Questions for the Astral Traveler

Here are a few questions for those who claim they "astral project". I would appreciate honest answers, because my questions are serious and honest as well. :)

1. Based on what exactly do you believe that astral travel and lucid dreaming aren't one and the same thing? "It feels different" is not an acceptable answer.

2. Have you ever done a digital clock reality check while astral projecting? If yes, what were the results, and if not, why not?

3. What can you do during astral projection that you can't do while lucid dreaming?

4. What can you do in a lucid dream that you can't do during astral projection?

5. Is there a difference between an OBE and astral projection?

6. How do astral beings behave differently from dream characters (or dream beings)?

7. Have you ever thought you were astral projecting and then it turned out to be just a regular lucid dream? If yes, how did this happen?

I would appreciate if someone could answer each question, instead of posting a general response such as "you don't understand astral projection."

Thanks much!

1. I do not know if Astral travel, and Lucid dreaming are/not the same thing, so a reliable answer that meets your criteria is not forthcoming.
2. I have never thought of checking a digital clock during the few astral experiences I have had. I do not even use this method in dreams. I just 'know' I am dreaming.
3. This answer to this question, and number 4. seem to be the same.
4. I have no control in astral experiences whatsoever. In a lucid, almost anything is possible.
5. I think they are the same thing, but again, I do not speak with too much experience.
6. Never met a single entity, ever, in any astral experience. Not managed to get out of my room yet, so this answer must also go partly unanswered.
7. The difference between a possible astral experience, and a lucid dream are so far apart on the Tiredphil spectrum, I have never mixed the two.
The only common theme, is I am not conscious when either take place.

I have tried to answer as honestly as possible, and will follow this thread, as it sounds like it could generate a few good replies.
Any further questions you would like to add, wil also be answered - if I can.
Cheers,
Phil

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

1. I do not know if Astral travel, and Lucid dreaming are/not the same thing, so a reliable answer that meets your criteria is not forthcoming.

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Ok, I appreciate your honesty.

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2. I have never thought of checking a digital clock during the few astral experiences I have had. I do not even use this method in dreams. I just 'know' I am dreaming.

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But don't you think it would be smart to do the digital clock RC during astral projection? If the numbers on the clock change, wouldn't that tell you that you are most likely (99.9%) not astral projecting at all?

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3. This answer to this question, and number 4. seem to be the same.
4. I have no control in astral experiences whatsoever. In a lucid, almost anything is possible.

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Hmm, this is very weak to be used as evidence. I have had lucid dreams where I can do many things, and other lucid dreams where I can't do anything extraordinary at all. So theoretically, your astral projection experience could have been a lucid dream where you didn't have any control.

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5. I think they are the same thing, but again, I do not speak with too much experience.

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Okay.

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6. Never met a single entity, ever, in any astral experience. Not managed to get out of my room yet, so this answer must also go partly unanswered.

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Okay.

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7. The difference between a possible astral experience, and a lucid dream are so far apart on the Tiredphil spectrum, I have never mixed the two.

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Could you explain, in detail, what those differences are? For example I have had WILDs that could be easily mistaken for astral projection, because they have a completely different feel than a regular DILD, but later on I see that they are really nothing more than a lucid dream.

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The only common theme, is I am not conscious when either take place.

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Let me ask you this: Do you believe that lucid dreams can mask themselves as astral projection?

I can read writing in dreams, and it is usualy clear. Same thing with clocks, so not much progress could be made using this method.

When I am in a dream, I just awaken to lucidity.
Almost anything that is out of place will alert me to the fact that I am dreaming.
This is not a learned skill,as I have had the ability from a very young age.
I even got bored with lucid dreaming, and often let the dream take its course.
This has knocked the frequency of lucid dreams down by quite a bit, but made dreams much more interesting.
I have only re-started with the lucid thing since joining this forum.

A so called OOBE or astral experience is totaly different for me.
I always start off from my bedroom, and always float upward with zero control.
I will sometimes drift toward the window, but the floating sensation is quite scary, and I am afraid of heights.
Once I drifted out, but tried to claw my way back in because I was quite afraid of what was happening.
This is not the case in lucid dreaming, where I can fly, or do almost anything at heights.

Also in oobe/astral, I sometimes look around my room, and there are no items out of place.
In dreams, which are lucid, or not, my bedroom is always similar to the real thing.

In total, I have had hundreds, or maybe even thousands of lucid dreams, but only a small amount off oobe/astral ( Less than a dozen in 40 years - probably less )

"Let me ask you this: Do you believe that lucid dreams can mask themselves as astral projection?"

Not in my experience. Not at all.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

I can read writing in dreams, and it is usualy clear. Same thing with clocks, so not much progress could be made using this method.

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This is where I have to stop you. Text can be very clear in a dream, but it isn't stable. Especially not if you look away, look back, and repeat the same thing twice. It has to do with certain parts of the brain that are less active when asleep.

So yeah, this is the perfect method, no matter how you slice it or dice it. Now if you tell me that the clock does not change for you if you look away and look back, then in all honesty, I find that very hard to believe.

Of course many "astral travelers" on the forum will confirm your statement and not mine, because they hate the idea that astral projection = lucid dreaming. :D

In real life, I look at a clock only once, however if I look back again it often changes to one more min' ahead.
So in dreams when I see a clock, and look back again, if it has changed, the change seems normal to me, and I pay it no attention.
Plus we have quite a few clocks in our house, and all are a few mins out from each other. So change - again - seems normal
Because numerical figures are quite stable ( to me anyway ) this method of reality checking has never been adopted by myself.
As for reading. I can not read long stories, or even Dream View replies. I have an an undiagnosed attention problem.

Question.
Are you looking to prove or disprove a link between astral/lucid dreaming, or looking for evidence either way ?
Rhetorical question, that I will answer

If you are looking to prove the connection, then you will always find 'your' answers.
If you are looking to disprove the connection you will also always find 'your' answers.
If you are looking for evidence either way, you may find the real answer.

It will take more than my poor replies to get to the bottom of your query.
Why not try some Astral Travel Techniques
Then some Lucid Dreaming Techniques
Answers will always make themselves known to a true, determined seeker of knowledge.

I wish you luck, my friend.

We need more replies from other members -

Personally I've had several obe's/astral projection over the last 4 years so I'll share what I 've noticed during that time through your 1st question. (I would answer your other questions Im just tired from a long day @work)

1) When people say astral travel feels different they may be referring to several things. One being the ability to make a visual distinction (depending on how dark your room is) between you and your sleeping body. Sometimes looking at your sleeping body is not necessary because u can sense it and your consciouness as being temporarily apart from each other. Two. you usually start where your physical body lays which more then likely will be your room. It's not your physical room its an exact copy of it. You know this because if u knock over a lamp during the experience that same lamp will be standing when u wake up. For example If you had a dream that started somewhere else and u managed to make it back to your room the accuracy of what your room looks like will pale in comparison if u were observing it from an astral projection point of view. People may also be referring to the strong vibrations felt at the onset of the experience. Or how u may feel when you wake up from an astral projection, which can feel like you never were asleep in the first place. In other words you don't wake up groggy or slightly disoriented as normally observed after a dream.

2.
I can't remember a time I looked at a clock during an obe/ap experience. ?? But if your referring to how something can change when looked at more then once then yes I have witnessed this many times in my dreams it can be quite frustrating. I can't say the same about my obe experiences things seem to be more stable and familiar. I remember walking to my kitchen 1 morning and asking to see lottery numbers pop up in my head. As usual nothing happen. So I got the urge to manifest a newspaper and with in seconds I had one sitting on my kitchen counter top. I flipped a few pages and there they were a six number set. I did look away and look back several times and the numbers stayed the same. I was only able to remember 12,18,32. Those exact numbers came out in the next powerball draw.

3.
I think you have a better sense of where your body is located during an Ap , you can even observe it sleeping. Although just like your room being an exact copy of it self so is the body that your observing.Kinda Like looking at another version of yourself in a neighboring reality. Scientist our now theorizing on a multiverse idea which could explain my previous statement alluding to parallel universes. I have also noticed a sense of duality the ability to exist in more then one place. I remember watching my self struggle from a hundred feet away because something was trying to guide me out of earths atmosphere.

4.
In a (lucid) dream you can be indifferent from anything accurately resembling your physical reality.


5.
I would say an obe is the initial exiting of the body and ap is exploring beyond the initial setting of your room like your neighborhood, other places etc.

6.
Astral beings seem to want to guide u in some way or communicate telepathically. Only in my dreams can I recall having verbal conversations with people. But On the other hand I've had astral beings assist me out of my body by pushing me on to my bed room floor or pulling me out of my bed out in to my neighborhood where I flew through the clouds at high speeds. Telepathically I communicated with a astral being through some sort of twitter thought bubble that had tweets I could read from them.

7. I have yet to see a obe change to a lucid dream or vice versa.

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Originally Posted by Gills

Here are a few questions for those who claim they "astral project". I would appreciate honest answers, because my questions are serious and honest as well. :)

1. Based on what exactly do you believe that astral travel and lucid dreaming aren't one and the same thing? "It feels different" is not an acceptable answer.

2. Have you ever done a digital clock reality check while astral projecting? If yes, what were the results, and if not, why not?

3. What can you do during astral projection that you can't do while lucid dreaming?

4. What can you do in a lucid dream that you can't do during astral projection?

5. Is there a difference between an OBE and astral projection?

6. How do astral beings behave differently from dream characters (or dream beings)?

7. Have you ever thought you were astral projecting and then it turned out to be just a regular lucid dream? If yes, how did this happen?

I would appreciate if someone could answer each question, instead of posting a general response such as "you don't understand astral projection."

Thanks much!

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such a great and in your face question.
1: no different other than expectations.
2: exactly the same as in lucid dream, figures change before your eyes
3: nothing other than your own expectations limiting factor
4: ^
5: the only thing I can possibly think of that's different is medical emergency type experiences which I have not experienced (research traumatic events, near death, war stories of men being "blown out of body" by extreme force of impact etc)
6: not at all different
7: yes at first. after much experimenting i have come to the conclusion that they are exactly one and the same. the experience is no different between the two other than what your own expectations might constrict it to being.

now having said all that..the real question for me at this stage in my learning is "what exactly is happening during a dream"? (especially lucid dreaming). are we actually spiritually leaving our physical bodies during this time or is it all taking place in our own mind? i've had many experiences that I could 99.9% swear I have exited my physical body and gone some other place yet, comparing to a lucid dream experience, the experience itself and all the laws applying to the experience pertain to both "astral projection" and lucid dreaming. I do not post my lucid dreaming count or "OBE" count but they are both in the several hundreds.
as i said though, after many experiments during both experiences i've determined for my own knowledge that they are one and the same. this is not to say that an OBE experience is not genuine, interpret that as you will.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

In real life, I look at a clock only once, however if I look back again it often changes to one more min' ahead.

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Uh yeah, but I'm talking about it changing from 06:23 to 06:28 and then to 27:05. That's how it works in a dream.

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So in dreams when I see a clock, and look back again, if it has changed, the change seems normal to me, and I pay it no attention.

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Next time you are "astral projecting", look at a clock, remember the time, look away, look back, repeat. I am convinced, 100%, that the numbers will change and reveal to you that you're not astral projecting, but lucid dreaming. That is, if you're honest enough to admit it afterwards.

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Plus we have quite a few clocks in our house, and all are a few mins out from each other. So change - again - seems normal

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:roll:

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Because numerical figures are quite stable ( to me anyway ) this method of reality checking has never been adopted by myself.

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The point is that you should at least try to pay attention and see if the clock changes drastically. A very simple, regular reality check, no more no less.

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As for reading. I can not read long stories, or even Dream View replies. I have an an undiagnosed attention problem.

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That may very well be true, but it seems to me that many people are very dishonest about the AP-LD connection. I'm not sure (yet) if you are one of those people.

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Question.
Are you looking to prove or disprove a link between astral/lucid dreaming, or looking for evidence either way ?
Rhetorical question, that I will answer

If you are looking to prove the connection, then you will always find 'your' answers.
If you are looking to disprove the connection you will also always find 'your' answers.
If you are looking for evidence either way, you may find the real answer.

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I have so far found that there are no real differences between AP and LD other than what Runeword already pointed out, and it has to do with expectation. You expect that the AP is something different, and it will feel different and have certain different characteristics than a regular LD. I am talking from personal experience when I say that I thought I was astral projecting for quite some time, and then figured out I wasn't... by learning about a simple digital clock reality check.

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It will take more than my poor replies to get to the bottom of your query.
Why not try some Astral Travel Techniques
Then some Lucid Dreaming Techniques
Answers will always make themselves known to a true, determined seeker of knowledge.

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I tried many things, and I'm convinced that AP is a normal LD masked as AP.

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I wish you luck, my friend.

We need more replies from other members -

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BTW, here is a thread that made me bust into tears from laughing: http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...-dreaming.html

The OP lists 30 similarities between LD and Astral Projection, lists not one single difference, and then claims they are not the same thing. :lol:

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Originally Posted by Runeword

such a great and in your face question.
1: no different other than expectations.
2: exactly the same as in lucid dream, figures change before your eyes
3: nothing other than your own expectations limiting factor
4: ^
5: the only thing I can possibly think of that's different is medical emergency type experiences which I have not experienced (research traumatic events, near death, war stories of men being "blown out of body" by extreme force of impact etc)
6: not at all different
7: yes at first. after much experimenting i have come to the conclusion that they are exactly one and the same. the experience is no different between the two other than what your own expectations might constrict it to being.

now having said all that..the real question for me at this stage in my learning is "what exactly is happening during a dream"? (especially lucid dreaming). are we actually spiritually leaving our physical bodies during this time or is it all taking place in our own mind? i've had many experiences that I could 99.9% swear I have exited my physical body and gone some other place yet, comparing to a lucid dream experience, the experience itself and all the laws applying to the experience pertain to both "astral projection" and lucid dreaming. I do not post my lucid dreaming count or "OBE" count but they are both in the several hundreds.
as i said though, after many experiments during both experiences i've determined for my own knowledge that they are one and the same. this is not to say that an OBE experience is not genuine, interpret that as you will.

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Great post. I appreciate your honesty.

I have a strong belief that lucid dreams and "astral projection" (I prefer the term "out of body experience") are somehow related. That being said, but having experienced a number of both, I still find them still to be quite distinct events. The following are just observations from my own experiences and are obviously my own speculation and beliefs - not necessarily "reality".

In a lucid dream, you are aware you are dreaming. In an OBE, you are quite certain you are NOT dreaming. (Big distinction!).

In a lucid dream, your focus of awareness is the "you" in the dream. In an OBE, you often observe your physical body from a focus of awareness outside the body. You may observe, from your physical body, the "outside you" actually separate from the "physical you" and later observe the reconnection from either or both perspectives. Your consciousness seems to reside in separate focuses but your awareness can be concentrated in one or the other.

Lucid dreams often lead to OBE's, but OBE's never seem to lead to lucid dreams.

Lucid dreams, though unusual, are still within the normal realm of human experience. Out of body experiences feel decidedly "not normal" - especially the first time you experience one. In fact, an OBE can change one's paradigm about the true nature of consciousness, reality, and spirituality.

Your first lucid dream is usually a fun experience. Your first OBE will likely scare the living daylights out of you!

Lucid dream settings can be virtually anywhere. OBE settings inevitably initiate from the location of your physical body.

In a lucid dream, your consciousness is already separate from your body. In an OBE, you witness the separation as it actually happens.

Again, my belief is that lucid dreams, OBE's, false awakenings, sleep paralysis, hypnogogic and hypnopompic states are all related somehow, but the characteristics of the events themselves are markedly different.

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Originally Posted by Tarvus

I have a strong belief that lucid dreams and "astral projection" (I prefer the term "out of body experience") are somehow related. That being said, but having experienced a number of both, I still find them still to be quite distinct events. The following are just observations from my own experiences and are obviously my own speculation and beliefs - not necessarily "reality".

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Fair enough.

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In a lucid dream, you are aware you are dreaming. In an OBE, you are quite certain you are NOT dreaming. (Big distinction!).

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I disagree with this statement, as many people are aware that an "OBE" is taking place, if that is what you meant. On the other hand, if you are not aware/lucid, that means an OBE could be a simple "dream" which masks itself as an OBE. You simply dream about being separated from your body. Many years ago I thought I had OBEs for months, and after learning about lucid dreaming I was able to find out that these OBEs were nothing more than WILDs. Why is everybody avoiding the question about doing a simple digital clock reality check in an OBE? They either ignore this question or say something similar to "numbers are always stable for me in dreams", which is 99% bull.

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In a lucid dream, your focus of awareness is the "you" in the dream. In an OBE, you often observe your physical body from a focus of awareness outside the body. You may observe, from your physical body, the "outside you" actually separate from the "physical you" and later observe the reconnection from either or both perspectives. Your consciousness seems to reside in separate focuses but your awareness can be concentrated in one or the other.

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A lucid dream has the power to make you observe your "body" lying in bed, as well as a feeling of separation from your body. A lucid dream has the power to do all those things. If you can be an animal in a lucid dream, grow limbs in a lucid dream, clone yourself in a lucid dream, and do a ton of other spectacular things, what makes you think a lucid dream can't also give you the feeling you're outside of your body? I hope you see where I'm going with this. It seems the biggest argument/evidence the astral travelers have is that it "feels different", and that's it.

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Lucid dreams often lead to OBE's, but OBE's never seem to lead to lucid dreams.

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Seeing how there is no solid evidence that OBE's are something other than dreams, this statement has no value.

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Lucid dreams, though unusual, are still within the normal realm of human experience. Out of body experiences feel decidedly "not normal" - especially the first time you experience one. In fact, an OBE can change one's paradigm about the true nature of consciousness, reality, and spirituality.

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Actually, the WILDs I had (and still have) made me change my paradigm about the nature of consciousness. If someone dreams they are out of their body and looking at themselves in bed, this might seem frightening at first, but there are also many other dreams and nightmares that can convince you that something supernatural happened.

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Your first lucid dream is usually a fun experience. Your first OBE will likely scare the living daylights out of you!

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Actually, my very first lucid dream scared the living daylights out of me, as did my first two or three WILDs.

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Lucid dream settings can be virtually anywhere. OBE settings inevitably initiate from the location of your physical body.

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Every single WILD I have had (and I've had hundreds) began in the room I fell asleep in, so I don't see anything significant in this statement.

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In a lucid dream, your consciousness is already separate from your body. In an OBE, you witness the separation as it actually happens.

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Dreams can create wonders. You can feel your body passing through walls, tasting food, having sex, flying, shapeshifting, growing additional limbs, and whatnot else... so why can't a dream recreate a realistic feeling of separation from your body?

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Again, my belief is that lucid dreams, OBE's, false awakenings, sleep paralysis, hypnogogic and hypnopompic states are all related somehow, but the characteristics of the events themselves are markedly different.

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My belief is that OBEs are dreams, no more no less. I don't see any reason to believe otherwise, and in my personal experience all me OBE's turned out to be dreams after doing a simple reality check. Again we see the popular pattern of people repeating "it feels really different" as a convincing argument.

"It's scary", "you look at your body", "you feel separating" are really really weak arguments.

This thread is going nowhere.
You are contradicting almost every comment made, that does not match your beliefs.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

This thread is going nowhere.
You are contradicting almost every comment made, that does not match your beliefs.

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It doesn't have anything to do with beliefs. I am asking if someone has done reality checks, specifically the digital clock RC, during an OBE experience. People are avoiding this question, and those who aren't avoiding it are claiming they don't do this reality check ever... which is also... a bit strange to say the least.

What do you want me to say to someone who claims OBE's aren't dreams simply because they "feel special"? Of course I will counter that statement every time someone makes it. The question is WHY can't a dream, lucid or otherwise, create a perfect OBE experience? Why can't a simple dream recreate the feeling of you separating from your body and looking at it?

If someone during an OBE or astral projection can find some text to read, reads it 3 times and it hasn't changed, then looks at a digital clock 3 times and it hasn't changed either, then there is reason to believe that he is really experiencing something other than a dream. In this case he is most likely having some type of out of body experience.

Everything else a.k.a "it feels different" or "it's scary" simply isn't evidence enough. Dreams can fool you. They fooled me, too. The sole reason I made this thread is because I managed to convince a friend that he is not having an OBEs, by making him do the digital clock thing. He never knew about reality checks or what lucid dreams are.

So please don't get all worked up about it. I simply want, those who claim they are separating from their body, to do a simple digital clock reality check next time they are having this experience... and to honestly post the results.

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Originally Posted by Gills

My belief is that OBEs are dreams, no more no less. I don't see any reason to believe otherwise, and in my personal experience all me OBE's turned out to be dreams after doing a simple reality check. Again we see the popular pattern of people repeating "it feels really different" as a convincing argument.

"It's scary", "you look at your body", "you feel separating" are really really weak arguments.

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As I said in my post before, I believe lucid dreams, OBE's, sleep paralysis, hypnogogic/hypnopompic states are all somehow related. You may well be correct that OBE's may in fact be lucid dreams. But since we draw a distinction between sleep paralysis and hypnogogia or lucid dreams and hypnopompia, what's wrong with making a distinction between lucid dreaming and OBE's? My post was made with an intent to state the differences I've personally observed between the lucid dream experience and OBE experience. It was in no way intended to appear argumentative. Sorry that you perceived it that way.

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Originally Posted by Gills

It doesn't have anything to do with beliefs. I am asking if someone has done reality checks, specifically the digital clock RC, during an OBE experience. People are avoiding this question, and those who aren't avoiding it are claiming they don't do this reality check ever... which is also... a bit strange to say the least.

What do you want me to say to someone who claims OBE's aren't dreams simply because they "feel special"? Of course I will counter that statement every time someone makes it. The question is WHY can't a dream, lucid or otherwise, create a perfect OBE experience? Why can't a simple dream recreate the feeling of you separating from your body and looking at it?

