out of are small string. Not just any strings, but vibrating strings. So I don't know, but now the vibrations don't sound too silly, since scientists talks about vibrating strings as building blocks or everything.

I agree with you that OBEs are spiritual. For some, they are proof of afterlife, of heaven, or suvival of the soul.

These two books are excellent read about OBEs.
William Buhlman's Adventures beyond the body.
Robert Monroe's Journeys out of the body

gab: that is fascinating! I definitely feel like the vibrations are significant and not just a hallucination. If they were a hallucination, why would they be so consistent for me since I was very young? I used to think that everybody experienced them whenever they fell asleep. I like your thoughts about OBEs, and would certainly like to look into it more. It just doesn't seem like a lucid dream to me. If it was just a dream, I don't think so many people would report such similar experiences. None of my dreams are ever the same... but my OBEs are.

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Originally Posted by RoseDream

gab: that is fascinating! I definitely feel like the vibrations are significant and not just a hallucination. If they were a hallucination, why would they be so consistent for me since I was very young? I used to think that everybody experienced them whenever they fell asleep. I like your thoughts about OBEs, and would certainly like to look into it more. It just doesn't seem like a lucid dream to me. If it was just a dream, I don't think so many people would report such similar experiences. None of my dreams are ever the same... but my OBEs are.

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Although in my posts about WILD I list vibrations together with "other hallucinations" as falling sensation, images, sounds, I do feel very strongly, that they are not hallucinations. I say they are, only for WILDing purposes, as they can give you an indication where you are in the WILDing process. That you are getting close to a WILD.

But I know (for myself only, as I could be totaly wrong), that these vibrations are on subatomic level. You can feel them quite strongly, but if someone touched you, he would feel nothing.

Vibrations to me mean, that my subtle body is changing it's vibrational frequency in it's preparation to exit confines of the physical body and enter another energy dimension. To me, one of the main differences between OBE and LD is the vibrational frequency my body is able to achieve at that moment.

Once I had this experience, which gave me some food for thought.

I was doing some breathing excercises on my bed, laying down. When suddenly I almost fell out of myself. I felt my inner body (first time ever), as it turned inside me to my left side, as if laying on the left shoulder. That's the first time I felt another body inside me. Like the russian matrioshka dolls. It was so intense, unexpected and incredible.

Then, after some other stuff , I felt my inner body squirming and trying to make a break for it. It was trying to get out. During all this, I was as aware and awake, as I'm now.

Among people who believe that the astral body is a real body made of refined or higher vibratory matter, I've read two very different views about the significance of astral projection. One group thinks that the astral body is developing within the physical body like a butterfly in a cocoon, and we can eventually abandon the physical body and live in the astral body. This group includes people who write books on astral projection. Another group thinks that the astral body will always depend on the physical body, but that by improving all aspects of one's being, including the astral body, the physical body will also be improved. They believe that trying to separate the bodies is a bad mistake that is destructive of one's psychic health. This group includes Theosophists, and some who call themselves Rosicrucians and Masons. I would guess that there are probably Vedic or Buddhist factions that share that view also, since the western groups derived many of their ideas from those.

If the Theosophists are right, long term effects of repeated astral projection include neuroticism and loss of control over one's feelings and desires. It could also result in physical effects like connective tissue disease. I know from my own understanding and experience that the Theosophists are wrong about a lot of other stuff. Whether they're right or wrong about this I don't know. Their view makes more sense to me than the view of the people who advocate astral projection as a spiritual path. And even if its wrong it makes at least enough sense to be worth considering. This is why I think people ought to give some consideration to their negative feelings astral projection, without suppressing those based on what other people tell them. And of course people should try to share their own long term experiences so that other people can learn from them. This is why I have previously said that if people advocate exotic meditative practices, including astral projection, they should be up front with other people about their mental health issues, since those might be related. Its just the same as if I come on here telling people that vegetarian diet is a great idea, I have a responsibility to be up front with other people about health problems I have that might possibly be a result of that diet.

One thing that I don't think the Masons and similar take into account very well is the extent to which individual destiny is limited by the destiny of the larger group we are a part of. We mostly share the same genome, for example. They think that if the astral body is perfected, the physical body becomes immortal. Even if that's true in principle I don't think that it follows that its attainable for individuals. I like their idea of not separating or dissociating the spiritual from the physical though, because results are fairly consistently bad for religious sects that try to do that, by almost any measure.