If someone during an OBE or astral projection can find some text to read, reads it 3 times and it hasn't changed, then looks at a digital clock 3 times and it hasn't changed either, then there is reason to believe that he is really experiencing something other than a dream. In this case he is most likely having some type of out of body experience.

Everything else a.k.a "it feels different" or "it's scary" simply isn't evidence enough. Dreams can fool you. They fooled me, too. The sole reason I made this thread is because I managed to convince a friend that he is not having an OBEs, by making him do the digital clock thing. He never knew about reality checks or what lucid dreams are.

So please don't get all worked up about it. I simply want, those who claim they are separating from their body, to do a simple digital clock reality check next time they are having this experience... and to honestly post the results.

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I do not do reality checks of any kind. I never have.
It will not be such an important task that I can remember to do these things when I become lucid.
It just is not something I have ever done, so I must decline on this one.
If you can think of some other task for me, that fits in with my way of thinking/dreaming. I will glady take part.

Again reading text more than once is not a common task that people undertake.
DV members becoming lucid may want to do the Superman thing, rather than waste an opportunity reading words on a page three times.

Going downhill in a car feels very different to going uphill in a car. These two are poles apart, but are the same thing.
They feel very different, and they are. But different forces/circumstances dictate their definitions as being 'not the same'
You can argue that the two actions are the same, or they are distinctly seperate.

As you have converted one believer from their beliefs, do you now want to convert everyone else ?
Then 'if' you are proven wrong, will you then try to convert everybody back to your version of the truth.

Try asking yourself, why you are so adamant that you should make your beliefs come before others.

If you do not resort to any more comments like " So please don't get all worked up about it" then I will gladly respond to your thread some more.

I might even think up some exercises, or reality checks to support your point of view, but not at the moment.

Cheers,
Phil

This thread needs a few other participants to drag it up from the pits.
There is too much counter contradiction going on by all sides, and not enough experienced events being shown.
I would send messages to Sivason, Original Poster,Joanna B, Linkzelda and a quite few others to join in on either side, but they are probably too busy, and do not have the skills to put in a good opinion.

( That will rattle a few cages ) or am I beating a :horse:

Love this forum

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Originally Posted by Gills

Here are a few questions for those who claim they "astral project". I would appreciate honest answers, because my questions are serious and honest as well. :)

[COLOR="#800080"][B]1. Based on what exactly do you believe that astral travel and lucid dreaming aren't one and the same thing? "It feels different" is not an acceptable answer.

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What kind of answer are you looking for if you are going to limit what can be answered. See below,,,

[COLOR="#800080"][B]1. Based on what exactly do you believe that BLUE and YELLOW aren't one and the same thing? "It LOOKS different" is not an acceptable answer.

[COLOR="#800080"][B]1. Based on what exactly do you believe that WARM WATER and COOL WATER aren't one and the same thing? "It feels different" is not an acceptable answer.

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Originally Posted by sivason

What kind of answer are you looking for if you are going to limit what can be answered. See below,,,

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My questions are very simple, and Runeword answered them honestly.

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Based on what exactly do you believe that BLUE and YELLOW aren't one and the same thing? [COLOR="#B22222"]"It LOOKS different" is not an acceptable answer.

Based on what exactly do you believe that WARM WATER and COOL WATER aren't one and the same thing? [COLOR="#B22222"]"It feels different" is not an acceptable answer.

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This is a very weak comparison. We have a light spectrum, wavelength, energy of light, and frequency. We know what separates blue from being yellow, and black from being white. Same thing with warm and cold water, we measure temperature.

As far as OBEs and/or dreams go, we have several possibilities to test and see which state we are in. Why does this seem so problematic to some people? Unless of course, they don't want to accept the idea that their OBE experiences are simply their subconscious fooling them.

Fact: If the numbers on a digital clock change in an "OBE" just as they would in a dream, then you are dreaming. If they do not change after looking back repeatedly, then you are definitely in another state of consciousness, perhaps really some kind of OBE.

Very simple. 2 + 2 = 4.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

I do not do reality checks of any kind. I never have.
It will not be such an important task that I can remember to do these things when I become lucid.
It just is not something I have ever done, so I must decline on this one.

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But are you not interested to see if your OBEs are really OBEs? :roll:

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If you can think of some other task for me, that fits in with my way of thinking/dreaming. I will glady take part.

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The digital clock RC takes 5 seconds, or a bit more if you repeat it a few times. Couldn't be quicker, and easier, and more reliable to see if you are really separated from your body. So why not do it?

It seems that you do not want to see the results of this reality check, because it might shatter your beliefs and show you that you're dreaming.

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Again reading text more than once is not a common task that people undertake.
DV members becoming lucid may want to do the Superman thing, rather than waste an opportunity reading words on a page three times.

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Then you haven't read some of the threads on this forum. Many users use "reading text" as a way to become lucid in the first place. Hell, that's what DILDs (Dream Initiated Lucid Dreams) are all about. Sure, some might count fingers or try to breathe through their nose, but in the end testing your state it what it comes down to... unless you're a "natural".

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Going downhill in a car feels very different to going uphill in a car. These two are poles apart, but are the same thing.
They feel very different, and they are. But different forces/circumstances dictate their definitions as being 'not the same'
You can argue that the two actions are the same, or they are distinctly seperate.

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I don't see how this can be applied into this situation. Going downhill cannot be masked so you think you're going uphill, and vice versa. Dreams on the other hand, can very well fool you when it comes to hundreds of different things. That's why we have reality checks to see if we are dreaming.

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As you have converted one believer from their beliefs, do you now want to convert everyone else ?
Then 'if' you are proven wrong, will you then try to convert everybody back to your version of the truth.

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First, I did not convert anyone, I simply suggested he should do a reality check next time he "separates" from his body. He actually converted himself.

Second, how can I be proven wrong? I have convinced myself that my out of body experiences are not out of body experiences, but maybe some other person really has them. That's why I suggest doing the digital clock RC. I don't see a problem.

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Try asking yourself, why you are so adamant that you should make your beliefs come before others.

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I'm not. I simply asked a few questions, and one user (Runeword) answered them very honestly.

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If you do not resort to any more comments like " So please don't get all worked up about it" then I will gladly respond to your thread some more.

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It just looked that way. No offense.

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I might even think up some exercises, or reality checks to support your point of view, but not at the moment.

Cheers,
Phil

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Okay.

Wave length meters and thermometers are physical devices. As no physical devices are present inside our heads, please give me an example of how you would answer those questions assuming you have no access to any device I would not have access to while dreaming. It makes little sense. Deprived of any form of physical measuring device, you almost have to just say "blue is not yellow because I SEE it with my own eyes"

I am not being a jerk. I know you like science and you know I claim to have a prestigious science degree. Think of this as just a bonus question to help your exploration. I am sure reasonable answer could be drawn up. So, here is the challenge. As no material is available in the dream/astral question, take the blue/yellow question as a simali and show us, via your answer, what form of answer you would like to the origanal question you posed.

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Originally Posted by sivason

Wave length meters and thermometers are physical devices. As no physical devices are present inside our heads, please give me an example of how you would answer those questions assuming you have no access to any device I would not have access to while dreaming. It makes little sense. Deprived of any form of physical measuring device, you almost have to just say "blue is not yellow because I SEE it with my own eyes"

I am not being a jerk. I know you like science and you know I claim to have a prestigious science degree. Think of this as just a bonus question to help your exploration. I am sure reasonable answer could be drawn up. So, here is the challenge. As no material is available in the dream/astral question, take the blue/yellow question as a simali and show us, via your answer, what form of answer you would like to the origanal question you posed.

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We do have a "device" of sorts, and that's called reality testing. What is so problematic about doing a simple digital clock RC during an OBE experience or during astral projection? Why does the question "did you ever do a digital clock RC during astral projection" always result in 20 paragraphs of text basically avoiding the issue?

Scenario 1: I think I have just separated from my body and I'm not in a dream. I do a reality check. The numbers change. Result: It's a dream.

Scenario 2: I think I have just separated from my body and I'm not in a dream. I do a reality check. The numbers do not change. I do it again, the numbers do not change. Result: It is not a dream, but another state of consciousness, perhaps really an out of body experience.

What is the problem? I don't see it.

I can't be seen as expert in dreaming of any sort. But I will tell you that I'm with Gills on this one. The question he poses is pretty simple guys. Go do the reality check. I guess if you're an experienced OBEist you won't mind wasting 5 sec of your hundredth OBE on a simple RC. After that you can go do whatever you planed! I'd do it right now if I could and I'm also very interested in this. I felt the "feeling" of the OBE once (scared the crap out of me). That's what got me into Lucid dreaming in the first place, but I also felt a WILD entrance which was quite similar. Again I'm no expert but I'd like this to be discussed and got over with.

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Originally Posted by Gills

Scenario 1: I think I have just separated from my body and I'm not in a dream. I do a reality check. The numbers change. Result: It's a dream.

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You seem to be making an either-or assumption. It's a possibility that the same part of the brain used in reading digital clocks is disengaged during an OBE as well as in a lucid dream. Have you considered that? If you assume all single headlight vehicles are motorcycles you aren't accounting for the car with one burned-out headlight.

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Originally Posted by Deluksic

I can't be seen as expert in dreaming of any sort. But I will tell you that I'm with Gills on this one. The question he poses is pretty simple guys. Go do the reality check. I guess if you're an experienced OBEist you won't mind wasting 5 sec of your hundredth OBE on a simple RC. After that you can go do whatever you planed! I'd do it right now if I could and I'm also very interested in this. I felt the "feeling" of the OBE once (scared the crap out of me). That's what got me into Lucid dreaming in the first place, but I also felt a WILD entrance which was quite similar. Again I'm no expert but I'd like this to be discussed and got over with.

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I gave an example in my post about reading lottery numbers posted in a news paper during what I would term an OBE. Those numbers never changed on me and they even showed up in the next lottery draw. Obe's don't come every day 4 me but Im willing to glance at a digital clock several times and see if my initial observations change. :-) Now I just need a digital clock because I don't have 1 by my bedside.

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Originally Posted by Tarvus

You seem to be making an either-or assumption. It's a possibility that the same part of the brain used in reading digital clocks is disengaged during an OBE as well as in a lucid dream. Have you considered that? If you assume all single headlight vehicles are motorcycles you aren't accounting for the car with one burned-out headlight.

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That's an interesting comparison! But...
Wouldn't that mean that everything is as unstable around you as the clock you're seeing. Which results in a regular lucid dream?

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Originally Posted by dreamcatcher81

I gave an example in my post about reading lottery numbers posted in a news paper during what I would term an OBE. Those numbers never changed on me and they even showed up in the next lottery draw. Obe's don't come every day 4 me but Im willing to glance at a digital clock several times and see if my initial observations change. :-) Now I just need a digital clock because I don't have 1 by my bedside.

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That's the spirit, now we need more people to confirm their findings! :)

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Originally Posted by Gills

We do have a "device" of sorts, and that's called reality testing. What is so problematic about doing a simple digital clock RC during an OBE experience or during astral projection? Why does the question "did you ever do a digital clock RC during astral projection" always result in 20 paragraphs of text basically avoiding the issue?

Scenario 1: I think I have just separated from my body and I'm not in a dream. I do a reality check. The numbers change. Result: It's a dream.

Scenario 2: I think I have just separated from my body and I'm not in a dream. I do a reality check. The numbers do not change. I do it again, the numbers do not change. Result: It is not a dream, but another state of consciousness, perhaps really an out of body experience.

What is the problem? I don't see it.

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OK, we need to start with question #5 to clarify why that is not valid. In question #5 you ask if AP and OBE are different. OBE is a very generic term like UFO. Any experience that seems to be out of body is an OBE. Therefore even a dream is OBE if you appear to be out of body. Think about UFO to get what I mean. If we are together in the woods and see a strange thing go overhead, and neither of us have a clue what it is, then to us it is a UFO unidentified (true) Flying (true) Object (true). I can say it was a UFO and be factual. I can not make the assumption that it was a space craft.
OBE is that kind of word. As long as you have an experience, and said experience appears to be out of your body, then it is, OBE. Therefore OBE is a meaningless word. It covers any experience, such as thinking you were a ghost, thinking you floated above your bed AND astral projection.

Now, in order to show why your experiment may be valid for some claims of OBE, but not for claims of AP, we need to clarify what AP is. The idea with AP is that other realms exist that are not composed of matter in the way we understand it. It basically involves crazy ideas like dimensional travel. That is leaving earth and this type of universe behind and experiencing things of a nature completely removed from the physical world. There for if someone claims to have done AP and gone all around their house then to the moon, they are using the term incorrectly. They have had a generic OBE, not AP.

Now a tiny bit on the supposed nature of such astral realms. It is supposed to be composed of a much less stable set of physics. It is messy and like a storm, with physical laws barely in place. The matter that composes it is unstable. While projecting into such a space we can see illusions created by our mind attempting to make heads or tails f what is going on. If you run into a life form, you will just create some image that fits your mental expectations. You may have run into a "real" thing, but all you can come up with in understanding is dream like interpretations. A hostile life form may be nothing like what you see, but your brain attempting to translate crazy input shows you your own idea of a devil and so on. Also, it is supposed to include areas of higher stability that can be inhabited. The stability is due to things like eddies in a current, or an eye of a storm.

So, there is your answer to #5. I now say that your whole premise is built off the idea of disproving/proving the form of OBE in which someone thinks they are walking/floating around the real world. The idea that there would be any form of clock in AP is flawed. If you saw a clock it would either be a real object there, that your brain was attempting to translate into some thing you comprehend, or it would be an illusion of a clock created by the expectation of the person experiencing AP.

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Originally Posted by Deluksic

That's an interesting comparison! But...
Wouldn't that mean that everything is as unstable around you as the clock you're seeing. Which results in a regular lucid dream?

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Yes, from my experience and from talking with others, the very nature of this type of OBE involves a separation from the advantage of a reasoning brain. You may see details that seem like you must have really been observing, while on the other hand you feel deranged and messed up like on drugs. You may see weird things that make no sense at all.

That is not to say it is 100% only an LD with nothing else going on, but both this form of OBE and AP conform to the same form as LDs do. be they the same or not, they clearly seem very related. Perhaps, if we wish to believe in something beyond ordinary, we can go with the same partsof the brain interpreting all 3 experiences.

It's always an interesting discussion but it's always one that goes round in circles. In the end people have to make up their own minds about what they believe. There really is no absolute proof one way or another. One thing a previous poster said about seeing a UFO and comparing that to the term OBE kind of made me think of the X Files poster that says "I want to Believe." For those type of people that want to believe that's ok for them. For others that's just not enough. We might as well be talking about whether the universe was created from the big bang or if God created it. For me I'm comfortable with my own beliefs and I'm also fine with other people having theirs. This is something I try to get across to new people joining the forums that come on asking a million questions about "is this normal etc", I caution them to make up their own minds about their own personal experiences. How can someone else really say what happened when it did not happen to them personally?

. . . Yes, I'm getting dizzy!

Gills - please answer these questions yourself - It may provide some insight for those of us that don't have the breadth of experience that you obviously have. I, like Runeword, have my own beliefs about my experiences that can never be changed for me. What I feel and how it affects me will always be different than you and everyone else. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it will be the same for me. The same thing as some people suffer from mental illness and others don't - we can't always have perfect answers to these questions - Subjective I believe life is.

cheers

Ok, so me not doing your experiment suggests, I am trying to ignore the facts.
If I go into a dream, and see a clock at 7:35pm then look back several times, and the clock is at the same time. Does this mean I am out of body.
Then I wake up, and write my findings down in a dream journal.
I do this for several weeks, and always get the same result.
This proves only one thing. That my dreams are quite stable.
It could also mean that this reality check may not be suitable in this context.
A freshman dreamer may use the clock as a reliable source, but what happens when the dreamer hones his skills, and starts seeing more stable items in dreams.
Also, you might not expect a novice to be able to move out of body, that is' if such a task were possible.
From your experiences, I think it is difficult to prove any o'o'b' experience. But very easy to disprove.
Not so from other peoples perspective.
If there were nobody on this forum with dreaming skills, then what about the advanced meditators in the world.
I am talking about monks, and yogis, etc
They all have experiences of oob.
Or are these people wrong as well.

Lets say OOBE are real, and tonight, you leave your body.
You jump into the astral world, and notice that you no longer follow the laws of physics.
You may be fluctuating in the present time line. One minute her, next minute you have jumped an hour or so.
The clock reality checks will have you believing the facts are not true.

Assuming your oobe is real, how do you propose to prove it to others. Or rather, make them believe your story.

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Originally Posted by sivason

Yes, from my experience and from talking with others, the very nature of this type of OBE involves a separation from the advantage of a reasoning brain. You may see details that seem like you must have really been observing, while on the other hand you feel deranged and messed up like on drugs. You may see weird things that make no sense at all.

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... which sounds like nothing more than a dream.

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That is not to say it is 100% only an LD with nothing else going on, but both this form of OBE and AP conform to the same form as LDs do. be they the same or not, they clearly seem very related. Perhaps, if we wish to believe in something beyond ordinary, we can go with the same partsof the brain interpreting all 3 experiences.

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Sure it could be similar, but in the stories I hear, and talking from personal experience, I don't see the slightest difference other than the storyline: the fact that we dream about being out of our bodies.

In other words I don't see anything that makes me believe I am truly out of my body. The reason why I got into lucid dreaming in the first place was because of my "OBEs" 10 years ago. I believed I was truly separating from my body and bragged about it to friends. This lead me to researching about OBEs and I came across lucid dreaming, WILDs, and reality testing.

Your last sentence sums it up pretty well. "Perhaps, if we wish to believe in something beyond ordinary, we can go with the same partsof the brain interpreting all 3 experiences."

But I, personally, don't see any evidence to believe in it.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

Ok, so me not doing your experiment suggests, I am trying to ignore the facts.

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It means you're not interested to see how a clock reacts during an OBE, and/or how an OBE-clock behaves differently from a dream-clock.

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If I go into a dream, and see a clock at 7:35pm then look back several times, and the clock is at the same time. Does this mean I am out of body.

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It most likely means you are not dreaming, because there is no clock in a dream. There is no bedroom in a dream. There are no objects in dreams. They are creations of our mind and/or subconscious, while a digital clock during an OBE is a real clock that should be at least a bit more stable than a dream-clock.

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Then I wake up, and write my findings down in a dream journal.
I do this for several weeks, and always get the same result.
This proves only one thing. That my dreams are quite stable.

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Your scenario is very unlikely. There is a reason, scientifically explained, why test/numbers are unstable in dreams. If numbers never change for you in a dream then you are a special human being.

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It could also mean that this reality check may not be suitable in this context.
A freshman dreamer may use the clock as a reliable source, but what happens when the dreamer hones his skills, and starts seeing more stable items in dreams.

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You can be skilled all you want, if you look at the same "clock" at least three times, it will change.

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Also, you might not expect a novice to be able to move out of body, that is' if such a task were possible.
From your experiences, I think it is difficult to prove any o'o'b' experience. But very easy to disprove.
Not so from other peoples perspective.

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We can't prove it to other people, but we can discuss the similarities/differences between an OBE and a regular dream. Sadly there aren't any differences. You see weird things, text is unstable, numbers are unstable. It might very well be "something" else, but we need to have a reason why we believe that other than "I wish it were true." And remember: the burden of proof is always on the person claiming something.

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If there were nobody on this forum with dreaming skills, then what about the advanced meditators in the world.
I am talking about monks, and yogis, etc
They all have experiences of oob.
Or are these people wrong as well.

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I am not saying anyone is wrong. I am simply saying that dreams can recreate incredible scenarios and make you believe lots of things. Separating from your body and looking at it lying in bed is one of them. Or are you claiming a dream cannot create this particular experience?

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Lets say OOBE are real, and tonight, you leave your body.
You jump into the astral world, and notice that you no longer follow the laws of physics.
You may be fluctuating in the present time line. One minute her, next minute you have jumped an hour or so.
The clock reality checks will have you believing the facts are not true.

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The digital clock reality check isn't the only one. Why not observe your sleeping body during an OBE? Are your clothes the same ones you fell asleep in? What about your hair? What about the objects near the bed? Is the bedroom exactly the same? Then what about the body you are viewing your sleeping body from? Look at your hands. Look at your clothes. If you have any clothes at all, how is that possible? Do mirrors show a reflection of this body? If yes, what is the logic behind that?

I mean, there are really useful things to experiment with in order to verify if this state is something other than a dream, but if you are not interested, then that is your choice.

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Assuming your oobe is real, how do you propose to prove it to others. Or rather, make them believe your story.

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I'm not attempting to prove or disprove. I simply want people to make up their own mind by critically examining/testing their state.

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Originally Posted by LucidAurora

. . . Yes, I'm getting dizzy!

Gills - please answer these questions yourself - It may provide some insight for those of us that don't have the breadth of experience that you obviously have. I, like Runeword, have my own beliefs about my experiences that can never be changed for me. What I feel and how it affects me will always be different than you and everyone else. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it will be the same for me. The same thing as some people suffer from mental illness and others don't - we can't always have perfect answers to these questions - Subjective I believe life is.

cheers

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Have you ever done a reality test during an OBE? If yes, what was the reality test, and what were the results?

Very simple.

Yes - it seems simple . . . But I've never had an OBE there big guy. I'm asking you too, so that I/we can get some insight into where this might help. This started out kind of interesting, but really seems like this is just going in circles. Answer your own questions please so that we can learn more . . .

cheers

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Originally Posted by LucidAurora

Yes - it seems simple . . . But I've never had an OBE there big guy. I'm asking you too, so that I/we can get some insight into where this might help.

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I've had OBEs, and in every OBE reality checks revealed that I'm dreaming. I have no reason to believe that an OBE is anything other than a dream about me leaving my body.

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This started out kind of interesting, but really seems like this is just going in circles. Answer your own questions please so that we can learn more . . .

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I already answered the questions, as did Runeword. All it comes down to is belief. People believe, for some reason I can't understand, that an OBE is not a dream but something "else".

Thanks Gill, I agree with pretty much all of what you have said, now that we are clearly talking about OBE on a supposed Earth. I have seen nothing to prove to me this form of experience is not just a dream. I have had interesting feelings that were different from most dreams and been impacted in a way that made me wonder if something a little more complicated than just a dream was going on, but mostly I think this form of OBE is just a WILD that takes place in nREM sleep. The difference in sleep phase could explain why it feels different. IF something more is going on, I assume it is more like a weak Psychic probing of the world around you, in which case it is no more a separation from the body, than the sense of hearing is. I do believe in mental ability beyond the standard well understood stuff. Being so deeply into mental yoga (started at 9 years old and am now 42) that I have no problem assuming the title "Yogi" I have witnessed amazing things, but a belief that I can leave my body just has never been one of them. I do have a belief that I can extend my awareness using senses we poorly understand. If OBE, which I feel is a WILD in nREM has anything else going on, I think it is just some weak psychic probing and not leaving the body. I accept your method of testing as being very reasonable in this form of OBE.

However, AP is a totally different matter. I honestly think discussion of it deserves its own thread as the two things are vastly different. In AP you could not turn and look at your body, as you are supposedly no longer in this world. I do believe that I have AP adventures and have been having hundreds of them going back 20ish years. In them there is one experience that I can not describe well, any more than one can describe the knowing about yellow and blue being different. That experience is meeting life forms there. The place is full of illusion created by your expectations, but when dealing with an astral entity it is very clear that they are separate from your mind. Also, as far as can I do the same things in AP as in LDs, yes and no. I can create the illusion of about anything, but I can only barely effect the actual substance of the place. In the chaos of the storm it is nothing like an LD unless you have f&^%ed up dreams. It is like being stuck in a turbulent river; you can have an effect on your course, but NOT by changing the river itself. In stable areas powerful entities have stabilized the laws of physics to the best of their ability. In a well establish area gravity is real. To oppose gravity take effort and that effort is exhausting, much like jumping up and down is here.
I still do not believe AP involves leaving your body, and I do believe the brain is processing the data with its dream center. I think it is a matter of some poorly understood psychic power that allows observation and limited interaction of worlds removed from ours, but not by leaving your body. I doubt I can create similes that work for such a mysterious weird event.

Here is something interesting I noticed for quite some time, and I confirmed it this morning.

It seems that when I have a WILD, if I distance myself too much from my bedroom, the dream begins to fade and I wake up. I'm not kidding.

I can go into the living room, kitchen, front of the house, and neighbour's house, and the dream is quite stable. But when I try to go down the street and turn right or left, it just becomes unstable and I wake up within less than a minute. Any thoughts why?

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Originally Posted by Gills

Here is something interesting I noticed for quite some time, and I confirmed it this morning.

It seems that when I have a WILD, if I distance myself too much from my bedroom, the dream begins to fade and I wake up. I'm not kidding.

I can go into the living room, kitchen, front of the house, and neighbour's house, and the dream is quite stable. But when I try to go down the street and turn right or left, it just becomes unstable and I wake up within less than a minute. Any thoughts why?

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Perhaps because you are getting too far away from your digital clock? (Sorry, couldn't resist! :))

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Originally Posted by Tarvus

Perhaps because you are getting too far away from your digital clock? (Sorry, couldn't resist! :))

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LoL. :D No, really, what do you think is the reason for this?

Perhaps in a WILD the brain is unable to quickly create the way other houses and streets look like, and the dream ends because it is overwhelmed? No clue, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

In a DILD this problem doesn't exist.

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Originally Posted by Gills

LoL. :D No, really, what do you think is the reason for this?

Perhaps in a WILD the brain is unable to quickly create the way other houses and streets look like, and the dream ends because it is overwhelmed? No clue, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

In a DILD this problem doesn't exist.

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I really don't know. Without trying to resurrect the previous discussion on whether OBE's are a form of lucid dream or not, I will say this: In every OBE type experience I have had (4 of them), I inevitably remained near where my physical body was. In fact, in three of them, I have only been able to partially "get out" of my physical body and had the sensation of extremities being "stuck" inside my body. Of those 4 experiences, two were WILD types and two were DILD types. In all of my "regular" lucid dreams, I have been able to go anywhere and do basically anything. I should mention, I have never had a "regular" WILD lucid dream though. They were both OBE types. The fourth OBE type time, when I had an OBE type experience and was completely "out" I remained in the same room from which the exit had occurred.

Assuming lucid dreams and OBE are both manifestations of the lucid dream experience, there apparently are some distinctions between the two types. Your experiences with WILDS and mine with both WILD and DILD OBE type experiences are similar in this regard.

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Originally Posted by Gills

Here is something interesting I noticed for quite some time, and I confirmed it this morning.

It seems that when I have a WILD, if I distance myself too much from my bedroom, the dream begins to fade and I wake up. I'm not kidding.

I can go into the living room, kitchen, front of the house, and neighbour's house, and the dream is quite stable. But when I try to go down the street and turn right or left, it just becomes unstable and I wake up within less than a minute. Any thoughts why?

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I've noticed this at times too. I liken it to a computer loading time. Maybe our subconscious has a certain amount of dream world loaded up to interact in and we just get too far ahead of it too fast.

If it were something like my theoretical psychic probe, rather than true separation, then maybe it is like any other sense, such as hearing. That is, maybe it has limits relating to how far away the sense stays useful. If it is just an LD then I would guess you expect to see real life stuff, and are very familiar with the stuff closest to you. Then when you travel further from that comfortable well known area, the rendering of realistic scale models would become more taxing. Perhaps if someone used stabilization tricks every 50 feet or so, they could go further?

That's exactly what I thought as well, you just worded it perfectly. Both Runeword and sivason.

Thanks. :)

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Originally Posted by sivason

If it were something like my theoretical psychic probe,

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Now, I know you are going to have to come up with a better phrase than "Psychic Probe"

1. Based on what exactly do you believe that astral travel and lucid dreaming aren't one and the same thing?
I believe that Astral Travel and OBE are the same thing, I believe that Lucid Dreaming and Astral/OBE are the same - because I can switch between OBE/Astral to Lucid and back to OBE/Astral. So basically it is the same thing, but you might experience different feelings.

2. Have you ever done a digital clock reality check while astral projecting? If yes, what were the results, and if not, why not?
Yes, i did it very often. For some period i did DEILD every time i woke up, i came back to my Lucid Dream where i came to my room, saw my self sleeping, then i walked to living room and checked clock, then i woke up. But i checked real time clock only when i knew that i could not logically predict time. For example i did not check real time when my alarm waked me up, i did not check time when my wife woke me in the morning because i had to go to work. I only checked time when i woke up in the middle of the night or when i was sleeping for extended amount of time on weekends. As for the time it self, time was logical in my Lucid Dreams, for example if i checked time before i go to my adventures it was 9;00 then i came back from my Lucid Dreaming and checked time again and it was 9:40 or more, i understand that my inner clock and logic could know the approximate amount of time i was away. Regarding my real time check-ups, i almost never matched exact time, best what i did was 5-10 minutes different and it was still a good result considering that i could wake up at 3:00 night and i no way could predict what time it is exactly i went back to my Lucid Dream checked time in my apartment and woke up. Of course sometimes i had time difference of 2-3 hours. For my self i know exact explanation and the reason why it happened this way. This is a separate discussion, i will keep on topic.

3. What can you do during astral projection that you can't do while lucid dreaming?
Everything that i could do in my Lucid Dreams, because both of them are connected as per my view. I might experience little bit different feelings if i started my dream with OBE/Astral and then continued to Lucid Dreaming, but it was still the same event.

4. What can you do in a lucid dream that you can't do during astral projection?
Everything that i could do in my OBE/Astral, because both of them are connected as per my view. I might experience little bit different feelings if i started my dream with Lucid Dream and then continued to OBE/Astral, but it was still the same event.

5. Is there a difference between an OBE and astral projection?
No difference as per my view. I believe for some people events can determine whether it was Astral or OBE, but in the end i think it is the same thing.

6. How do astral beings behave differently from dream characters (or dream beings)?
This is a very long and complicated question, i do not know what is the exact difference between astral beings and dream characters. I believe that OBE/Astral is the same thing as Lucid Dreaming. You will ask me why did i say that i do not know the difference - because i think there is a difference in behavior when you see beings while you observe you self, your apartment in other words while you are close to your body. There were many weird situation that i had during experiments in time between OBE Lucid Dream and awake, but this is a separate topic.

7. Have you ever thought you were astral projecting and then it turned out to be just a regular lucid dream? If yes, how did this happen?
I know that i can switch between OBE/Astral to Lucid Dream, back and forth with no problems. So i did not have this kind of question. But usually i prefer to stay in Lucid Dream, unless i want to do some experiments in OBE or in other words somewhere around my body.


I answered to all your questions very honestly. Thank You for making such a topic.

Great post, flowofmysoul. Thanks.

thanks, this is a great topic.

i finally found my section on DV :)

I won't answer your the questions directly but i will tell you about my one and only OBE and i hope you can get answers from the experience.

This OBE happened when i was between the ages of 10 - 13 (the years just seem to blur together) . I was in the backseat of a jeep looking out the window and thinking about how anything can be anything. I was thinking about how anything could have ever come from nothing and how could nothing ever exist. Why wasn't every thing nothing?

Well one minute i was mentally dueling with these difficult concepts, in the backseat, and the next minute i was somewhere else. I was viewing what i felt was infinity, it wasn't a thing in the normal sense and i felt as if i could move into it, (i dont remember having a body) and leave from both the space where i was and from normal reality. It was only one step away (figuratively) but i was also satisfied and knew (100%) that this thing would always exist. I also came out of the experience knowing that death wasn't the end and no matter how things went it would be alright at the end. I'm a christian and the experience only strengthened my beliefs/

The experience was in actuality seconds long, and it felt to me to be less than 30 seconds. But i was glad that i had my one glimpse to sustain me for my whole life.
Now I know that was not a lucid dream because i was wide awake and it just spontaneously happened.

Im not sure if this would be considered "astral"; OBE really is a very general term. I mean you can OBE on drugs, in dreams or like the above. This is where i believe these things become one, because they are all experienced within in our minds, but the mind is ALOT deeper than our normal everyday awareness. Even this physical world is experienced with the mind so in a way all experiences are of the same make.

Also i find your near obsession with the digital clock RC kind of silly. Text is very stable in my dreams and i cant think of any occasion in which it has changed on me, both in lucid and non lucid dreams. Its all about expectation, i decided early on i wouldn't do RCs which could unconsciously lead to instability; such as finger through palm, and expecting clock/text to change upon looking back. I expect my body to be solid so i treat it that way, and the same goes for reading.

1. Based on what exactly do you believe that astral travel and lucid dreaming aren't one and the same thing? "It feels different" is not an acceptable answer.

I think astral travel is best understood as a type of lucid dream. This is a misleading statement though, in that a lucid dream isn't a simple, indivisible experience. There are multiple things going on at the same time, and these aren't the same in every lucid dream.

In a typical lucid dream, if there is such a thing, a person imagines themselves operating a body in an environment projected by their imagination. This is much like waking life, except that when awake the imagined environment is projected more involuntarily, and the projection incorporates current sensory data. In waking life it is still an internal projection though. Missing data is filled in, the experience of color is approximately mapped to the wavelength spectra of sensed light (which does not have color), and this is integrated with data from other senses along with educated guesses about relationships between objects and how those are changing.

In a typical lucid dream, very little of the imagined scene is tied to current sense data. In a typical astral projection experience, the imagined scene is imagined to correspond to one's sleeping environment, and may or may not include more current sensate data than other lucid dreams do.

2. Have you ever done a digital clock reality check while astral projecting? If yes, what were the results, and if not, why not?

Though this sounds like a worthwhile test, I don't think that the outcome necessarily means what you suggest it means in later posts. My sense of time while asleep is somehow remarkably better than while awake, and I know what time it is to within a couple of seconds. By 'know' I mean that I'm capable of waking up at exactly a specified time, even though I don't know how that works, and don't know whether or not that awareness could be used to control a clock face. If I did your clock test and it passed, that still wouldn't imply that I'm not imagining the clock without aid of sensory data, I could just be remembering what time it should be. And if I did the clock test and it failed, all this would prove is that my projected 'external' environment is not true to how I would 'see' it if awake. That's the result you're interested in, but it doesn't really answer the question of whether astral projection is different from other lucid dreams, because there's more going on than that.

I agree that the imagined environment during astral projection mostly lacks sensory data, and most tests akin to the clock test will usually fail.

3. What can you do during astral projection that you can't do while lucid dreaming?

I very rarely imagine having a body when lucid dreaming. If there's a visual scene at all, I'm just a point in that scene, or on rare occasions multiple points simultaneously. During 'astral projection' I'm wide awake in my usual waking life tactile experience, except that my tactile model of my body's location is not synchronized with the sensory information I'm getting about where my body actually is. So I can separate the two, which is what the 'astral projection' is.

As far as things like being able to fly through the night and haunt astral projection skeptics, I can't do anything with astral projection that I can't do in any other lucid dream. But I haven't really explored that sort of thing. In general I never repeat dream experiences, and for a variety of reasons I don't cultivate either 'astral' or controlled 'lucid' experiences.

In one of my 'astral' experiences I inverted my spatial map, one hemisphere of my head at a time, so that inside was outside and outside was inside. That was pretty weird, and I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream.

4. What can you do in a lucid dream that you can't do during astral projection?

I visualized an imagined object from multiple directions at once. As far as I know that would be possible during astral projection also though. I've experienced things from other perspectives besides my own. This I think is easier during a lucid dream, because a person has more control over the sensate experience, which is metaphorically useful. I've had a lot of remarkably accurate premonitions, but that's another topic. Now that I think of it though, I did have one accurate premonition in an 'astral' type of dream, and its probably equally possible there, though the form it would have to take would generally be different, since the content of the experience is different. I have almost nothing in the way of a "mind's eye" while awake, and that would be true for me in an "astral" experience also.

5. Is there a difference between an OBE and astral projection?

Instead of warping my mental model of where my body is, I can project my first person visual standpoint to what would usually be a subconsciously imagined third person perspective. That kind of perspective is part of what gives a person an awareness of how they look from other points in their surrounding environment. But if the first person visual imagination is projected to it, this corresponds to an out of body experience. This is the distinction I make between AP and OBE, though experiences can blend aspects of both. To say that again, astral projection is when you warp your sense of where your physical body is, separating it from where your physical body actually is. When people describe out-of-body experiences, such as when near death, what they describe usually seems to me to be more like transferring one's subjective first-person visual standpoint to what would normally be a third person standpoint. In other words, it uses a different part of one's mostly involuntary model of one's environment, though its the same in other regards, and these different aspects can be blended.

6. How do astral beings behave differently from dream characters (or dream beings)?

There seems to be an implication in a lot of these questions, and in the subsequent comments, that something is only objectively real if it is seen in a way that is consistent with what other people see. I don't think this is a reasonable perspective. When you see that something is red, for instance, you actually don't know anything about the 'wavelengths of light', you're just assuming that there's a fairly accurate correspondence between the appearance and the actual radiated and reflected spectra. That may be a good assumption, but its still an assumption, and its not one that would necessarily be accepted by a member of a blind species, for instance. You may say "I knew the book was on fire because I saw it burning", and he might say "you have that impression, did you actually feel the heat?" You, in contrast, do not trust other people's feelings about things as being at all reliable. I don't see that its different in principle though, other than that the ability to accurately interpret visual and audial sensate impressions is much better developed in most people. "It feels different" is not a good answer only because its vague, and it would be better if a person could describe in more detail how it feels different. But the feeling, while subjective, is no more subjective than an experience of color, which as I mentioned earlier is almost arbitrarily mapped to light spectra. Different people map it mostly in the same way under similar circumstances, but the experience is still subjective. Similarly, though the 'feeling' of anything is subjective, there may be an objective reality to what is felt, just as there is with what is seen. If you can't see what they see, that doesn't mean that what they see is an invalid basis for them to draw conclusions about it. Likewise with feeling. So "it feels different" is in my view actually a pretty good reason for drawing a distinction between two things, even though a more extensive description would be a lot better. Sometimes the more extensive description isn't possible though, a large part of what generates the feeling is subconscious and beyond a person's access. As with a person who has poor communication between different hemispheres of their brain, they may "know" something, and be correct about it without be able to describe why.

I'm fairly strongly inclined to develop a detailed understanding for my perspectives though, so you're not going to hear "it feels different" as a complete explanation from me. Anyway, continuing in response to this specific question....

Behind any image in a dream there are impressions of thought, desire, and identity related to the image. I mentioned that my dreams aren't very visual or audial, its mostly impressions like that. End even where there is a clear 'dream character' the appearance of the character is a pretty small part of the experience. Most of the impression of the nature of what is being dreamed isn't in the appearance. And the 'dream character' doesn't represent a single person or personality, it expresses aspects of myself, several other people I know, and various abstract principles. There also aren't clear delineations between different characters. My first person perspective jumps around, the number of characters representing the different aspects of an interaction can change, and the genders can change from one second to the next as the content of my attention shifts slightly from one aspect of what is being represented to another. Its not very much like waking life in that regard, at least not on anything like the same timescale. So when you ask how dream characters behave....its really not quite like that. And yet I do often experience the presence of identity that is outside of what I would normally think of as 'myself', even though there aren't any clear lines that separate that from myself. I 'feel' the difference in identity, which isn't a description you like, but I often have objective checks on that feeling, and learn the extent to which I can trust it based on how the experiences connected with subsequent waking life experiences.

I realize this is sounding rather vague. Part of that is lack of sleep muddling my description, part of that is I don't have time for a more complete explanation, because I need to go sleep. It would take a lot of examples to make clearer, and even then the examples would be hard to describe to someone else in a way that they can make sense of in terms of their own experience, which is usually much different than mine.

In summary, I don't think the 'beings' in my dreams are going to be any different than the 'beings' in my astral experiences, because the distinction between the astral experiences and the other dream experiences is relatively superficial compared to the main content in regard to those 'beings'. But in either case, I don't divide things into strict categories like 'dream characters' or 'angels' or 'shadow people' or 'demons' or 'suppressed parts of my own personality', its all more fluid than that.

7. Have you ever thought you were astral projecting and then it turned out to be just a regular lucid dream? If yes, how did this happen?

I don't think this question makes any sense in the context of my thought of what astral projection is. And maybe it doesn't even make sense to other people who believe they have 'astral bodies' made up of "astral matter", since most of those people will attribute a similar kind of reality to what they think of as a "dream plane" during other lucid dreaming. Just like the name says, the experience is astral, its not a physical experience. The environment a person is aware of in that state has a connection to the physical environment, but its not the same thing. When they call the experience "astral", to distinguish it from other lucid dreams, they're saying something to characterize the nature of the experience. How can it not really be how they experience it? That's like asking "have you ever had a nightmare that turned out not to be a nightmare?" Or "have you ever seen a color that wasn't really a color?" Like I pointed out earlier, everything you experience, even during waking life, is in your imagination, even though there is usually a fairly direct connection between what you imagine your external environment to be and what your external environment actually is. If someone were to ask "have you ever imagined something then it turned out to be real", or "have you ever thought something was real then it turned out to be imagined", they're asking questions about how well what you imagined corresponded to reality. But in a sense they're being a little bit sloppy with words, because everything you experience is an internally generated cartoon of your surroundings, irrespective of how useful and accurate that cartoon may or may not be. In that same sense there's no difference at all between a lucid dream or astral projection. But then there's no difference between that or waking life either. And yet we can make distinctions between all three of these things, because the relationship with the reality behind the experience is different in each case.

A problem with astral projection is that none of us understand the relationship with the reality behind the experience. It seems that some people imagine that they do, and talk about higher worlds and vibrations. But I don't think what they're saying actually makes detailed sense, to them or to anyone else. Just because we don't understand the experience doesn't mean that there's nothing there though, that its unreal except for the "lucid dream" aspect of it. I tried to give an explanation of that aspect of it, when I described it in terms of distorting mental models. But that doesn't mean that's all that's going on there. In other words, I think there's a bit of a false premise in the question of whether astral projection is different from other lucid dreams. You said that you wanted specific answers, not just to be told that you don't understand it. But I think that really is the truth, that the questions don't really speak to the essence of what astral projection is, they only speak to the aspect that's a lucid dream. Its a little bit like how people have some idea in their mind about what "shared dreaming" is, then propose ways of proving or disproving it, when in fact their idea of "shared dreaming" is not what other people are actually talking about. And people do the same thing in relation to dream premonitions too, trying to come up with tests for it and speculating about possible fallacies, without understanding what people are really talking about. A difference here with astral projection is that it sounds like you may have significant experience with astral projection. But if you've only looked at the sensate-imagination aspect of it, like how I did when talking about mental models, then I think that doesn't really tell you the whole story either.

By saying this I'm not suggesting that I understand the whole story. I used to think I did, and I used to think that "astral projection" was "all in my head", based on the experiments I'd done. Then I had scores of other bizarre dream experiences that proved to me without a reasonable doubt that there is a lot to dreaming that is not "all in my head". So now I know that I probably don't understand astral projection either.

One more closing comment....You suggested that people often lie about this stuff, and that you want honest answers. I agree with you about this, that people often aren't honest, and I want honest answers too. I try very hard to be completely objective, and to give a balanced and truthful impression in everything I say. If I seem evasive in relation to some specific example, it may be because I'm trying to protect someone else's privacy, or because I'm trying to avoid adding confusion by saying something that I know will be misunderstood and which I don't have time to explain adequately at the moment. (My posts are way longer than practically anyone has time to read as it is, and arguably longer than I have time for myself.) But I'm never trying to present a distorted picture, hiding information that doesn't support the argument I'm taking. I instead adjust my view to fit the information, to the best of my ability. I won't mislead someone to try to get them to believe what I think is true. If I did that, I'd be cultivating a habit of deception, and almost immediately I'd be deceiving myself as well. Plus it pisses me off when people try to do that to me. So if I say something that seems dishonest, you can be almost 100% certain that either you're misunderstanding me, or missing other context such as personal experience that's similar to mine. Call me on it anyway if it looks dishonest to you, that's the most direct thing you can do. I'm just saying this in hopes of saving time if we're on the same page about this.