Continuing on another aspect of this....In my astral projection experiences, my sense of touch was pretty much completely dissociated from my physical body. This sort of goes along with what I said about mental models. Gab, in your experience while awake, it sounds like you could still feel your physical body simultaneously. This seems to support the idea that the experience of the 'astral' body is more than a mistaken tactile hallucination of where your physical body is.

I didn't notice any vibration at all, but I wasn't paying attention to that either. Certainly there was no buzzing or large vibrations like some people experience. I've guessed that kind of vibration is due to sense of touch and/or hearing oscillating between two different states, rather than it being from feeling or hearing something that is vibrating. (In other words, its the sense that's vibrating in that case, not what is being sensed.) It sounds like the vibration that Gab experienced is different than that though.

It seems to me that a person ought to be able to feel that kind of vibration all the time, once a person knows what to pay attention to.

Gab, can you tell if the vibrations seem to become higher in frequency before you feel your astral body, or higher in amplitude? This is like the difference between higher pitch and higher volume. Both cases are higher energy. Don't go from what other people say, they don't have these kinds of distinctions straight.

If I think about feeling in my whole body at once , I can cause a sort of avalanche of feeling, like what some people call a full-body orgasm. This is particularly easy to do if I pay special attention to the top of my head and my spine. Experientially this would be an amplitude kind of thing, not frequency, but nerve impulses use higher frequency to represent stronger impressions. I'm guessing that the 'vibrations' you experience have either to do with nerve impulses or with how the information is represented in your mind, rather than a vibration of some thing that you're sensing. I don't think you can experience vibrations of particle physics, like in string theory, as vibrations of your astral body. I don't even think that would work for something like oscillations of electrons. The scale is completely different. Feeling that as a vibration would be like trying to build a working microscope out of bricks. I think the 'astral vibration' has to be some more macroscopic behavior of the astral body, like waves moving through it. In other words, the body is vibrating. If the matter itself is different from ordinary matter because of something having to do with vibrations, I don't think that it makes sense that those kinds of vibrations would be felt that way.

To understand any of this stuff, I think a starting point is to recognize that one's experience of one's physical body is a mental representation of one's physical body, that its not a direct experience of one's physical body. I think that if a person doesn't recognize that, or doesn't see any of the implications, then most conclusions they draw about astral reality are unavoidably wrong. As I've posted previously, the reason I care about this is I think that our whole astral paradigm with vibrations and whatnot is mostly wrong, and if someone could come up with a more realistic way of thinking about it, we would all have better experiences. Since this sort of thing is psychically shared, people who aren't interested in intellectual discussions wouldn't even have to think about it, but they'd still be able to imagine a better representation of the experience, in other words a better experience, based on what they feel about how other people think about it. Even the stuff about vibrations and finer bodies is a collection of thoughts that other people put thought into developing, and if they hadn't made that effort then we wouldn't even have that.

To try to better explain what I mean here by way of analogy....We are able to see using our eyes because natural selection trained the structure of the brain and the eye. It doesn't just happen by itself, if our eyes were not lenses for instance it wouldn't work at all. Then on top of that our brains had to teach themselves to make the right connections in infancy. Without that training you would be completely blind, even if your eye and brain started out fine. (This has been verified through sick sensory deprivation experiments with baby animals.) As a minor example of this, one of the last things to be learned is how to judge size and distance. I have a very vivid memory of seeing a bumble bee that was as big as a small rabbit - it really appeared to me that way. And I've seen other small children make similar mistakes, such as thinking they might fall into a small crack in the ground. With the astral stuff, even if our bodies are already designed by providence to be able to do this stuff, we still have to learn how. Its as if we're trying to see and we don't even have the shape of an eye, we have to imagine it into being. As a similar example, I think that a person who thinks in terms of signals being sent between people is probably at a big disadvantage in learning to share dreams, because that's not how it works. And someone who thinks in terms of 'me' and 'not me' can't do it as easily either. A lot of the steps we take are by providence, like an older person holding our hand, but we have to do the work of developing that kind of thinking ourselves or it won't stick. That's how it seems to me anyway.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

In my astral projection experiences, my sense of touch was pretty much completely dissociated from my physical body. This sort of goes along with what I said about mental models. Gab, in your experience while awake, it sounds like you could still feel your physical body simultaneously. This seems to support the idea that the experience of the 'astral' body is more than a mistaken tactile hallucination of where your physical body is.