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Originally Posted by DarkFlatTop

I won't answer your the questions directly but i will tell you about my one and only OBE and i hope you can get answers from the experience.

This OBE happened when i was between the ages of 10 - 13 (the years just seem to blur together) . I was in the backseat of a jeep looking out the window and thinking about how anything can be anything. I was thinking about how anything could have ever come from nothing and how could nothing ever exist. Why wasn't every thing nothing?

Well one minute i was mentally dueling with these difficult concepts, in the backseat, and the next minute i was somewhere else. I was viewing what i felt was infinity, it wasn't a thing in the normal sense and i felt as if i could move into it, (i dont remember having a body) and leave from both the space where i was and from normal reality. It was only one step away (figuratively) but i was also satisfied and knew (100%) that this thing would always exist. I also came out of the experience knowing that death wasn't the end and no matter how things went it would be alright at the end. I'm a christian and the experience only strengthened my beliefs/

The experience was in actuality seconds long, and it felt to me to be less than 30 seconds. But i was glad that i had my one glimpse to sustain me for my whole life.
Now I know that was not a lucid dream because i was wide awake and it just spontaneously happened.

Im not sure if this would be considered "astral"; OBE really is a very general term. I mean you can OBE on drugs, in dreams or like the above. This is where i believe these things become one, because they are all experienced within in our minds, but the mind is ALOT deeper than our normal everyday awareness. Even this physical world is experienced with the mind so in a way all experiences are of the same make.

Also i find your near obsession with the digital clock RC kind of silly. Text is very stable in my dreams and i cant think of any occasion in which it has changed on me, both in lucid and non lucid dreams. Its all about expectation, i decided early on i wouldn't do RCs which could unconsciously lead to instability; such as finger through palm, and expecting clock/text to change upon looking back. I expect my body to be solid so i treat it that way, and the same goes for reading.

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You are right about the clock, the only reason it changes because people believe that it will change, or they just read it somewhere.. I started lucid dreaming with only RC's and i never had anything weird with clock :)

Hi, I am pretty new to this site but find astral projection very fascinating.

I have recently started learning how to LD so that I can learn the difference between Ld and AP.

I am actually attending courses on this exact phenomenon and have recently just passed phase one. Due to my utmost interest and progress I have been invited to skip phase 2 and go onto phase 3 which entails deep meditation, and astral projection. and from what Ive heard from friends also attending these courses. They experienced the folowing:

An object was hidden in the back yard of a house close to the training center and nobody knew about this object, during their training that day they were shown a map from the training hall to the house as well as a picture of the house (without the object being in the picture of course). they were then told to astral project and go look at what object was behind the house. after 30 minutes of silence they were asked to write wat they saw behind the yard. All those who gave answers got it right. the few who didnt answer said they couldnt get that far away from their physical body due to fear etc.

I have however not had first hand experience and I hope this thread will be open by the time I am done so that i can give proper feedback. I am hoping that astral projection is real. because you can do so much with a skill like that. But I am not afraid to find out and post my honest answer, and being able to LD is all so new and I have still so much to learn that even that is awesum enough to be real.

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Originally Posted by DarkFlatTop

Well one minute i was mentally dueling with these difficult concepts, in the backseat, and the next minute i was somewhere else. I was viewing what i felt was infinity, it wasn't a thing in the normal sense and i felt as if i could move into it, (i dont remember having a body) and leave from both the space where i was and from normal reality. It was only one step away (figuratively) but i was also satisfied and knew (100%) that this thing would always exist. I also came out of the experience knowing that death wasn't the end and no matter how things went it would be alright at the end. I'm a christian and the experience only strengthened my beliefs/

The experience was in actuality seconds long, and it felt to me to be less than 30 seconds. But i was glad that i had my one glimpse to sustain me for my whole life.
Now I know that was not a lucid dream because i was wide awake and it just spontaneously happened.

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Although I'm not able to understand exactly what you saw/heard/felt, I do understand that this was some type of transcendental experience, which can also be part of a dream, both lucid and non-lucid. How you can be 100% sure that you were "wide awake" yet at the same time not remember having a body is a bit odd.

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Im not sure if this would be considered "astral"; OBE really is a very general term. I mean you can OBE on drugs, in dreams or like the above. This is where i believe these things become one, because they are all experienced within in our minds, but the mind is ALOT deeper than our normal everyday awareness. Even this physical world is experienced with the mind so in a way all experiences are of the same make.

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No they're not of the same make. Dreaming about being out of your body is not the same as actually being out of your body, and dreaming about moving through the astral plane is not the same thing as actually being in the astral plane (if such a thing exists).

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Also i find your near obsession with the digital clock RC kind of silly. Text is very stable in my dreams and i cant think of any occasion in which it has changed on me, both in lucid and non lucid dreams. Its all about expectation, i decided early on i wouldn't do RCs which could unconsciously lead to instability; such as finger through palm, and expecting clock/text to change upon looking back. I expect my body to be solid so i treat it that way, and the same goes for reading.

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My "obsession" with the digital clock RC is not silly at all. It is the perfect way to test your state when you are "out of your body", and the instability of text in dreams has absolutely nothing to do with expectation. There are parts of the brain that are much less active when we are asleep, and one of these parts is the one necessary for reading text. So unless you are a superhuman with special capabilities, text will always be unstable. Maybe not the second time you look at it, but surely the third time it will change. It is also interesting to note that those who propagate the AP/OBE "phenomenon" are always the ones claiming that text is completely stable in their dreams. There was not one single person on the old lucidity.com forums back in 2004 that claimed text was stable in his/her dream. I remember a huge thread about this, and not one person was able to read the same time off a digital clock three times. Not, one, person.

I also have to separate reading text from reading numbers, and that's because numbers are a much better reality check. Here is an example from one of my dream journal entries: I have had a simple word, "Monitor", change into "Moritor", "Monters", "Monique", and finally "Machine." This is all somewhat similar, and you can notice a sort of pattern... that the brain tries to make this particular word (Monitor) stable as much as it can, but it just fails, and mutates into something else slowly... whereas numbers show a much more drastic change without any pattern. I've had "02:04" change into "7:30" and then into "16:82", and then into strange symbols.

To cut to the chase: I appreciate a good and honest discussion, but whenever someone tells me that text and numbers are always completely stable in their dreams, I simply cannot take them seriously.

Expectation can only play a part when you wish the word to morph into another word of your choice. This is possible, and can also be used as an RC. Of course the more complex the word or sentence is, the more unstable it will be. So the word "Sky" will be much more stable as opposed to "Toshiba" or "Pineapple".

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

You are right about the clock, the only reason it changes because people believe that it will change, or they just read it somewhere.. I started lucid dreaming with only RC's and i never had anything weird with clock :)

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Again, same as I said above. Nothing to do with expectation. It has to do with your brain being able to comprehend things. Some are more active while asleep, while others are less active. That's why we act like complete idiots in our dreams many times, thinking that it is normal, or maybe just a "little odd" that a cat is talking to us, or that we have 6 or 7 toes.

Yes, reading is possible in dreams, but re-reading is an entirely different matter, for the reasons above. Sure, I myself was able to read sentences in an LD and remember them clearly. But looking back at those sentences they were already slightly changing. By the third and fourth time it was something completely different. Fact check: There is no text in your dreams, and there is no digital clock either. And the "finer", or more detailed your dream objects are, the more "fluid" they will be.

Next time you, flowofmysoul, become lucid in a dream... please stand in front of a digital clock. Remember the numbers, look away, look back. Repeat twice. Then let me hook you up on a polygraph and ask you if the numbers changed. Fair enough? :D

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Originally Posted by MrDee

I am actually attending courses on this exact phenomenon and have recently just passed phase one. Due to my utmost interest and progress I have been invited to skip phase 2 and go onto phase 3 which entails deep meditation, and astral projection. and from what Ive heard from friends also attending these courses. They experienced the folowing:

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Just to let you know, I also have friends who claim extraordinary things. :)

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An object was hidden in the back yard of a house close to the training center and nobody knew about this object, during their training that day they were shown a map from the training hall to the house as well as a picture of the house (without the object being in the picture of course). they were then told to astral project and go look at what object was behind the house. after 30 minutes of silence they were asked to write wat they saw behind the yard. All those who gave answers got it right. the few who didnt answer said they couldnt get that far away from their physical body due to fear etc.

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Yes, of course, this is the perfect scenario. A man/woman leaves his/her body and brings back information; a drawing, a hidden object, a secret message, etc. etc.

The problem is this: Where the heck can I read a successful study about such a thing? Where are the sources for the info you just posted here? Is there any link at all you can provide? Who directed the experiment? Was this a controlled study?

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I have however not had first hand experience and I hope this thread will be open by the time I am done so that i can give proper feedback. I am hoping that astral projection is real. because you can do so much with a skill like that. But I am not afraid to find out and post my honest answer, and being able to LD is all so new and I have still so much to learn that even that is awesum enough to be real.

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Well, even though it does sound awesum, I suggest taking a look at this: Challenge Info

So if your friends can repeat the things they claim they did at this "AP course", they will be able pick up 1 million dollars from the James Randi Foundation and become famous. Why not do it? (Now this is most likely where the "money is unimportant to them" part comes in.)

Now, shadowofwind, I think your post is great, and I appreciate you taking the time to write such a lengthy post. I will respond to you tonight when I have more time. :)

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Again, same as I said above. Nothing to do with expectation. It has to do with your brain being able to comprehend things. Some are more active while asleep, while others are less active. That's why we act like complete idiots in our dreams many times, thinking that it is normal, or maybe just a "little odd" that a cat is talking to us, or that we have 6 or 7 toes.

Yes, reading is possible in dreams, but re-reading is an entirely different matter, for the reasons above. Sure, I myself was able to read sentences in an LD and remember them clearly. But looking back at those sentences they were already slightly changing. By the third and fourth time it was something completely different. Fact check: There is no text in your dreams, and there is no digital clock either. And the "finer", or more detailed your dream objects are, the more "fluid" they will be.

Next time you, flowofmysoul, become lucid in a dream... please stand in front of a digital clock. Remember the numbers, look away, look back. Repeat twice. Then let me hook you up on a polygraph and ask you if the numbers changed. Fair enough? :D

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I agree, you can connect polygraph, i will read same clock as many times as you want, numbers will be the ones that i want. Same for text in books, if i will be able to read them first time, then i would re-read it again easily if i turn away and look back.

Trust me its is your prepossession which makes your numbers change, if you try to read the same numbers - somewhere inside you will keep the idea that it will not be the same.

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

I agree, you can connect polygraph, i will read same clock as many times as you want, numbers will be the ones that i want. Same for text in books, if i will be able to read them first time, then i would re-read it again easily if i turn away and look back.

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Unfortunately, I won't be able to test you with a polygraph. Of course you know that too.

And of course you know that you would fail the test miserably.

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Trust me its is your prepossession which makes your numbers change, if you try to read the same numbers - somewhere inside you will keep the idea that it will not be the same.

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Perhaps you meant to say presupposition -- and no, it's not my presupposition that makes the numbers change. It's the fact that:

1.) parts of my brain (and yours) which are responsible for these tasks are much less active in dreams,
2.) there is no external input upon which this text is based,
3.) your brain has to re-create the numbers and/or word/sentence each time you "look back".

The reason why numbers on the clock change is not because of our expectation, but because of the fact that there is no clock, and there is no text. Your mind creates and re-creates it, everytime you look at it, and look back. The brain creates your "text" without any external source, without external input of visual information, and therefore this text is unstable. For some individuals it might be more stable than others, and also depending on how vivid the dream is, but to claim your dream text is completely stable and you that therefore you have difficulty using it as a realty test is pure and simply bull. :D

So thanks but not thanks, I will not "trust" you that it is my presupposition. I have noticed unstable text in my dreams long before I knew what reality tests are.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Unfortunately, I won't be able to test you with a polygraph. Of course you know that too.

And of course you know that you would fail the test miserably.


Perhaps you meant to say presupposition -- and no, it's not my presupposition that makes the numbers change. It's the fact that:

1.) parts of my brain (and yours) which are responsible for these tasks are much less active in dreams,
2.) there is no external input upon which this text is based,
3.) your brain has to re-create the numbers and/or word/sentence each time you "look back".

The reason why numbers on the clock change is not because of our expectation, but because of the fact that there is no clock, and there is no text. Your mind creates and re-creates it, everytime you look at it, and look back. The brain creates your "text" without any external source, without external input of visual information, and therefore this text is unstable. For some individuals it might be more stable than others, and also depending on how vivid the dream is, but to claim your dream text is completely stable and you that therefore you have difficulty using it as a realty test is pure and simply bull. :D

So thanks but not thanks, I will not "trust" you that it is my presupposition. I have noticed unstable text in my dreams long before I knew what reality tests are.

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I will stick to my understanding. What you are saying does not comply to what i experience, that is the only reason why i will not agree with you. I hope one day you will turn back and see the same time again and again, then come back to this conversation and try to find where you did mistake.

Hello shadowofwind, and thanks for making this lengthy and quality post. There are some things which we agree on, and other things on which we disagree. Allow me to comment on the following.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I think astral travel is best understood as a type of lucid dream. This is a misleading statement though, in that a lucid dream isn't a simple, indivisible experience. There are multiple things going on at the same time, and these aren't the same in every lucid dream.

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But if that is truly so, then why use the term astral projection if it is only to describe a lucid dream? We know the definition of astral projection: "Astral projection or travel denotes the astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the astral plane." So for astral projection to exist, there must be an astral plane, and an astral body. In lucid dreaming these terms are unimportant.

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In a typical lucid dream, if there is such a thing, a person imagines themselves operating a body in an environment projected by their imagination. This is much like waking life, except that when awake the imagined environment is projected more involuntarily, and the projection incorporates current sensory data. In waking life it is still an internal projection though. Missing data is filled in, the experience of color is approximately mapped to the wavelength spectra of sensed light (which does not have color), and this is integrated with data from other senses along with educated guesses about relationships between objects and how those are changing.

In a typical lucid dream, very little of the imagined scene is tied to current sense data. In a typical astral projection experience, the imagined scene is imagined to correspond to one's sleeping environment, and may or may not include more current sensate data than other lucid dreams do.

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Hmm, I'm not sure I see a difference. I always operate a body in every dream. Have you ever pondered that you are simply having two different types lucid dreams? One that is with a body, and one without? I have had WILDs which are phenomenal, where I begin to see an almost exact replica of my bedroom through my eyelids. Then I just get up with my dream body. I just don't call it astral projection because I have no evidence that I am in any sort of astral plane or any other dimension. That's why I find the claim "astral projection" pretty out there, because I see absolutely no evidence that this is anything else than a dream.

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My sense of time while asleep is somehow remarkably better than while awake, and I know what time it is to within a couple of seconds. By 'know' I mean that I'm capable of waking up at exactly a specified time, even though I don't know how that works, and don't know whether or not that awareness could be used to control a clock face. If I did your clock test and it passed, that still wouldn't imply that I'm not imagining the clock without aid of sensory data, I could just be remembering what time it should be. And if I did the clock test and it failed, all this would prove is that my projected 'external' environment is not true to how I would 'see' it if awake. That's the result you're interested in, but it doesn't really answer the question of whether astral projection is different from other lucid dreams, because there's more going on than that.

I agree that the imagined environment during astral projection mostly lacks sensory data, and most tests akin to the clock test will usually fail.

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I agree with this last sentence, but not with what you wrote previously. It has nothing to do with your sense of time. The point is to find something smaller, something very fine, very detailed that will "stress" the brain so-to-speak. Because if text is unstable, and if fine details (such as hairs, buttons, complex logos, complex pictures etc.) are unstable... doesn't this tell you that your brain is having a hard time keeping them stable? It is only the smaller more detailed things that are changing. Why doesn't a chair turn into a leather couch when you look back at it? Doesn't it tell you that your environment is a construct of your mind?

Why would a word even be unstable on the astral plane, when we have people (such as in this very same thread) who claim that astral travelers can find hidden objects located in the real world, simply through astral travel?

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I very rarely imagine having a body when lucid dreaming. If there's a visual scene at all, I'm just a point in that scene, or on rare occasions multiple points simultaneously. During 'astral projection' I'm wide awake in my usual waking life tactile experience, except that my tactile model of my body's location is not synchronized with the sensory information I'm getting about where my body actually is. So I can separate the two, which is what the 'astral projection' is.

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I always have a body when lucid dreaming. I cannot even imagine the feeling to have a dream without a body. Even in my weakest most blurry and non-lucid dreams, I still have a body.

In my lucid dreams I always have a body from head to toe, except if I inspect my hands more clearly I will notice a 6th or 7th finger. This is a reality test that you could also use during your "AP" experiences. Why not?

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As far as things like being able to fly through the night and haunt astral projection skeptics, I can't do anything with astral projection that I can't do in any other lucid dream. But I haven't really explored that sort of thing. In general I never repeat dream experiences, and for a variety of reasons I don't cultivate either 'astral' or controlled 'lucid' experiences.

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Fair enough.

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In one of my 'astral' experiences I inverted my spatial map, one hemisphere of my head at a time, so that inside was outside and outside was inside. That was pretty weird, and I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream.

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Don't be too sure about that. People have been able to shapeshift into animals, literally feel they're a bird, a cat, or a dog. They've been able to grow more limbs, shrink themselves, make themselves into giants, and do lots of other things.

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I visualized an imagined object from multiple directions at once. As far as I know that would be possible during astral projection also though. I've experienced things from other perspectives besides my own. This I think is easier during a lucid dream, because a person has more control over the sensate experience, which is metaphorically useful. I've had a lot of remarkably accurate premonitions, but that's another topic. Now that I think of it though, I did have one accurate premonition in an 'astral' type of dream, and its probably equally possible there, though the form it would have to take would generally be different, since the content of the experience is different. I have almost nothing in the way of a "mind's eye" while awake, and that would be true for me in an "astral" experience also.

Instead of warping my mental model of where my body is, I can project my first person visual standpoint to what would usually be a subconsciously imagined third person perspective. That kind of perspective is part of what gives a person an awareness of how they look from other points in their surrounding environment. But if the first person visual imagination is projected to it, this corresponds to an out of body experience. This is the distinction I make between AP and OBE, though experiences can blend aspects of both. To say that again, astral projection is when you warp your sense of where your physical body is, separating it from where your physical body actually is. When people describe out-of-body experiences, such as when near death, what they describe usually seems to me to be more like transferring one's subjective first-person visual standpoint to what would normally be a third person standpoint. In other words, it uses a different part of one's mostly involuntary model of one's environment, though its the same in other regards, and these different aspects can be blended.

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I haven't tried this myself, but I've heard of people shifting their perspective and doing similar things like you describe. I don't see anything spectacular about this.

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There seems to be an implication in a lot of these questions, and in the subsequent comments, that something is only objectively real if it is seen in a way that is consistent with what other people see. I don't think this is a reasonable perspective. When you see that something is red, for instance, you actually don't know anything about the 'wavelengths of light', you're just assuming that there's a fairly accurate correspondence between the appearance and the actual radiated and reflected spectra...

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No the question is very simple actually. Have you noticed any difference in the behavior of dream characters vs. the behavior of characters during an AP experience? Because if we want to talk about astral projection vs. lucid dreaming, we first have to define what astral projection actually means. It should mean that there is an astral body and an astral plane, and consequently it would have to mean that our environment during an AP experience is definitely NOT the construct of our mind. So if characters during AP are not a construct of our mind, they would have to be other beings, perhaps astral beings. Surely there must be a difference in behavior between the two, or am I wrong?

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Behind any image in a dream there are impressions of thought, desire, and identity related to the image. I mentioned that my dreams aren't very visual or audial, its mostly impressions like that. End even where there is a clear 'dream character' the appearance of the character is a pretty small part of the experience. Most of the impression of the nature of what is being dreamed isn't in the appearance. And the 'dream character' doesn't represent a single person or personality, it expresses aspects of myself, several other people I know, and various abstract principles. There also aren't clear delineations between different characters. My first person perspective jumps around, the number of characters representing the different aspects of an interaction can change, and the genders can change from one second to the next as the content of my attention shifts slightly from one aspect of what is being represented to another. Its not very much like waking life in that regard, at least not on anything like the same timescale. So when you ask how dream characters behave....its really not quite like that. And yet I do often experience the presence of identity that is outside of what I would normally think of as 'myself', even though there aren't any clear lines that separate that from myself. I 'feel' the difference in identity, which isn't a description you like, but I often have objective checks on that feeling, and learn the extent to which I can trust it based on how the experiences connected with subsequent waking life experiences.

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My point is that an AP dream character would not be an aspect of yourself, or of several other people you know, because the AP world is not the dream world. But if you deny the existence of an astral plane, astral body, and astral "beings", then it makes no sense to call this experience astral projection. It would make sense to call it a lucid dream.

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In summary, I don't think the 'beings' in my dreams are going to be any different than the 'beings' in my astral experiences, because the distinction between the astral experiences and the other dream experiences is relatively superficial compared to the main content in regard to those 'beings'. But in either case, I don't divide things into strict categories like 'dream characters' or 'angels' or 'shadow people' or 'demons' or 'suppressed parts of my own personality', its all more fluid than that.

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I understand what you are saying, but my questions were really meant for those who believe in special astral beings and who view astral projection as another dimension which is completely different from a lucid dream. So if an astral plane does exist, then who is the neighbor you see on the balcony? Who is your sister who is sitting in the living room? Are they astral versions of these real people? What is the evidence that they aren't regular dream characters? I hope you see where I'm going with this.

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I don't think this question makes any sense in the context of my thought of what astral projection is. And maybe it doesn't even make sense to other people who believe they have 'astral bodies' made up of "astral matter", since most of those people will attribute a similar kind of reality to what they think of as a "dream plane" during other lucid dreaming. Just like the name says, the experience is astral, its not a physical experience.

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You are right, but only if you view AP as a "sort of" lucid dream or different type of lucid dream. Most other people unfortunately don't see it that way. We even have a person in this thread who claims that people can find hidden objects in reality through astral projection. We have people who claim they talk to otherworldy beings during AP. We have people who claim LDs have absolutely nothing to do with AP.

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The environment a person is aware of in that state has a connection to the physical environment, but its not the same thing. When they call the experience "astral", to distinguish it from other lucid dreams, they're saying something to characterize the nature of the experience. How can it not really be how they experience it? That's like asking "have you ever had a nightmare that turned out not to be a nightmare?" Or "have you ever seen a color that wasn't really a color?" Like I pointed out earlier, everything you experience, even during waking life, is in your imagination, even though there is usually a fairly direct connection between what you imagine your external environment to be and what your external environment actually is. If someone were to ask "have you ever imagined something then it turned out to be real", or "have you ever thought something was real then it turned out to be imagined", they're asking questions about how well what you imagined corresponded to reality. But in a sense they're being a little bit sloppy with words, because everything you experience is an internally generated cartoon of your surroundings, irrespective of how useful and accurate that cartoon may or may not be. In that same sense there's no difference at all between a lucid dream or astral projection. But then there's no difference between that or waking life either. And yet we can make distinctions between all three of these things, because the relationship with the reality behind the experience is different in each case.

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No, I will have to completely disagree here. We can differentiate between waking life and dream by doing simple tests which trick the brain, make it work hard to do some things, and then see the result and conclude if we are awake or asleep. Analyzing your fingers, re-reading text, looking at digital clocks, etc. can show you if you are sleeping or awake. Now what tests can we do to determine if we are located on the astral plane? Why does the astral plane have to be just as unstable as a lucid dream?

We have scientific evidence of lucid dreaming. Stephen LaBerge made people send eye-signals during REM sleep after gaining lucidity. We have controlled studies where LaBerge documented these things, as well as the fact that dream time is very close to real time as well. But what studies do we have as far as astral projection goes? Waking life is fact. Dreaming is fact. Lucid dreaming is fact as well. But what about astral beings, the astral plane and the astral body? What studies do we have on these things? A person in this thread talks about a course in which his friends participated, where people were able to find hidden objects through astral projection. So why do we only read about these spectacular tales on an internet forum? What is your comment about these claims? It seems to me that in this case, the astral plane is completely different from a lucid dream environment and is actually connected to the physical world. How else would someone be able to find a hidden object through this experience?

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A problem with astral projection is that none of us understand the relationship with the reality behind the experience. It seems that some people imagine that they do, and talk about higher worlds and vibrations. But I don't think what they're saying actually makes detailed sense, to them or to anyone else. Just because we don't understand the experience doesn't mean that there's nothing there though, that its unreal except for the "lucid dream" aspect of it.

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I view it very differently. I personally think that AP lovers are fascinated with the idea about there being a special world that is different from the normal dream world. This idea gives you many things to wonder about and fantasize, and it just sounds "cool." It is just cooler to leave your body and walk around than dream about leaving your body and walking around.

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By saying this I'm not suggesting that I understand the whole story. I used to think I did, and I used to think that "astral projection" was "all in my head", based on the experiments I'd done. Then I had scores of other bizarre dream experiences that proved to me without a reasonable doubt that there is a lot to dreaming that is not "all in my head". So now I know that I probably don't understand astral projection either.

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I respect your opinion, and I thank you for writing so much and making this great and honest post. I just think that you underestimate the power of dreams. They can really fool you and make you think you are experiencing something that is "above" a dream. :)

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One more closing comment....You suggested that people often lie about this stuff, and that you want honest answers. I agree with you about this, that people often aren't honest, and I want honest answers too.

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Yes, for example digital clock RCs and text is something that people frequently lie about, and it's mostly people who are AP/OBE-lovers. They do it I suppose only for one reason, and that is to make astral projection something "untestable". Because text is completely stable in their dreams, they cannot use it as a reliable test in AP. This kind of dishonesty makes me wanna puke. Text can be "more" or "less" stable, depending on how much you focus, how vivid the dream is, and how you are performing the test. But to claim it is completely stable all the time, and that you cannot use it as a reliable check... this is dishonesty, pure and simple. There is no external stimuli, there is no text, there is no clock. Your mind creates it and re-creates it everytime you look, and parts of the brain which are responsible for reading text are less active. So unless you are a superhuman, a digital clock will not read "14:47" three times you look at it.

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I try very hard to be completely objective, and to give a balanced and truthful impression in everything I say. If I seem evasive in relation to some specific example, it may be because I'm trying to protect someone else's privacy, or because I'm trying to avoid adding confusion by saying something that I know will be misunderstood and which I don't have time to explain adequately at the moment. (My posts are way longer than practically anyone has time to read as it is, and arguably longer than I have time for myself.) But I'm never trying to present a distorted picture, hiding information that doesn't support the argument I'm taking. I instead adjust my view to fit the information, to the best of my ability. I won't mislead someone to try to get them to believe what I think is true. If I did that, I'd be cultivating a habit of deception, and almost immediately I'd be deceiving myself as well. Plus it pisses me off when people try to do that to me. So if I say something that seems dishonest, you can be almost 100% certain that either you're misunderstanding me, or missing other context such as personal experience that's similar to mine. Call me on it anyway if it looks dishonest to you, that's the most direct thing you can do. I'm just saying this in hopes of saving time if we're on the same page about this.

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I thank you wholeheartedly for making such a long, wonderful post. :) I don't think it is dishonest at all, and I think the major difference between you and I is that we view astral projection differently. When I think AP I think "astral plane completely different than dream environment", "astral beings completely different from dream characters", and "astral body completely different than a dream body". I base my views upon books I've read, articles, and stories about AP on this very forum. You seem to view AP as a type of lucid dream. You don't talk much about astral beings or the astral plane, nor do you seem to believe that there is a connection between the astrale plane and the physical world. So your position doesn't seem to be the popular one that is circulating everywhere. That being said, I don't see any evidence that astral projection is anything other than a completely regular dream in which you dream you have separated from your body and that you're exploring another dimension. The purpose of this thread was to ask the questions to those who believe in the classic definition of astral projection. You don't seem to fit in this group, but I think your post was insightful nonetheless.

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

I will stick to my understanding. What you are saying does not comply to what i experience, that is the only reason why i will not agree with you. I hope one day you will turn back and see the same time again and again, then come back to this conversation and try to find where you did mistake.

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I have made no mistake, and neither did Stephen LaBerge in his findings regarding visual information in dreams. Text and numbers are unstable because of the reasons I cited, and not because of expectation.

And no text is the same. There is simple text and complex sentences. You are able to modify simple text using your expectation, ex: transform "Memo" into "Mama", but to keep text or numbers completely stable after looking back 3 times or more, this will not be possible. At least not for the 98% of "normal" people. For superhumans like yourself, it might be a different story.

In any case, please let's not divert this discussion into talk about RCs. Let's keep it on-topic, and the topic is the existence of the astral plane, astral body, and astral beings.

Thanks. :shadewink:

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

I have made no mistake, and neither did Stephen LaBerge in his findings regarding visual information in dreams. Text and numbers are unstable because of the reasons I cited, and not because of expectation.

And no text is the same. There is simple text and complex sentences. You are able to modify simple text using your expectation, ex: transform "Memo" into "Mama", but to keep text or numbers completely stable after looking back 3 times or more, this will not be possible. At least not for the 98% of "normal" people. For superhumans like yourself, it might be a different story.

In any case, please let's not divert this discussion into talk about RCs. Let's keep it on-topic, and the topic is the existence of the astral plane, astral body, and astral beings.

Thanks. :shadewink:

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As you wish, its your topic :)

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Originally Posted by MrDee

Hi, I am pretty new to this site but find astral projection very fascinating.

I have recently started learning how to LD so that I can learn the difference between Ld and AP.

I am actually attending courses on this exact phenomenon and have recently just passed phase one. Due to my utmost interest and progress I have been invited to skip phase 2 and go onto phase 3 which entails deep meditation, and astral projection. and from what Ive heard from friends also attending these courses. They experienced the folowing:

An object was hidden in the back yard of a house close to the training center and nobody knew about this object, during their training that day they were shown a map from the training hall to the house as well as a picture of the house (without the object being in the picture of course). they were then told to astral project and go look at what object was behind the house. after 30 minutes of silence they were asked to write wat they saw behind the yard. All those who gave answers got it right. the few who didnt answer said they couldnt get that far away from their physical body due to fear etc.

I have however not had first hand experience and I hope this thread will be open by the time I am done so that i can give proper feedback. I am hoping that astral projection is real. because you can do so much with a skill like that. But I am not afraid to find out and post my honest answer, and being able to LD is all so new and I have still so much to learn that even that is awesum enough to be real.

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So according to your input.
If I hide an object in my garden, then you - on the other side of the world - guess correctly, the astral realm exists.
Would this be proof enough for the original poster ?
Or is this just a lucky guess.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

So according to your input.
If I hide an object in my garden, then you - on the other side of the world - guess correctly, the astral realm exists.
Would this be proof enough for the original poster ?
Or is this just a lucky guess.

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For me that would demonstrate knowledge at a distance, but would not tell us anything about the existence of an astral realm. I'm already completely convinced about knowledge at a distance, but have no knowledge of anything astral.

By way of analogy, in former times, non-visible light was thought by many to be 'astral'. Demonstrating the existence of non-visible light did not demonstrate anything about other realms.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

For me that would demonstrate knowledge at a distance, but would not tell us anything about the existence of an astral realm. I'm already completely convinced about knowledge at a distance, but have no knowledge of anything astral.

By way of analogy, in former times, non-visible light was thought by many to be 'astral'. Demonstrating the existence of non-visible light did not demonstrate anything about other realms.

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Hypothetical situation
So, tonight I go into the Astral Plane for real.
What piece of information could I bring back that would prove to you the Astral Plane exists.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

So according to your input.
If I hide an object in my garden, then you - on the other side of the world - guess correctly, the astral realm exists.
Would this be proof enough for the original poster ?
Or is this just a lucky guess.

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It would be enough to demonstrate psychic phenomena and get 1 million dollars offered by the James Randi Foundation.

And yes, it would be enough evidence for me.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

It would be enough to demonstrate psychic phenomena and get 1 million dollars offered by the James Randi Foundation.

And yes, it would be enough evidence for me.

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Actually that's not even remotely good enough to satisfy the requirements for the Randi challenge, if you read the fine print.

If you want evidence of paranormal phenomena we could try sharing something in a dream. I've had about a 30% success rate with this with people on Dreamviews. I'll send a private message later.

I'm not ignoring your other post, I'm still at work and will read it later.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

Hypothetical situation
So, tonight I go into the Astral Plane for real.
What piece of information could I bring back that would prove to you the Astral Plane exists.

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Some kind of result that aids understanding of what the astral plane actually is. I have no idea what that might be. Remote viewing or accurate premonition doesn't do that, unless the result has some peculiar characteristic that sheds new light on how it works. Ask for help I guess.

About 6 months ago it was suggested to me in a dream that I should think about why my impression from the narrator isn't time reversed, and that this would aid my understanding of 'astral'. Not knowing what else to do about that, I thought about why an image is reversed in a mirror, since the astral plane is said to be a mirror of the physical plane and also of the 'thought' plane. The result of my thinking about that is I now understand that objects aren't actually reversed by a mirror. (The print on a book, for example, is reversed because you turn the book around to face the mirror. Its reversed because you turned it around, not by the mirror. If the words are printed on a transparent piece of plastic and you hold that up, then they look exactly the same in the mirror as they do to you.) So now I'm marginally less stupid about mirrors, but as far as I know I don't understand the 'astral plane' any better.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

why use the term astral projection if it is only to describe a lucid dream? We know the definition of astral projection: "Astral projection or travel denotes the astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the astral plane." So for astral projection to exist, there must be an astral plane, and an astral body.

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I don't think that's a very meaningful definition, it has too many implied assumptions built into it. People have taken the experience at face value without understanding it and built a whole theological fantasy out of it. The experience they're referring to isn't just like another lucid dream though. I'll say a little bit more about this. I also think that your thought about what an 'astral plane' would be is really a lot different than what other people are talking about, and that accounts for a lot of misunderstanding. I'll say more about that later.

Some of my lucid dreams are more visually vivid than in waking life, and my cognitive abilities are pretty good too in those dreams, though the range of things that it can occur to me to think about is typically more restricted. The easiest way for me to tell that those are 'dreams' is my peripheral vision is never as good as in waking life, even though the vision straight ahead may be better than in waking life.

During astral projection, I can feel my so-called 'astral' body separating from my physical body. Its a remarkable feeling, hard to describe because there's nothing else to compare it to. I could suggest imagining your astral and physical bodies are stuck together at every atom by van der Waals forces, and you feel the separation in every bit of you. But of course that's not a very good description because we don't know what that would feel like, and it probably doesn't make much sense anyway. But as I experience it its not very much like flying around a lucid dream replica of my room. So irrespective of the true nature of what is happening, whether its "really just a type of lucid dream" or whatever, we need some kind of phrase to describe the experience, to distinguish it from those other experiences. So we call it astral projection. The experience is definitely a kind of projection, and we can define the subjective 'body' that we project as "astral", even though we don't have any idea what that means. The assumptions of there being some kind of "astral matter" or "astral plane" don't necessarily follow from that.

Despite the extreme visual clarity of a lucid dream, for me there's still something discernibly fake about the experience. It may look real and even feel real to the sense of touch, and there may be powerful emotions, but in a way it doesn't seem real. Its as if I know the story in the dream isn't true. Actually waking life is like this for me too. When I look around my desk here I don't merely intellectually understand that my image of it is a mental projection, it seems that way to me to, it doesn't seem like the real thing. With astral projection its the opposite. Its as if I'm not looking at an embellished cartoon image of my surroundings any more, its as if that layer of insulation has been stripped away and I'm in more direct contact with it. Like I'm seeing it directly, not something reconstructed from what passed through a lens. This is by far the most remarkable aspect of the experience, and that aspect is there even if I don't separate the two bodies. I can hear too in that state, but its not like hearing in any other lucid dream, or in waking life. Its as if I can hear the unseen spirit of the house that normally I would just feel. Very creepy, particularly in an old house. And it never completely goes away afterwards, because afterwards you can recognize the feeling more clearly in waking life also, even though the astral sights and sounds are no longer present, irrespective of what reality you may or may not attribute to it. I'll say more later on what I mean by 'astral sights'.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Hmm, I'm not sure I see a difference. I always operate a body in every dream. Have you ever pondered that you are simply having two different types lucid dreams? One that is with a body, and one without? I have had WILDs which are phenomenal, where I begin to see an almost exact replica of my bedroom through my eyelids. Then I just get up with my dream body. I just don't call it astral projection because I have no evidence that I am in any sort of astral plane or any other dimension. That's why I find the claim "astral projection" pretty out there, because I see absolutely no evidence that this is anything else than a dream.

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It doesn't sound to me like we're talking about the same thing. I think that if you had the kind of astral projection experience that I'm talking about, you might still understand it as a form of lucid dream, but you would also understand why many other people don't regard it as a lucid dream.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

I agree with this last sentence, but not with what you wrote previously. It has nothing to do with your sense of time. The point is to find something smaller, something very fine, very detailed that will "stress" the brain so-to-speak. Because if text is unstable, and if fine details (such as hairs, buttons, complex logos, complex pictures etc.) are unstable... doesn't this tell you that your brain is having a hard time keeping them stable? It is only the smaller more detailed things that are changing. Why doesn't a chair turn into a leather couch when you look back at it? Doesn't it tell you that your environment is a construct of your mind?

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I think you're making a lot of assumptions about how other people lucid dream. Its not necessarily very much like what you experience, or very much the people some credentialed dreaming experts somewhere have gotten hold of.

Also, in my experience there's another notable difference between how I experience the room in an 'astral' dream, and how I would experience it in a lucid dream. In a lucid dream, it looks just like the real room, but with bad peripheral vision as I mentioned. I also can't sustain that degree of visual lucidity for very long, it seems some crucial chemical in my brain runs out or something. In the astral experience, its not the room that seems 'astral'. The image of the room itself is like that of a lucid dream, or of a waking life experience. But there's other wispy stuff superimposed on it, almost like everything has an aura, and you can see and hear things that might vaguely remind you of 'energy life forms' in a Star Trek show or something, but with even less substance and form than that. At night I guess this would be all shadowy, but my experiences have been during the day. Again, the room itself seems like the room of a lucid dream, but then there's that other stuff too. And it seems remarkably real, like the story is true, not like a dream.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Why would a word even be unstable on the astral plane, when we have people (such as in this very same thread) who claim that astral travelers can find hidden objects located in the real world, simply through astral travel?

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What I'm calling astral, in whatever sense its real, is like a different kind of realm, or maybe a very different way of seeing in the physical realm. If you're talking about a word being stable or unstable, that's not the same kind of realm. This 'astral' plane is not the same as what people call the 'dream plane', and the astral body is not what people call the dream body. I've never even encountered anyone who regards them as the same. Even in waking life, right now, if I think about them within my own physical body, they don't feel the same. The dream body is more mental, in the imagination, even though spatially you imagine it to be where you imagine your body to be. It sort of floats. The astral body is more like something that is deeply a part of the physical body, in your nerves, but you're not aware of it because your mind is turned away from it somehow. If it could be suddenly gone you would notice the difference though. Note that I'm not attempting to interpret what any of this means, I'm just trying to describe the experience.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

I always have a body when lucid dreaming. I cannot even imagine the feeling to have a dream without a body. Even in my weakest most blurry and non-lucid dreams, I still have a body.

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So we've established a way in which your lucid dreams are notably different from mine, so we shouldn't be surprised if there are other differences too, such as with clock experiments.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

In my lucid dreams I always have a body from head to toe, except if I inspect my hands more clearly I will notice a 6th or 7th finger. This is a reality test that you could also use during your "AP" experiences. Why not?

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My experiences are largely involuntary. I ask a question, and my subconscious constructs an experience that attempts to answer the question. Though this might almost sound schizophrenic, the respect I have for that process is part of what has enabled me to have experiences that most people haven't had. We're not doing astral projection experiences right now, we're not interested, and I can't really force that interest. (I actually don't think that repeated astral projection is a very good idea for my development, though I don't want to get sidetracked onto that right now, since this is a complex enough discussion already. It would be like training as a contortionist when your goal is to play basketball at a high level.) I can say with some confidence though that if I ever had more than five fingers in a dream, there would be a definite reason for it, that it wouldn't just drift around like that without being tightly tied into my thought process in the dream. It also doesn't seem to fit the astral projection experience. The feeling of the astral body is deeply precise and intimate. Having an extra finger just wouldn't fit at all. The experience isn't vague enough for something like that to randomly drift about like that.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Don't be too sure about that. People have been able to shapeshift into animals, literally feel they're a bird, a cat, or a dog. They've been able to grow more limbs, shrink themselves, make themselves into giants, and do lots of other things.

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What I said was "I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream". I didn't say I couldn't do it, and wasn't trying to make a point about how astral projection is or is not fundamentally different from lucid dreaming, I was just answering the question. But shapeshifting is a notably different type of transformation than reversing 'inside' and 'outside', even though both are transformations. And given that I almost never even experience having a body in a lucid dream, I think that I'm a better judge than you of what I can do in a lucid dream than you are, which is all I was talking about.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

I haven't tried this myself, but I've heard of people shifting their perspective and doing similar things like you describe. I don't see anything spectacular about this.

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I didn't go into very much detail about what I mean by shifting perspective, since its a bit off topic. Its possible to get actual extra-sensory information that way, and from what you've said you would regard that as spectacular.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

No the question is very simple actually. Have you noticed any difference in the behavior of dream characters vs. the behavior of characters during an AP experience? Because if we want to talk about astral projection vs. lucid dreaming, we first have to define what astral projection actually means. It should mean that there is an astral body and an astral plane, and consequently it would have to mean that our environment during an AP experience is definitely NOT the construct of our mind. So if characters during AP are not a construct of our mind, they would have to be other beings, perhaps astral beings. Surely there must be a difference in behavior between the two, or am I wrong?

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I think that there are assumptions here about what it means for something to be a construct of the mind, and assumptions of similarity between astral planes and dream planes, so that we may compare the 'characters' of each. I don't think that the 'astral plane' has 'characters'. That would be sort of like thinking that the "color plane" has characters, or the "electromagnetic plane" has characters. The word "plane" is actually a terrible analogy I think. Years ago everyone learned geometry in high school, so when theosophists constructed their half-plagiarized cosmogony, they built it out of spheres and planes because those are the ideas they had available for visualization. But in my experience I can't find anything that's even remotely like a higher 'plane'. So I can't discuss differences in behavior because there are not astral "characters" that I'm aware of. I have had some remarkable experiences with entities that seem not to exist as fixed individuals or in any particular place. But these aren't "astral", and I think it goes quite a bit beyond the distinctions made between astral and lucid dream. It would be like arguing who is or who isn't a great mind based on what clothes they are wearing.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

My point is that an AP dream character would not be an aspect of yourself, or of several other people you know, because the AP world is not the dream world. But if you deny the existence of an astral plane, astral body, and astral "beings", then it makes no sense to call this experience astral projection. It would make sense to call it a lucid dream.