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In maybe 2 LD, I did feel my physical and dream body at the same time. I was simultaneously in the LD, doing my thing, and I was also avare and felt my physical body laying in bed. I think this happened, because my cat was leaning against me, so I didn't completely lose track of my sleeping body.

But in the experience from previous post, I felt only one body - dream/astral body. I knew there is another one right there, occupying same space, but I didn't feel it, and my perspective was from the dream body. At some point, the dream body started rotating with axes being in my torso, so the torso of both bodies was in same place, but my dream body head rotated over floor, and my feet were in the wall. (bed is against the wall)

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Gab, can you tell if the vibrations seem to become higher in frequency before you feel your astral body, or higher in amplitude? This is like the difference between higher pitch and higher volume. Both cases are higher energy. Don't go from what other people say, they don't have these kinds of distinctions straight.

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My first vibrations was very intense. Since then, they are very gentle. Sometimes less, sometimes more intense. Pulsating very fast. Like when you put your hand on purring cat, but faster. Sorry, can't give you better answer. I'm not claiming it's the strings vibrating, in fact, I have no idea what these vibrations are. Or, what I percieve as vibrations. I would love to know. That's why I would love to have more OBEs. To explore and look for answers. Is there afterlife, who am I and why I'm here, what is the universe, are we rally just on one membrane, does universe have an end, is Earth a kindergarden for our souls to learn propper manners, before we go to better living in higher energy worlds...?

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

To understand any of this stuff, I think a starting point is to recognize that one's experience of one's physical body is a mental representation of one's physical body, that its not a direct experience of one's physical body. I think that if a person doesn't recognize that, or doesn't see any of the implications, then most conclusions they draw about astral reality are unavoidably wrong.

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I understand what you saying. Same way as we don't see objects, we just "see" how our brain interprets what we see. maybe with practicing awareness and OBEs and meditation, I will be able to see things more for what they really are, rather than what my brain wants me to believe they are.

Each time when I had what I think was OBE, I felt only one body, hovering slightly above my sleeping body. I saw my room from this elevated perspective. But when WILDing, I feel as I'm in the same place, my perspective is from position of my physical head on a pillow. I take a leap of faith here, stand up and walk away.

Shadowofwind, I really like your posts. I wish, I could converse with you better on this interesting subject. But I was out of school long before string theory came out, so all I know is just from discovery and science channels. Thank you for posting.

Thanks for the thoughts Gab. It sounds then like our experience is very similar.

When asleep I'm also vaguely aware of my body, but the main way I reconcile the contradiction between that and my 'dream body' is I just don't imagine a dream body.

I did a quick calculation of what the frequency of an electron's spin would be (in the sense that it has spin) and got 2e50Hz. From an internet search, the frequency of the electron's "orbit" around a hydrogen atom is about 7e15 oscillations per second. I think that second number is about right, because it would be similar to the frequency of light that interacts with matter, and hydrogen is the smallest atom. Ultraviolet light, which is a little bit too high frequency to see, is about (3e8m/s)/150e-9m, which is 2e15Hz or 2000000000000000 oscillations per second. Astral matter is of course said to vibrate at an even higher frequency than normal matter.

A fluorescent lamp is 60 oscillations per second, which is near the limit of what most people can notice as a vibration. I'd guess that people's astral projection vibrations are a lot slower than that, maybe more like 10 or 20 per second.

It seems to me that the 'higher vibrations' meme started as a spiritual growth metaphor a hundred years ago when radio was cutting edge technology. People experience oscillations of their sensory imagination during astral projection, and radio waves are invisible, just like thoughts, and 'higher' is often a metaphor for 'better'.

I still think that something 'real' is happening during astral projection though.

One speculation I had was that the astral body is a physical body in a parallel world, but I don't think that can be right since a physical body shouldn't be able to levitate.

I suspect that whatever the truth is may not be very much like any of this, that astral phenomena might be a side effect of something else, and only appears as a side effect because we don't know how to think about that something else.

Anyway, I hope not to undermine anyone's spiritual experiences by saying these things, this is just my inept way of trying to get at the heavenly realities hiding behind our early attempts to conceive of them. I do agree that heavenly things are real, I'd go so far as to say that I know this, even if I don't know very much at all about what those things are.

I had a few other things to say, but I need to work, and I'll be pretty busy for a few days. So if I don't respond to something its not because I've lost interest. Thanks again for your thoughts.