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It seems to me that you're trying to draw conclusions based on a logical manipulation of definitions that are inappropriate for what other people experience and are trying to talk about. Like I tried to say earlier, the dream character is the tip of an iceberg. The astral experience is distinct from other lucid experiences, but is also the tip of an iceberg. If we start talking about shared identity or archetypes or something, that doesn't really mean anything in either context. The lucid dream character is just an image, just a moving picture. The astral experience is limited in similar ways too.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

I understand what you are saying, but my questions were really meant for those who believe in special astral beings and who view astral projection as another dimension which is completely different from a lucid dream. So if an astral plane does exist, then who is the neighbor you see on the balcony? Who is your sister who is sitting in the living room? Are they astral versions of these real people? What is the evidence that they aren't regular dream characters? I hope you see where I'm going with this.

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I think these comparisons are between incomparably different classes of things. "Astral entity" and "lucid dream character" really aren't two different things that can be conflated, as if one looks like the other but they behave differently somehow. The "dream plane" and the "astral plane" are almost as different as algebra and geometry. The reason I said that astral projection is like a kind of lucid dream, is because the mental faculty, so to speak, that you use to make the movie-like touch and sight and sound experience is largely the same. But the underlying ideas and experiences are different, just as the physical world is quite distinct from the "dream world" even though you use your imagination, voluntarily and involuntarily, to represent both of them.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

You are right, but only if you view AP as a "sort of" lucid dream or different type of lucid dream. Most other people unfortunately don't see it that way. We even have a person in this thread who claims that people can find hidden objects in reality through astral projection. We have people who claim they talk to otherworldy beings during AP. We have people who claim LDs have absolutely nothing to do with AP.

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Although I disagree with all of those people about all kinds of things, I don't think that their claims are as unreasonable as they appear to be though your current set of assumptions about what all these things mean and how they might work.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

No, I will have to completely disagree here. We can differentiate between waking life and dream by doing simple tests which trick the brain, make it work hard to do some things, and then see the result and conclude if we are awake or asleep. Analyzing your fingers, re-reading text, looking at digital clocks, etc. can show you if you are sleeping or awake. Now what tests can we do to determine if we are located on the astral plane? Why does the astral plane have to be just as unstable as a lucid dream?

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You are never "located" on the astral plane, it is not that kind of thing. The words we're using here were all invented to describe things in the physical world. Applied to other subjects, they're at best very bad metaphors. Its a different kind of problem, requiring different kinds of tests. Few of the tests that distinguish between "dreaming" and "awake" are very useful here. Most of those tests will tell you that you're dreaming, but then you're missing the point, because the difference between "dreaming" and "awake" is a fairly superficial distinction between what you're doing with one part of your mind and your senses. The "physical" part of the astral experience resembles a lucid dream because you don't in fact have information coming in through your eyes that you can use, so you're apt to project it in almost exactly the same manner. But that's only one aspect of the experience.

I said that I've experienced a reversal of "inside" and "outside", and also that I've seen something from several sides at once, focused as a single unified visual experience of group of objects seen from no particular vantagepoint. If you think about what that really says, I don't see why you wouldn't find it remarkable, it takes your mind into a space that's topologically different than our external world as we usually perceive it. When you're not as locked into your former assumptions about objects and space and objectivity and subjectivity, then you can have experiences that weren't possible earlier. This is why I can't understand "astral", I'm too locked into my own box that way. But I've taken some steps in that direction, so I try to share some of the ideas that were steps towards other experiences for me, and sometimes you can repeat something after you've heard about it and you've thought about it.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

We have scientific evidence of lucid dreaming. Stephen LaBerge made people send eye-signals during REM sleep after gaining lucidity. We have controlled studies where LaBerge documented these things, as well as the fact that dream time is very close to real time as well. But what studies do we have as far as astral projection goes? Waking life is fact. Dreaming is fact. Lucid dreaming is fact as well. But what about astral beings, the astral plane and the astral body? What studies do we have on these things? A person in this thread talks about a course in which his friends participated, where people were able to find hidden objects through astral projection. So why do we only read about these spectacular tales on an internet forum? What is your comment about these claims? It seems to me that in this case, the astral plane is completely different from a lucid dream environment and is actually connected to the physical world. How else would someone be able to find a hidden object through this experience?

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So you wouldn't believe in lucid dreaming unless there had been a scientific study? It wouldn't be a "fact"? Of course you shouldn't believe it if you have no evidence for it, but you have a lot of evidence besides those scientific studies. A generation ago, if you were a lucid dreamer, and other people didn't believe you, you'd be in almost exactly the same situation as the "astral projection" people are in.

I have actually sent e-mails to numerous academic dream experts, but couldn't find anyone interested in studying the dream phenomena I know something about. These phenomena are very difficult to set up controlled experiments for. So even academics who believe in them don't study them, because it doesn't support a line of research that they can get sustained funding for. They have to pay their bills just like everyone else.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

I view it very differently. I personally think that AP lovers are fascinated with the idea about there being a special world that is different from the normal dream world. This idea gives you many things to wonder about and fantasize, and it just sounds "cool." It is just cooler to leave your body and walk around than dream about leaving your body and walking around.

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I think there's an element of truth in your hypothesis there, but its not the whole truth. Hopefully I can demolish it by helping provide you with additional facts that don't support it.

[Chopping some stuff out from here on to save time.]

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Yes, for example digital clock RCs and text is something that people frequently lie about, and it's mostly people who are AP/OBE-lovers. They do it I suppose only for one reason, and that is to make astral projection something "untestable". Because text is completely stable in their dreams, they cannot use it as a reliable test in AP. This kind of dishonesty makes me wanna puke.

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I think your educated guess about their motivations is failing you a bit here. Maybe some people are doing what you say. They aren't all doing that though. Your lucid dream experiences are very much different from mine, we've only scratched the surface of how different they are. The clock experiment doesn't actually make much sense in my world. That doesn't mean that its a bad idea. But there's really a lot of variation in people's experiences, and you can't transfer what makes sense in your dream world to other people's.

The reason the test doesn't work well for me, is I put almost all of my "lucidity" effort into intuitive and abstract cognitive awareness. I almost completely ignore the video-game aspect of the dream, I don't even bother to support it. And I don't try to control any of it. If I was controlling it, I wouldn't be able to have cool experiences like seeing things from several directions at once, because I would have no idea how to go about doing something like that. My subconscious controls that stuff. And my subconscious is strong enough that I'd be absolutely shocked if it can't stabilize a clock face. That doesn't even make sense to me. Have you ever looked at a mountain peak several kilometers away or so, behind another peak slightly closer? Both look comparably far away, but they're far enough from each other that if you move your head back and forth you can see one moving against the other, eclipsing individual trees and rocks. My lucid dreams are stable enough that I've been able to do that experiment, back and forth and back and forth, without any discernible shift in the scene. Aside from nature and urban scenes, I've also done something similar with the crosswork of steel beams on a suspension bridge, moving against each other as I walk. There's just no way that a clock face won't stay still. Everything in these kinds of dreams is stable like that. But "I", as the first person witness in the dream, am not keeping it still, I'm trusting that other more mysterious part of myself to do it. My astral projection experiences were all created in this manner also. Most people don't have that kind of approach to dreams, they control the dream "themselves" from their first person vantagepoint. But I find it completely plausible that other people can keep a clock face stable, even people who don't believe in astral projection. There will tend to be consistent dream capability differences between astral projection people and lucid dreamers more like yourself though, because those are the same differences that produce the astral projection experience for them and not for you. I'm not saying that one is "better" than the other, just that there are tradeoffs. My way, which is different from their way or your way, is bad for dream control, but good for producing a fairly wide range of exotic experiences to think about. So we learn different kinds of things.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

There is no external stimuli, there is no text, there is no clock. Your mind creates it and re-creates it everytime you look, and parts of the brain which are responsible for reading text are less active. So unless you are a superhuman, a digital clock will not read "14:47" three times you look at it.

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My mind creates it ahead of time, almost like playing a recording, though the 'ahead of time' and 'concurrent' concepts break down for many of my experiences also. Most of my "lucidity" goes into watching and thinking about the recording. If I try to control the story I'll mess up the most interesting parts of it. For me the clock will say 14:47 each time because that number has some essential significance to that particular dream, or it wouldn't even be in the dream. The visually precise dreams I described a minute ago were demonstrations of what my mind is capable of in terms of detail and stability. Other dreams wouldn't have a clock in them at all unless its important to the story being told. This is part of why I almost never have a body, its rarely relevant to the ideas I'm thinking about. Maybe if I took a more active role I'd be able to learn some new things, but somehow I just don't feel like it. That "active role" part of me is resting, and if I wanted to do something I'd just be awake so I could bring more of my faculties to bear on it. Actually most of the "carefully scripted story" aspect of the dream is gone now too, probably for a similar reason, I just don't do as much while asleep as I used to. It would seem sort of unnatural, like prying one part of my mind away from the other part, rather than bringing all my intelligence and will to bear on making my life work. Though I'm still a fool for mile long internet forum posts, apparently.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

When I think AP I think "astral plane completely different than dream environment", "astral beings completely different from dream characters", and "astral body completely different than a dream body". I base my views upon books I've read, articles, and stories about AP on this very forum.

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Yeah you have to throw away most of that stuff. Suppose, by way of analogy, that an "astral realm" were a part of your everyday experience, and you wanted to find if that could tell you anything about natural history. Going and spending your time arguing with Christians about whether the earth is 6000 years old just wouldn't help you very much. They may be right about some things, but not the things you care about. Or even if they do know something relevant, its attached to other crap or obstacles that keep you from digesting it. Sometimes you have to focus on the ideas and interactions that you seem to be getting some traction with.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I don't think that's a very meaningful definition, it has too many implied assumptions built into it. People have taken the experience at face value without understanding it and built a whole theological fantasy out of it. The experience they're referring to isn't just like another lucid dream though. I'll say a little bit more about this. I also think that your thought about what an 'astral plane' would be is really a lot different than what other people are talking about, and that accounts for a lot of misunderstanding. I'll say more about that later.

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I think this is the problem in our discussion. We simply cannot discuss astral projection if your definition differs so much from the standard popular one. However I'll respond to some things you said.

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Some of my lucid dreams are more visually vivid than in waking life, and my cognitive abilities are pretty good too in those dreams, though the range of things that it can occur to me to think about is typically more restricted. The easiest way for me to tell that those are 'dreams' is my peripheral vision is never as good as in waking life, even though the vision straight ahead may be better than in waking life.

During astral projection, I can feel my so-called 'astral' body separating from my physical body. Its a remarkable feeling, hard to describe because there's nothing else to compare it to.

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But there you go again with the "astral" body, yet at the same time you claim your definition of astral projection is different. Now my question is, have you ever thought that this remarkable hard-to-describe feeling is simply something that the dream creates? I mean, why the word astral? Why can't a dream produce these sensations? These spectacular sensations are part of the majority of my WILDs, if not 90% of them.

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I could suggest imagining your astral and physical bodies are stuck together at every atom by van der Waals forces, and you feel the separation in every bit of you. But of course that's not a very good description because we don't know what that would feel like, and it probably doesn't make much sense anyway. But as I experience it its not very much like flying around a lucid dream replica of my room. So irrespective of the true nature of what is happening, whether its "really just a type of lucid dream" or whatever, we need some kind of phrase to describe the experience, to distinguish it from those other experiences. So we call it astral projection. The experience is definitely a kind of projection, and we can define the subjective 'body' that we project as "astral", even though we don't have any idea what that means. The assumptions of there being some kind of "astral matter" or "astral plane" don't necessarily follow from that.

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But books about astral projection talk about an "astral plane". Or am I wrong? Isn't this in the majority of AP literature? So if we keep re-defining what AP actually is, then we can't really discuss it. When I talk about AP I mean the standard definition which is widely accepted: There is an astral plane into which we project our astral body.

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Despite the extreme visual clarity of a lucid dream, for me there's still something discernibly fake about the experience. It may look real and even feel real to the sense of touch, and there may be powerful emotions, but in a way it doesn't seem real. Its as if I know the story in the dream isn't true. Actually waking life is like this for me too. When I look around my desk here I don't merely intellectually understand that my image of it is a mental projection, it seems that way to me to, it doesn't seem like the real thing. With astral projection its the opposite. Its as if I'm not looking at an embellished cartoon image of my surroundings any more, its as if that layer of insulation has been stripped away and I'm in more direct contact with it. Like I'm seeing it directly, not something reconstructed from what passed through a lens. This is by far the most remarkable aspect of the experience, and that aspect is there even if I don't separate the two bodies. I can hear too in that state, but its not like hearing in any other lucid dream, or in waking life.

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But why not take into consideration that this is simply a more vivid lucid dream? I've had lucid dreams that are very blurry and unreal, and others which feel almost identical to waking life, then again others which seem somehow ABOVE the reality of waking life. I just don't feel the need to separate the more powerful dreams from the other ones and call them something other than dreams. They are simply better quality dreams - definitely not astral projection.

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It doesn't sound to me like we're talking about the same thing. I think that if you had the kind of astral projection experience that I'm talking about, you might still understand it as a form of lucid dream, but you would also understand why many other people don't regard it as a lucid dream.

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It's sort of like Occam's razor to me. If I am sleeping and experiencing something during the REM stage of sleep, however powerful or vivid it may seem, I am more likely to accept the simpler explanation - that it's nothing more than a dream.

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I think you're making a lot of assumptions about how other people lucid dream. Its not necessarily very much like what you experience, or very much the people some credentialed dreaming experts somewhere have gotten hold of.

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No, I just see a major difference as far as AP/OBE-fans are concerned. They are always the ones whose clocks never change in dreams. They're the ones who are 100% sure they talk to otherworldly beings and not regular dream characters, and they're the ones whose text is always completely stable in dreams.

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Also, in my experience there's another notable difference between how I experience the room in an 'astral' dream, and how I would experience it in a lucid dream. In a lucid dream, it looks just like the real room, but with bad peripheral vision as I mentioned. I also can't sustain that degree of visual lucidity for very long, it seems some crucial chemical in my brain runs out or something. In the astral experience, its not the room that seems 'astral'. The image of the room itself is like that of a lucid dream, or of a waking life experience.

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Again I have to point out that you seem to separate "lucid dream" and "astral experience" based on nothing but the feeling inside the dream. There is no good reason for you to accept that this is anything more than a dream, except for... as I said many times... the "it feels different" argument.

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What I'm calling astral, in whatever sense its real, is like a different kind of realm, or maybe a very different way of seeing in the physical realm. If you're talking about a word being stable or unstable, that's not the same kind of realm. This 'astral' plane is not the same as what people call the 'dream plane', and the astral body is not what people call the dream body. I've never even encountered anyone who regards them as the same. Even in waking life, right now, if I think about them within my own physical body, they don't feel the same. The dream body is more mental, in the imagination, even though spatially you imagine it to be where you imagine your body to be. It sort of floats. The astral body is more like something that is deeply a part of the physical body, in your nerves, but you're not aware of it because your mind is turned away from it somehow. If it could be suddenly gone you would notice the difference though. Note that I'm not attempting to interpret what any of this means, I'm just trying to describe the experience.

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But I have had experiences too in which my dreams seem MORE real than waking life. I just don't see any reason whatsoever to label them "astral".

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So we've established a way in which your lucid dreams are notably different from mine, so we shouldn't be surprised if there are other differences too, such as with clock experiments.

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I stand by what I said regarding digital clocks and text. I just don't buy it, sorry. I say what I say based on research and discussions with hundreds of experienced lucid dreamers through the last 12 years or so. Perhaps your clocks are more stable, but they are not completely stable. Not in a million years. No offense.

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The feeling of the astral body is deeply precise and intimate.

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Hmm, let me try it this way... what is an astral body?

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What I said was "I don't think I could do that as easily in another type of lucid dream". I didn't say I couldn't do it, and wasn't trying to make a point about how astral projection is or is not fundamentally different from lucid dreaming, I was just answering the question. But shapeshifting is a notably different type of transformation than reversing 'inside' and 'outside', even though both are transformations. And given that I almost never even experience having a body in a lucid dream, I think that I'm a better judge than you of what I can do in a lucid dream than you are, which is all I was talking about.

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You seem to be thinking in reverse. You have somehow established the existence of some astral realm, or else you wouldn't be saying "I almost never even experience having a body in a lucid dream." I mean surely you don't think the brain can't create a dream in which you don't have a body? This seems to be your argument...

Lucid dream without a body = Lucid dream without body
Lucid dream with a body = Astral projection

But why can't "lucid dream with a body" be simply a "lucid dream with a body"? Why the word astral?

I don't like the fact that you play around too much with the definition of the word "astral". We cannot simply define it as something "odd" or "different feeling", when the widely understood definition simply means what it means. It does involve an astral body and it does involve an astral plane. How would you be able to discuss with someone the existence of God if that person defined God as not being the creator of the universe, but something totally different, using a vague definition that isn't really a definition at all? You wouldn't be able to discuss it normally.

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I didn't go into very much detail about what I mean by shifting perspective, since its a bit off topic. Its possible to get actual extra-sensory information that way, and from what you've said you would regard that as spectacular.

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If astral projection can be used to do remote viewing, of course I would regard it as spectacular. It would prove psychic abilities and would convince me personally of the existence of an astral realm, which is somehow connected to the physical realm.

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I think that there are assumptions here about what it means for something to be a construct of the mind, and assumptions of similarity between astral planes and dream planes, so that we may compare the 'characters' of each. I don't think that the 'astral plane' has 'characters'. That would be sort of like thinking that the "color plane" has characters, or the "electromagnetic plane" has characters. The word "plane" is actually a terrible analogy I think.

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But unfortunately it is what it is. Google astral projection, astral realm, astral plane, and astral body. I am talking about AP just as it is discussed in literature. If we define it to be something vague and hard-to-define, then we can't have a normal discussion.

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It seems to me that you're trying to draw conclusions based on a logical manipulation of definitions that are inappropriate for what other people experience and are trying to talk about. Like I tried to say earlier, the dream character is the tip of an iceberg. The astral experience is distinct from other lucid experiences, but is also the tip of an iceberg. If we start talking about shared identity or archetypes or something, that doesn't really mean anything in either context. The lucid dream character is just an image, just a moving picture. The astral experience is limited in similar ways too.

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But I don't see based on what do you believe that the so-called astral experience isn't simply a lucid experience? I think it is a huge stretch to call something "astral" simply because it feels more vivid, powerful, or transcendental.

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You are never "located" on the astral plane, it is not that kind of thing.

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If it is not a location, then how can someone on the astral plane allegedly gather information about hidden objects and similar things? Those are some of the spectacular tales I have read on this very forum.

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I said that I've experienced a reversal of "inside" and "outside", and also that I've seen something from several sides at once, focused as a single unified visual experience of group of objects seen from no particular vantagepoint. If you think about what that really says, I don't see why you wouldn't find it remarkable, it takes your mind into a space that's topologically different than our external world as we usually perceive it. When you're not as locked into your former assumptions about objects and space and objectivity and subjectivity, then you can have experiences that weren't possible earlier. This is why I can't understand "astral", I'm too locked into my own box that way. But I've taken some steps in that direction, so I try to share some of the ideas that were steps towards other experiences for me, and sometimes you can repeat something after you've heard about it and you've thought about it.

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I think a simple dream can re-create those same experiences and feelings. In fact I see absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.

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So you wouldn't believe in lucid dreaming unless there had been a scientific study? It wouldn't be a "fact"? Of course you shouldn't believe it if you have no evidence for it, but you have a lot of evidence besides those scientific studies. A generation ago, if you were a lucid dreamer, and other people didn't believe you, you'd be in almost exactly the same situation as the "astral projection" people are in.

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This is a different situation entirely. I read fantastic stories about astral travelers locating hidden object A located in room B, but don't see one controlled study where this is demonstrated. I am not ruling out it's existence, but I am simply not seeing anything that makes me believe in it. As far as astral projection without remote viewing goes, all I see is people describing lucid dreams I have been having for years. They just don't call them lucid dreams - they call them astral projection or OBEs.

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The reason the test doesn't work well for me, is I put almost all of my "lucidity" effort into intuitive and abstract cognitive awareness. I almost completely ignore the video-game aspect of the dream, I don't even bother to support it. And I don't try to control any of it. If I was controlling it, I wouldn't be able to have cool experiences like seeing things from several directions at once, because I would have no idea how to go about doing something like that. My subconscious controls that stuff. And my subconscious is strong enough that I'd be absolutely shocked if it can't stabilize a clock face. That doesn't even make sense to me.

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Your subconscious has nothing to do with stabilizing a clock face. It has to do with limits of your brain. Sure I can somewhat stabilize a clock face if I focus and look at it two times, but it will be harder and harder each time I look back it. By the fourth or fifth time I will not be able to keep the same numbers on it. The same goes for the hundreds if not thousands of lucid dreamers who participated in the old lucidity.com forums. People from as early as 1962 (Oliver Fox) have described that they have difficulties keeping text stable. Surely, as I've said many times, it will be more stable and less stable depending on the person and the dream, but to claim it is always completely stable in is pure and utter nonsense.

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My mind creates it ahead of time, almost like playing a recording, though the 'ahead of time' and 'concurrent' concepts break down for many of my experiences also. Most of my "lucidity" goes into watching and thinking about the recording. If I try to control the story I'll mess up the most interesting parts of it. For me the clock will say 14:47 each time because that number has some essential significance to that particular dream, or it wouldn't even be in the dream. The visually precise dreams I described a minute ago were demonstrations of what my mind is capable of in terms of detail and stability. Other dreams wouldn't have a clock in them at all unless its important to the story being told.

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I am starting to think you never even experimented with dream text to begin with. No matter how "visually precise", the finer and more detailed an object is, the more fluid it will be. I tell you again that there is no clock, there is no clock face, and there is no "14:47" displayed on the face. There is no external stimuli on which upon the 14:47 is based, and I guarantee you even if you wouldn't look away... just zoom in, get close to the clock and analyze the numbers. They will change without you even wanting them to. The brain simply has a hard time keeping up with this, for obvious reasons. But then again, maybe I'm wrong and you and the other astral travelers have different brain capabilities than 98% of lucid dreamers.

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This is part of why I almost never have a body, its rarely relevant to the ideas I'm thinking about. Maybe if I took a more active role I'd be able to learn some new things, but somehow I just don't feel like it. That "active role" part of me is resting, and if I wanted to do something I'd just be awake so I could bring more of my faculties to bear on it. Actually most of the "carefully scripted story" aspect of the dream is gone now too, probably for a similar reason, I just don't do as much while asleep as I used to. It would seem sort of unnatural, like prying one part of my mind away from the other part, rather than bringing all my intelligence and will to bear on making my life work. Though I'm still a fool for mile long internet forum posts, apparently.

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It seems to me that you have two types of dreams. One with a body, one without a body. One with an active role, one with a passive role. Isn't this pure logic? Why feel the need to slap the label "astral" on anything here? Especially when you don't even believe in the popular definition.

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Yeah you have to throw away most of that stuff. Suppose, by way of analogy, that an "astral realm" were a part of your everyday experience, and you wanted to find if that could tell you anything about natural history. Going and spending your time arguing with Christians about whether the earth is 6000 years old just wouldn't help you very much. They may be right about some things, but not the things you care about. Or even if they do know something relevant, its attached to other crap or obstacles that keep you from digesting it. Sometimes you have to focus on the ideas and interactions that you seem to be getting some traction with.

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Although it might seem that way here on DreamViews, but I am really not a closed-minded person at all. I just need something more than people telling me they are experiencing a special feeling. Especially when it comes to the dream state where you brain can trick you in millions of ways, I just can't simply accept that people are truly separating from their body because it feels unlike anything they have felt before. Dreams fool us every night into thinking we are in reality, which is exactly why natural/spontaneous lucid dreaming on a day-to-day basis is very rare. So if a dream can create extraordinary emotions of love, the feeling that you met your soul-mate, or the feeling that you are flying through the air superman style at 300 km/h, an amazing feeling of transformation/shape-shifting, or the perfect sensation of strong wind blowing on your face... why shouldn't a dream be able to produce a very convincing feeling of separating from your body?

The problem with our discussion is not only that, but the fact that your definition of astral projection is very vague, and doesn't seem to have much (if anything) in common with the regular definition that has been used and discussed in literature for many many years. Well not only in literature, but also on these forums. So unless you can tell me exactly what you think astral projection is, this discussion is pretty much pointless. It would be like talking about sex as something that feels "good", without giving any details about it whatsoever, and without clearly defining it. That being said, I have much more reason to believe in the existence of telepathy, remote viewing, or even telekinesis, than believing that astral projection and OBE are anything other than dreams.

Alright, enough of the kilometer posts. Let's put things simple. Stephen laBerge made an experiment where he PROVES, objectively, with waking life results, that Lucid dreaming exists. He brought something from the dream into the real life. Now. Do you, as ATraveler, claim that you can bring something more into the real life than you can from LD? Memories do not count, as they aren't objective results. You would have to do something like: "I hide the object in my house here in croatia, and you from wherever you are, next morning, tell me where I hid it"(I understand that this is memory too, but it has to do with real life, meaning its not imaginary). Otherwise you have no proof of successful astral travel.

I will try to explain you this in a different way.

It is all only theories but lets think that our body and soul are here in this particular world/reality/dimension (call it as you wish). Our power of intention is very weak in this reality when we are awake, but when we sleep our intention has unlimited powers, our soul can travel from one reality to another. Everything - past, present and future is located in one place where you do not need to travel to find some information, you only need access there. You are having all the information at once.

What is astral projection / OBE / remote viewing ? In mechanics - It is all the same thing, you simply get access to other realities. There is unlimited amount of those realities where everything is possible. The feeling of getting there is what you call astral projection or OBE. Remote viewing is the same, you look into one of those possible realities. The most important thing is that you do not go anywhere, if you let your soul go there you will be at any possible scenario.

Think of it as a huge infinite coordinate plane where every box is a reality, our home reality (reality where we live now) is in the middle, every time you do an action you move to another reality which is very close to our home reality, you cannot leap into further realities because when you are awake you have power to move only to realities which are next to our home reality. By moving i mean you are focusing on a particular reality (scenario). In your dream you can leap in any reality that you wish and observe anything you want there, but remember - everything might be different from our home reality there. The further you leap the more difference you will find. This is the exact reason why you always look different in your mirror when you dream!

When you are in your OBE/Astral/Remote View you are dreaming and your soul can access any of possible realities, it will focus on one and read/see all the information there. Information might be correct or incorrect, depends how far from home reality are you.

Why do we have a feeling that we are leaving our body? I cannot answer you this question for sure. But i have several ideas - we all heard or saw somewhere that our soul can separate from our body, so when we are experiencing something like astral/obe/remove viewing in our dream we find the closest thing that we know, simply to comprehend it somehow, because it is something new and unknown to us. The other idea is that process of doing it might actually look something like what we are feeling.



Sorry if this does not make sense for you.

Empedocles:

I don't have time for this today, but very briefly:

No I am not saying that the body in a dream in which I have a body is an astral body. In fact I think I was pretty clear about that, the dream body and astral body are not the same. I experience both, and the experience is very different, hence the distinction.

I am also not claiming anything about what the astral body is or implies, other than what I said from the beginning that its an aspect of a mental model of where the physical body is believed to be. I'm not treating it as if its anything else besides that, though it might be. That 'mental model' I refer too has a lot of different facets to it, for instance there is a sense of inertia, which is more closely related to what is typically called the dream body. That sense of intertia is a model, you don't have direct information about that, its inferred.

If a bunch of people are trying to derive theorems from a set of definitions that contains a contradiction, then they won't be successful until they change the definition. If you insist on sticking with a definition of 'astral' that doesn't make sense, then almost anything you say about it won't make sense. Whether or not that's the 'standard definition' among a large segment of New Age mystics doesn't change that.

Deluksic:

This is a difficult subject. If you propose naive experiments that reflect a poor understanding of the subject being discussed, those experiments aren't going to yield useful results. If you want to understand what little some people know about astral projection, you have to wade through some long messages and think about them carefully and ask questions. Otherwise you're just ignorant. You could go back and look at the long threads about shared dreaming, its the same thing. People suggest unworkable experiments, without understanding why they're unworkable. Then the people who are patient and listen come to understand what is really being discussed, and the conversation changes. You're not required to care about astral projection, there are a lot of other more worthwhile things in life to be interested in. But if you don't care enough to educate yourself, then you're not going to be able to say much on the subject that's very intelligent either. The experiment you propose is very difficult, and will almost certainly fail, for a variety of reasons that could be discussed at length. I don't have time for that now though, and won't for at least a few more days. Its looking a bit futile though, I've spent a lot of time already, and don't seem to be getting through to you guys that the definitions and assumptions you're working with aren't adequate for the subject you've taken on. Yes most if not all people who presume to write books on astral projection are knaves and idiots, we're in agreement with that. But that's not at all the whole story.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Empedocles:

I don't have time for this today, but very briefly:

No I am not saying that the body in a dream in which I have a body is an astral body. In fact I think I was pretty clear about that, the dream body and astral body are not the same. I experience both, and the experience is very different, hence the distinction.

I am also not implying anything about what the astral body is or implies. I said from the beginning that its an aspect of a mental model of where the physical body is believed to be. I'm not treating it as if its anything else besides that, though it might be. That 'mental model' I refer too has a lot of different facets to it, for instance there is a sense of inertia, which is more closely related to what is typically called the dream body. That sense of intertia is a model, you don't have direct information about that, its inferred.

If a bunch of people are trying to derive theorems from a set of definitions that contains a contradiction, then they won't be successful until they change the definition. If you insist on sticking with a definition of 'astral' that doesn't make sense, then almost anything you say about it won't make sense. Whether or not that's the 'standard definition' among a large segment of New Age mystics doesn't change that.

Deluksic:

This is a difficult subject. If you propose naive experiments that reflect a poor understanding of the subject being discussed, those experiments aren't going to yield useful results. If you want to understand what little some people know about astral projection, you have to wade through some long messages and think about them carefully and ask questions. Otherwise you're just ignorant. You could go back and look at the long threads about shared dreaming, its the same thing. People suggest unworkable experiments, without understanding why they're unworkable. Then the people who are patient and listen come to understand what is really being discussed, and the conversation changes. You're not required to care about astral projection, there are a lot of other more worthwhile things in life to be interested in. But if you don't care enough to educate yourself, then you're not going to be able to say much on the subject that's very intelligent either. The experiment you propose is very difficult, and will almost certainly fail, for a variety of reasons that could be discussed at length. I don't have time for that now though, and won't for at least a few more days. Its looking a bit futile though, I've spent a lot of time already, and don't seem to be getting through to you guys that the definitions and assumptions you're working with aren't adequate for the subject you've taken on. Yes most if not all people who presume to write books on astral projection are knaves and idiots, we're in agreement with that. But that's not at all the whole story.

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This experiment is possible only if both people very well know the place where that item will be buried. Same for dream sharing, you can meet only in a place that both people know very well, if possible at all.

And you are right, long text conversations is the only way to come closer to understanding.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Deluksic:

This is a difficult subject. If you propose naive experiments that reflect a poor understanding of the subject being discussed, those experiments aren't going to yield useful results. If you want to understand what little some people know about astral projection, you have to wade through some long messages and think about them carefully and ask questions. Otherwise you're just ignorant. You could go back and look at the long threads about shared dreaming, its the same thing.

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I'm sorry if I seem ignorant, that was not my goal.

I know it is a difficult subject and yes I have read pretty much every word of your and Empedocle's posts (and most other too). I'm still not sure where we're getting at. I really didn't think of my experiment naive because there was a similar 'already done' experiment in this thread. Well, do you have an experiment that would prove existance of astral projection as a separate experience (not retorical, Im actually asking you)? I honestly would love to believe that there is such thing. If you cannot prove it, then this thread will go on forever. Some people will hold on to their belief and some people will deny it. Its an opinion against an opinion.

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Originally Posted by Deluksic

I'm sorry if I seem ignorant, that was not my goal.

I know it is a difficult subject and yes I have read pretty much every word of your and Empedocle's posts (and most other too). I'm still not sure where we're getting at. I really didn't think of my experiment naive because there was a similar 'already done' experiment in this thread. Well, do you have an experiment that would prove existance of astral projection as a separate experience (not retorical, Im actually asking you)? I honestly would love to believe that there is such thing. If you cannot prove it, then this thread will go on forever. Some people will hold on to their belief and some people will deny it. Its an opinion against an opinion.

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I think we should all start from something small, something that we all can do alone at home.

For example: get a random number generator, do not look at it and click to change number, lets say 3 digit number. Then go to sleep in other room and in your dream or astral projection try to come back to your random number generator and see the number, if you at least once get the same number you can say you have a proof for your self that astral projection does exist.

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

This experiment is possible only if both people very well know the place where that item will be buried. Same for dream sharing, you can meet only in a place that both people know very well, if possible at all.

And you are right, long text conversations is the only way to come closer to understanding.

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Ofcourse rules would have to be set. And you have to know my place.. Lets say simpler.. Somebody sets three boxes next to the door of your bedroom and hides something in one of them. You wake up and say which box, what was it. Fair enough?

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Originally Posted by Deluksic

Ofcourse rules would have to be set. And you have to know my place.. Lets say simpler.. Somebody sets three boxes next to the door of your bedroom and hides something in one of them. You wake up and say which box, what was it. Fair enough?

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I think fair enough, read my suggestion on random number generator.

I am trying to make up some experiment for my self all the time, for now they are very simple. I will move forward step by step.

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

I think we should all start from something small, something that we all can do alone at home.

For example: get a random number generator, do not look at it and click to change number, lets say 3 digit number. Then go to sleep in other room and in your dream or astral projection try to come back to your random number generator and see the number, if you at least once get the same number you can say you have a proof for your self that astral projection does exist.

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I like the experiment, and I suggest that everybody that can do astral projections do the experiment! One thing bothers me tho.. How many digits? :) I suggest 3

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Originally Posted by Deluksic

I like the experiment, and I suggest that everybody that can do astral projections do the experiment! One thing bothers me tho.. How many digits? :) I suggest 3

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I wrote - 3 digit number :)

Omg how did I miss that? What about simpler? Cards. Take one card out of a deck and place it on the table in your bedroom. ..

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

No I am not saying that the body in a dream in which I have a body is an astral body. In fact I think I was pretty clear about that, the dream body and astral body are not the same. I experience both, and the experience is very different, hence the distinction.

I am also not claiming anything about what the astral body is or implies, other than what I said from the beginning that its an aspect of a mental model of where the physical body is believed to be. I'm not treating it as if its anything else besides that, though it might be. That 'mental model' I refer too has a lot of different facets to it, for instance there is a sense of inertia, which is more closely related to what is typically called the dream body. That sense of intertia is a model, you don't have direct information about that, its inferred.

If a bunch of people are trying to derive theorems from a set of definitions that contains a contradiction, then they won't be successful until they change the definition. If you insist on sticking with a definition of 'astral' that doesn't make sense, then almost anything you say about it won't make sense. Whether or not that's the 'standard definition' among a large segment of New Age mystics doesn't change that.

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This is very incoherent. It seems to be the same realm, only a different scenario. Like a movie, you can watch a horror movie or a comedy movie. So there are also different dream genres, dream scenarios, dream feelings. Horror dream (nightmare), comedy dream, sex dream, astral projection dream, etc. etc. but it is still a freakin' dream! So why not simply say that, instead of complicating it and inventing terms such as astral projection?

I think this thread sums up pretty well what I'm trying to say: http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...-dreaming.html

The thread starter lists 30 similarities (!) between LD and AP, yet tries to present AP as something completely different from LD. Here are the similarities:

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1.) Abilities To Fly
2.) Communication through thought bubbles
3.) 3rd Person Vision
4.) Psychokinesis
5.) Telepathy
6.) Awareness of Self
7.) Long lasting memories of experience
8.) Porous walls
9.) Dual Earthly Characters (People)
10.) Heavily thought controlled environment
11.) Speech Feeling secondary
12.) Blurry vision
13) Presence of some of the 5 senses (vision, touch, hearing, taste)
14.) Night and Day
15.) higher self and spirit guide presence
16.) Verbal Commands (clarity now)
17.) Will Power
18.) Sex Themes
19.) Profound Knowledge
20.) Indesructabilty
21.) Sense Of Immortality
22.) Understanding that the reality of experience is more then physical perception
23.) personal longing ( how do i get back?)
24.) frequency alignment and off alignment (example blurred vision or unstable environment and vice versa)
25.) negative and positive entities
26.) boost of physical energy after non physical experience
27.) symbolism
28.) sense of my own duality
29.) First person vison (like shooter games)
30.) thinking about my physical body can wake me up

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I really find this funny, no offense. :D

Please tell me what you think about this list of similarities, and give me a reason why anyone should believe that this experience is anything other than a lucid dream?

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

This experiment is possible only if both people very well know the place where that item will be buried. Same for dream sharing, you can meet only in a place that both people know very well, if possible at all.

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Italics mine. Your statement that both people need to know the place well implies that you have a lot of experience with this or at least understand a lot about how it works. If that's the case, then I think you should try to find a way to back that up. Otherwise you're sabotaging the discussion for other dream sharers by defining the phenomena in a way that's not even real.

For what I call dream sharing, which is not the same as what you're calling dream sharing, apparently, it absolutely does not require both people to be familiar with the same location.

A week or two ago you described a waking precognitive experience. A couple of people suggested that it was essentially a lucid dream, and I said that it was a lot like the state that people astral project from. Later you posted that waking and dreaming precognition are very different. But I missed your post exploring the question of how you can know that your waking experience is essentially different from an 'astral' dream experience.

TiredPhil, you boldly declared you'd astral travel last night. You have something to report then, you weren't just trolling?

My point is that ideas are like money, in that if we flood the market with counterfeit currency, the real money isn't worth anything.

Yes Deluksic, I'm sorry my tone was rude. These discussions obviously take a lot of time, and I'm supposed to be working. I will get back to you, either on my phone at the airport tonight or next week.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Italics mine. Your statement that both people need to know the place well implies that you have a lot of experience with this or at least understand a lot about how it works. If that's the case, then I think you should try to find a way to back that up. Otherwise you're sabotaging the discussion for other dream sharers by defining the phenomena in a way that's not even real.

For what I call dream sharing, which is not the same as what you're calling dream sharing, apparently, it absolutely does not require both people to be familiar with the same location.

A week or two ago you described a waking precognitive experience. A couple of people suggested that it was essentially a lucid dream, and I said that it was a lot like the state that people astral project from. Later you posted that waking and dreaming precognition are very different. But I missed your post exploring the question of how you can know that your waking experience is essentially different from an 'astral' dream experience.

TiredPhil, you boldly declared you'd astral travel last night. You have something to report then, you weren't just trolling?

My point is that ideas are like money, in that if we flood the market with counterfeit currency, the real money isn't worth anything.

Yes Deluksic, I'm sorry my tone was rude. These discussions obviously take a lot of time, and I'm supposed to be working. I will get back to you, either on my phone at the airport tonight or next week.

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I understand what you mean, i will answer your question tomorrow. Now it is time to sleep.

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

This is very incoherent.

Please tell me what you think about this list of similarities, and give me a reason why anyone should believe that this experience is anything other than a lucid dream?

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My description is incoherent in the same way you would find an abstract algebra text incoherent because the word definitions are necessarily different from common usage.

You can believe whatever you want. You have a thesis about astral projection, and I'm telling you that your thesis is based on a misunderstanding of what astral projection is. It would be like a New Ager arguing with physicists about physics, trying to pin them to statements made by science journalists who don't understand physics either. (I've seen that too, and its ridiculous.) If you want an actual paranormal experience that you can objectively verify according to your own standards of evidence, I can help you get one. But I can't do that if you must assume that whenever something I'm saying doesn't seem to make sense, then it must be me who's confused about what I'm talking about. It seems you're really not very interested, you want to keep turning the topic back into the same strawman. You're not going to convince any 'astral travellers' about anything, because its clear to all of them that although you know a lot about a narrow type of lucid dreaming, and are very good at it, you don't understand astral stuff hardly at all. You think your insights about lucid dreaming apply, but to a large degree they don't. I realize that responding with objections to arguments that don't seem to make sense is part of how you make sense of them. But if you want real answers to your rhetorical 'gotcha' questions, I think you have to try harder to understand the answers. Its possible, but it will take some patience. Almost all words have multiple closely related definitions. In order to communicate, you have to be open to recognizing which ones a person is using, not trying to force them into a set that doesn't work for what they're trying to say.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

TiredPhil, you boldly declared you'd astral travel last night. You have something to report then, you weren't just trolling?

.

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I was pretty sure my short statement began "Hypothetical situation"
To ask "What you would consider to be proof ? " is not trolling. It is on topic.
I would honestly like to know, what would change your mind.
But it looks like you are fixed in your beliefs, and will not answer the question.

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

Hypothetical situation
So, tonight I go into the Astral Plane for real.
What piece of information could I bring back that would prove to you the Astral Plane exists.

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Sorry, I took that as two different statements, with hypothetical situation referring to earlier statements and the 'So' being the start of a new thought. Now that I understand that you don't claim to astral travel, what I said totally doesn't apply to you, so I apologize.

I don't see how I'm fixed in my beliefs about the astral plane, or what we would be changing my mind about. It may be unreal as conceived of by believers, or remarkably like what they believe, I can't tell based on my experience. And I really did answer the question. I thought you were saying that you would travel to the astral plane, so I really was suggesting that you 'ask for help' on what kind of information to try to get. That's what I do in other similar situations. Its hard for me to know what kind of question to ask about something that I know so little about.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Sorry, I took that as two different statements, with hypothetical situation referring to earlier statements and the 'So' being the start of a new thought. Now that I understand that you don't claim to astral travel, what I said totally doesn't apply to you, so I apologize.

I don't see how I'm fixed in my beliefs about the astral plane, or what we would be changing my mind about. It may be unreal as conceived of by believers, or remarkably like what they believe, I can't tell based on my experience. And I really did answer the question. I thought you were saying that you would travel to the astral plane, so I really was suggesting that you 'ask for help' on what kind of information to try to get. That's what I do in other similar situations. Its hard for me to know what kind of question to ask about something that I know so little about.

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My grammar can be a little messed up, even at the best of times, so no need to apologise.

Now back to my question, but put in another format.

If I enter a dream state tonight, then come to visit you. I show you a random location on the planet. I give you information you could never guess.
Then the next day I send you this information over the internet.
What does this prove ?

It does not prove the Astral Plane exists
It does not prove I am psychic.
It does not prove you are telepathic

It only proves information can be passed over long distances by the human mind.
If a person wants to put a label on the event, that is their choice.
Calling the visit 'Astral' would be the choice of a person believing in the astral plane.
In fact, a dozen people all from different backgrounds would probably come up with a dozen different names.
When this thread was started, I was not in agreement with many members opinions, but now I have done a 180 degree turn.
Until we can put an agreed label on what the astral plane is, or is not, everyones definition is right.
This has been a great topic to participate in, and I think I am a little wiser for it.
Thanks again,
Phil

QUOTE=TiredPhil;2046030]If I enter a dream state tonight, then come to visit you. I show you a random location on the planet. I give you information you could never guess.
Then the next day I send you this information over the internet.
What does this prove ?

It does not prove the Astral Plane exists
It does not prove I am psychic.
It does not prove you are telepathic

It only proves information can be passed over long distances by the human mind.
If a person wants to put a label on the event, that is their choice.
Calling the visit 'Astral' would be the choice of a person believing in the astral plane.
In fact, a dozen people all from different backgrounds would probably come up with a dozen different names.
When this thread was started, I was not in agreement with many members opinions, but now I have done a 180 degree turn.
Until we can put an agreed label on what the astral plane is, or is not, everyones definition is right.[/QUOTE]

This makes a lot of sense and I kinda agree. Like..for example...if I was to even read the numbers (from a random number generator) during AP, most skeptics would anyways say that its remote viewing and not actually astral travel. the best way is to do it yourself of course, BUT that makes it even harder because if you dont believe it, then you wont go there. I honestly think only somebody who believes can go there (But I stay under correction), and nobody will ever be able to show hard proof because of the fact that there is no definition to properly describe the astral plane, and no way to actually bring proper proof back from the astral plane. I am however a firm believer in the astral plane although I have only started experimenting with it. But to get back to the statement at hand, even though Id like to believe that seeing whats in a box without opening it or guessing random numbers or seeing things in a country youve never been to which actually exists is AP, but it will still always be considered some form of remote viewing / psychic ability, unless we can establish results on a proven field of what the astral plane actually exists of...a different realm? a different dimension? maybe... a different time in the universe? or just plain right here / right now? there are no set rules.

And just to add, The fact that people believe there are demons in the astral plane, kinda makes me feel like they are just dreaming then. but thats just my opinion

I guess we all are here for the answers....and so we shall keep searching right

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

A week or two ago you described a waking precognitive experience. A couple of people suggested that it was essentially a lucid dream, and I said that it was a lot like the state that people astral project from. Later you posted that waking and dreaming precognition are very different. But I missed your post exploring the question of how you can know that your waking experience is essentially different from an 'astral' dream experience.

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My grammar is not very good, maybe that is the reason why you missed my point, sorry for that. First of all i have to say that i know that they are different because i feel they are completely different, that of course does not prove anything for you so i will explain more. If you read my post i already answered OP questions on this post, Astral / OBE / Remote Viewing and etc are technically the same thing for me, they are all happening in Lucid Dream. Some of them might happen in a state between awake and sleep, but that is something i am currently studying and experimenting with, for now i don't want to make any conclusions regarding events in a state between sleep and awake.
The difference between waking precognition and dream precognition is huge, they might lead to the same location which is future, but the actual process is very different. In my case, in the bus i was awake, i had those strange feelings like time going slower, dizziness, huge flow of information into my head and at the same time i was awake! I am sure i was awake, i already stated a list of reasons in that post comments why i could not be sleeping. Waking precognition is 100% accurate, while dream precognition experience in best scenario will be something similar to what will happen in real life and in most of the cases it will be different and will not happen in real life or it will be different that much that you will have difficulties to comprehend it. Plus i did not have any similar feelings in my precognitive dreams. The reason why future events in our dreams are different is very clear for me, i will cover this below in my next answer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

This experiment is possible only if both people very well know the place where that item will be buried. Same for dream sharing, you can meet only in a place that both people know very well, if possible at all.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Italics mine. Your statement that both people need to know the place well implies that you have a lot of experience with this or at least understand a lot about how it works. If that's the case, then I think you should try to find a way to back that up. Otherwise you're sabotaging the discussion for other dream sharers by defining the phenomena in a way that's not even real.

For what I call dream sharing, which is not the same as what you're calling dream sharing, apparently, it absolutely does not require both people to be familiar with the same location.

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What i said was one of the conclusions that i made after experimenting with dream sharing, i can say that i have some good experience in it and for my self i have a model of how it is working and why it is not working as we want it to work.

I was studying in university, one of my friends who lived in the same camp/apartment with me was into lucid dreaming as well. I had a great opportunity to test dream sharing.
Before i start explaining i want you to say this - you need to have at least any basic understanding of how world is working, any theory, anything. If you will think of lucid dreaming phenomenons without any clue of how this could happen it will take you forever to bring answers together into one complete scheme.

The reason why i made the following experiment is that we often had dream sharing experience with my friend, at least we thought we had, at that time. It is all so complicated that i do not know where to start from :)
When we met in our dreams we did random things and then we woke up, and discussed them with each other, we discussed how did we both look like in dream, what clothes we wear. I had to look at my self and see what clothes i had on me and what clothes he had on him. Almost always our opinion was different, in my dream i had one type of clothes and i looked one way and in his dream our clothes were completely different and sometimes we also looked different. The better we knew the place where we met, the less differences we had in our view of each other. The less we knew a place where we meet the more difference in our look and the more difference we had in decorations and scenario of that particular dream. I suggested to do an experiment, where we will meet in a place that me and my friend know very well, there is brick wall, we will stick a yellow note on that wall, or sticker will already be there when we come. On that sticker there will be a 3 digit number we should remember it and when we wake up in the morning we will write down those numbers and tell it to each other. We both met in our dream, i saw him, he saw me, i already saw a sticker there with a number, he saw a sticker too. I even remember how in that dream we spoke with each other and said, alright this will not fail anyhow, we already both saw the same number. When we woke up, we were very excited of what will happen and we exchanged our numbers, numbers were completely different. I already knew a possible answer to this, we did couple of more experiments and it all leaded to one answer.

This will be hard to explain for me, i already did talk about this on a previous page, but in a very short version. Lets say our world is one of infinite amount of realities, we are moving on a line from one reality to another every time we do an action or a choice. Reality where we are located now, where we live, is called "home reality". When we are awake our power of intention is weak and can only move us on a line from one reality to another, step by step without leaping far. When we are sleeping our subconscious mind or our soul, call it as you wish, can move into any reality it wants, because our power of intent if very strong in our dream. When we observe other realities we do no live there, because we are focused our home reality, we simply observe other realities. The closer we are to our home reality to less difference you will find in your dream, the further your soul looks the more difference you will see. The closer you are to your home reality the easier it is to wake up, the further you are the harder it is to wake up. This is the exact reason why your (call it as you wish) obe / astral / dream / remote viewing will most probably be no accurate, because you will be dreaming in another reality where things went different way. In case you will be obe / astral / remote view / dream in closer reality you will see something similar to what our home reality has. If you will obe / astral / dream / remote view in very very close or exactly our home reality you will see things exactly how they are, you will see future exactly how it is or will be for you. I advise to imagine all of this as a infinite coordinate plane, where every box is on reality, imagine it as a 2d coordinate plane because it is very hard to imagine it in many more dimensions. Take a look at one of my posts in my blog, you can find few pictures there - Understanding dreams | flow of my soul
For you other realities do not exist unless you focus on them, they are all possible, however until you materialize your self there - they are not existent for you.
I will definitely spend some time later to write all of this in a bigger post, this is a short version and it might confuse you.

Now knowing this lets come back to our dream sharing experiments, what i wrote above, will answer why in all your dream sharing dreams you both look different for each other, you both get different information. This will also answer why 2 different people have 2 different view of a dream that you supposed to share. Both of us were dreaming in a slightly different reality, the less we knew the place where we meet the more difference we had because it was hard for us to focus on a particular reality. Taking the fact there might be unlimited amount of realities i do not know if it is possible at all to meet in the exact same reality when you are dreaming, but i am sure the closer you are dreaming the less difference you will have. The reason why it is good to experiment on dream sharing in a place that both dreamers know very well is that there is a higher chance that both of you will meet in a closer realities, you will remember all small details of that place as it is in real life. You have to know the person with whom you meet, other wise you wont be able to tell the difference in his behavior and/or his clothes and detailed look.


Knowing this i was thinking a lot about how to dream in our home reality, how to dream closer to what will happen in future in our real world? How can two people meet in exactly the same or a very close reality to do a real dream share. Perhaps the best answer that i can give you after 4 years of experimenting is that our state between awake and sleep is the closest key to this answer.

So generally when people are trying to share a dream, they end up seeing each other only because they wanted to see each other. They will most probably see a different but similar person, if they will take a closer look they will definitely see the difference in a persons behavior / look / clothes.

Of course for each their own, but i think that, dream sharing experiments will fail until we will find a way how to control the location of our dream on a coordinate plane, how to make both people dream in a same or in a very close reality. If you already did some dream sharing experiments, try to rethink of it now and see if you can remember any difference in a person that you saw there. If you only saw that person from an internet photo i will say that there is almost no way for you to understand was he different or no, the only way to prove a dream sharing event, that was created in internet between two people who do not know each other and who do not know the place where they will meet - is to exchange or extract some information from the same dream.

I do not think that it is impossible, this is the reason why i came to this forum, i want to read other dreamers experiments and attempts on various ideas.

Thanks for the long description, flowofmysoul.

I think that if you shared the same physical reality as your friend, you would effectively both be awake, that this is what the physical world is.

I don't think that your different dream realities are actual 'parallel' physical worlds, because its easy to imagine details in them that are not physically possible in any coherent world.

This is the same reason I don't think the 'astral' body is some kind of cloud of potentially real physical bodies. There would be no way to levitate.

I think the reason you can't agree on details in your dream is you are not sharing a physical environment. You're projecting it from imagination. The better you both know it, the easier it is to project the same thing, leaving more attention for coordinating your minds on other details like clothes.

I think the numbers are hard because they're arbitrary, containing not much meaning to your minds. So this kind of test is a very hard way to try to prove the experience. The trouble of course is that content with more meaning is usually already known to both of you.

For this reason, I only try to share dreams with people I haven't met. The dream usually happens the night prior to first contact online, or the night prior to a significant shift in our interest in sharing something. Since I don't know the person, almost all unfamiliar content in the dream is from the other person. Then we can verify the next day. The dream isn't shared in the sense of there being a common dream scene, and we don't have to be asleep at the same time. But there is a meeting of minds. Then I have some sense of who the other person is, so the potential for sharing that is exhausted, and it doesn't happen again.

The 'proof' of the experience is that the metaphors in my dream are drawn partially from the other person's experience, and those can contain unique facts. Those metaphors are also drawn from future as much as from past, so there are accurate premonitions by side effect. All of my precognitive dreams work like this.

I'm still confused about how this works though, because I don't think a unique future exists, and a many worlds thought doesn't quite fit either. Its more like having equal access to past and future mind, but not to physical reality. This is why I signed up, to try to understand this.

As I've said before, I don't think the New Age astral plane idea works, and I suspect its mostly made up, but I remain open to learning otherwise.

As I mentioned earlier, finding a more coherent thought about what it is would be a form of evidence, confirmed by the way such an improved understanding would make objectively paranormal results easier.

In another thread on dreaming, Sageous has discovered that awareness can extend to yet another state of conciousness.
I too have reached this state, but not as frequently as Lucid Dreaming.
The state is Delta Sleep. As of now, I know very little about the subject.
There is one very striking similarity though. To any person reaching this state, it all looks exactly the same.
Perhaps this is the common location that Flowofmysoul is looking for.

Thread title
Exploring Delta Sleep

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

In another thread on dreaming, Sageous has discovered that awareness can extend to yet another state of conciousness.
I too have reached this state, but not as frequently as Lucid Dreaming.
The state is Delta Sleep. As of now, I know very little about the subject.
There is one very striking similarity though. To any person reaching this state, it all looks exactly the same.
Perhaps this is the common location that Flowofmysoul is looking for.

Thread title
Exploring Delta Sleep

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I read that thread before, but i do not think it was Delta sleep, in fact i do not understand how Delta sleep can work at all. So it is something that i am not interested in, for now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Thanks for the long description, flowofmysoul.

I think that if you shared the same physical reality as your friend, you would effectively both be awake, that this is what the physical world is.

I don't think that your different dream realities are actual 'parallel' physical worlds, because its easy to imagine details in them that are not physically possible in any coherent world.

This is the same reason I don't think the 'astral' body is some kind of cloud of potentially real physical bodies. There would be no way to levitate.

I think the reason you can't agree on details in your dream is you are not sharing a physical environment. You're projecting it from imagination. The better you both know it, the easier it is to project the same thing, leaving more attention for coordinating your minds on other details like clothes.

I think the numbers are hard because they're arbitrary, containing not much meaning to your minds. So this kind of test is a very hard way to try to prove the experience. The trouble of course is that content with more meaning is usually already known to both of you.

For this reason, I only try to share dreams with people I haven't met. The dream usually happens the night prior to first contact online, or the night prior to a significant shift in our interest in sharing something. Since I don't know the person, almost all unfamiliar content in the dream is from the other person. Then we can verify the next day. The dream isn't shared in the sense of there being a common dream scene, and we don't have to be asleep at the same time. But there is a meeting of minds. Then I have some sense of who the other person is, so the potential for sharing that is exhausted, and it doesn't happen again.

The 'proof' of the experience is that the metaphors in my dream are drawn partially from the other person's experience, and those can contain unique facts. Those metaphors are also drawn from future as much as from past, so there are accurate premonitions by side effect. All of my precognitive dreams work like this.

I'm still confused about how this works though, because I don't think a unique future exists, and a many worlds thought doesn't quite fit either. Its more like having equal access to past and future mind, but not to physical reality. This is why I signed up, to try to understand this.

As I've said before, I don't think the New Age astral plane idea works, and I suspect its mostly made up, but I remain open to learning otherwise.

As I mentioned earlier, finding a more coherent thought about what it is would be a form of evidence, confirmed by the way such an improved understanding would make objectively paranormal results easier.

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I did not say that we shared a physical environment, the place where we were - did not exist for us physically, it was a mental location. Because from what i say our soul/subconscious mind are traveling, not our physical body.

I understood your point, let's keep each for their own. Unless some of us succeed in any experiment and can come and report some data.

Thanks :)

OK. Sorry I was rude earlier. I attacked several people who didn't deserve it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

I have made no mistake, and neither did Stephen LaBerge in his findings regarding visual information in dreams. Text and numbers are unstable because of the reasons I cited, and not because of expectation.

And no text is the same. There is simple text and complex sentences. You are able to modify simple text using your expectation, ex: transform "Memo" into "Mama", but to keep text or numbers completely stable after looking back 3 times or more, this will not be possible. At least not for the 98% of "normal" people. For superhumans like yourself, it might be a different story.

In any case, please let's not divert this discussion into talk about RCs. Let's keep it on-topic, and the topic is the existence of the astral plane, astral body, and astral beings.

Thanks. :shadewink:

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I replied honestly. Why is this such a hang up for you? You can accept text being the same on the second look back, but you cant accept it being the same on the third? Ridiculous.

The reason i said i dont remember having a body during my OBE is because it was years ago, and just posting about it makes me remember things about the experience that i had forgotten. Like the main message which was not that the thing would always be there (that was like bonus knowledge to comfort me), but that the answer to everything is within us, and we all know on some level. Besides even if i had a body i did not need to use it.

I say dreams, OBEs and waking life are all of the same make because they all happen in the mind. Even if you were to take some heroic dose of psychedelic drugs and have visions of an alien world while under the influence, or Astral project, or take a waking life trip to japan; its all in your mind. And if you believe it is not all in your mind, then where does the experience happen?

Have you heard of anyone who has ever had an Out of Mind Experience? lol. No i haven't either, because out of mind is out of us, we are the mind.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

OK. Sorry I was rude earlier. I attacked several people who didn't deserve it.

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No problem, criticism is something constructive for me, because i do not have a complete model and every new idea is good step forward for me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DarkFlatTop

I replied honestly. Why is this such a hang up for you? You can accept text being the same on the second look back, but you cant accept it being the same on the third? Ridiculous.

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The only thing that's ridiculous is people claiming that text is always completely stable in their dreams. I'm tired of repeating myself on this subject over and over and over again. The other day I actually remembered this discussion in one of my WILDs and I attempted to make the digital clock stable. At first it actually seemed that I stabilized it... but looking just a bit closer I actually saw the numbers morphing before my eyes. It is simply a burden on the sleeper's brain to keep fine details such as text and numbers stable. First there is no external input on which the numbers are based, and secondly the brain parts responsible for this are less active. Stephen LaBerge has done many studies on it. It has nothing to do with expectation, and there is no purpose in discussing this any longer in this thread. It's how it works for 98% of lucid dreamers, and I have a right to have my opinion that the other 2% are either 1.) not paying enough attention to text in dreams, or 2.) are being dishonest about it.

Quote:

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I say dreams, OBEs and waking life are all of the same make because they all happen in the mind. Even if you were to take some heroic dose of psychedelic drugs and have visions of an alien world while under the influence, or Astral project, or take a waking life trip to japan; its all in your mind. And if you believe it is not all in your mind, then where does the experience happen?

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You are generalizing things way too much. Waking life and dreams are definitely not of the same make. Waking life is a shared experience, whereas dreaming happens exclusively in our mind, or better said it is a product of our mind. That is, unless you believe in shared dreaming.

The perception of waking life is in our mind, but the actual environment isn't. Be careful not to lump things together too much.

Found this when trawling the internet.
Take from it, what you will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB6h_bWR3Y

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Originally Posted by TiredPhil

Found this when trawling the internet.
Take from it, what you will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB6h_bWR3Y

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I love those otherworldly pictures.


@OP ok i won't talk anymore about this reading thing, we both have our differing views. I still say dreams, waking life and what ever else there is, is our mind. Unless you can tell me what this *spreads arms ceremoniously* is in its base objective form. From the theories i've heard all the information we receive which makes up our known universe could be stored in holographic form on the face of a black hole. This is something that is still being worked on. So who knows what the environment our minds exist in really is.

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Originally Posted by DarkFlatTop

I still say dreams, waking life and what ever else there is, is our mind.

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No, it isn't. Waking life is an experience that is shared with over 6 billion people. It consists of physical matter, liquids, gasses, energy, and whatnot else.

Dreaming is an experience that happens exclusively in your mind. It is a construct of your mind.

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Unless you can tell me what this *spreads arms ceremoniously* is in its base objective form. From the theories i've heard all the information we receive which makes up our known universe could be stored in holographic form on the face of a black hole. This is something that is still being worked on. So who knows what the environment our minds exist in really is.

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This *spreads arms as well* is our physical universe, consisting of life, planets and solar systems, among many other things.

Our physical universe and dreams are absolutely not of "the same make"... unless of course you can fly, walk through walls, or perform telekinesis in waking life.

So you perceive the waking world through the senses in your limited human body. And you think this is real? We can't even determin if we actually perceive the same colour. Who says you can not fly? Walk through walls? Or perform telekinesis in waking life? Because the guys that are doing OBE and AP are actually doing JUST those things. They claim to fly through the earth, through walls. Telekinesis is another thing. But i've heared some stories. The thing is. They do all this without a human body. Perhaps that is the limiting factor. The world is mind-stuff. The material body is the limiting vessel.

Empedocles, you don't have to force your opinion on other people. Just like you don't want others to force their worldview into yours. You show the other the truth by means of insight. Or you respect the possibility of oppossing worldviews. This litle tip could save you some frustration and perhaps you can learn something in the process.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dthoughts

So you perceive the waking world through the senses in your limited human body. And you think this is real?

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The things in our universe are only perceived by our mind, not created by it like dream environments are.

Quote:

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We can't even determin if we actually perceive the same colour.

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So what? We know that color exists, and we can differentiate between colors. There is the visible spectrum, as well as frequency, wavelength, and energy of light. These are facts, parts of our physical universe. Now tell me about the facts on astral projection and the evidence that it is something different from lucid dreaming.

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Who says you can not fly? Walk through walls? Or perform telekinesis in waking life?

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I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there is no evidence that any living human being is/was able to fly or walk through walls. Telekinesis... maybe... although there is not much evidence to support that either.

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Because the guys that are doing OBE and AP are actually doing JUST those things. They claim to fly through the earth, through walls. Telekinesis is another thing.

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Uh... lucid dreamers have been doing just those things for many many years. I myself have been doing them for over 10 years, I just don't see a reason to call it astral projection.

Why should I?

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But i've heared some stories.

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Good for you! Stories are awesome!

Quote:

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The thing is. They do all this without a human body. Perhaps that is the limiting factor. The world is mind-stuff. The material body is the limiting vessel.

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Nonsense. The world is not "mind-stuff", whatever that is supposed to mean. The world, our physical universe, is made up of matter. It is made up of solids, liquids, gasses, stars, planets, solar systems, birth, life, and death. It is a shared experience by over 6 billion people.

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Empedocles, you don't have to force your opinion on other people. Just like you don't want others to force their worldview into yours. You show the other the truth by means of insight. Or you respect the possibility of oppossing worldviews. This litle tip could save you some frustration and perhaps you can learn something in the process.

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Huh? I'm not forcing any opinion on anyone, nor am I frustrated. I simply want to know why people call some lucid dreams astral projection instead of calling them lucid dreams.

I think most of us agree that Lucid Dream and Astral/OBE is the same thing, but that does not mean there nothing possible to do beyond dreams. You can call it as you wish, there are no terms and no public experiments on this topic, but that does not change the fact that you might witness future in your dream, or experience any other paranormal event.

Another term for Astral Projecting, or Lucid Dreaming has come to my attention.
Michael Reduga, has come up with his own definition of what we are trying to discuss here.
Looks like he has put a lot of work into the study.
Here is his contribution to the dream states that nobody can agree terms on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsE4mdB1-t4

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

The things in our universe are only perceived by our mind, not created by it like dream environments are.

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Orly? How do you know this? That is an assumption as far as i can tell. The term Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore i am) comes to mind. There is no sureproof way of knowing there is a universe without a conscious observer. Think about it. If all of humanity was to disappear completely. Including your own mind. How would you tell there is still an earth to observe?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

So what? We know that color exists, and we can differentiate between colors. There is the visible spectrum, as well as frequency, wavelength, and energy of light. These are facts, parts of our physical universe. Now tell me about the facts on astral projection and the evidence that it is something different from lucid dreaming.

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So what? It means we can not agree on observable reality being the same for everyone. The colour is are frequencies. We interpret it as light. You could also translate the frequency unto sound. And vice versa for sound. This should not be possible, because according to our senses. The light is a strictly visual phenomenon, and sound is an audible phenomenon. Yet, here it is. Purple sounds and high-pitched colours.

Ofcourse science has reasonable explanations. But something like synesthesia has not even been acknowledged for a long time (deemed biologically impossible). Yet, schizophrenics have experienced them for generations. In this regard i'd rather trust other conscious beings to understand differences or similarities between consciousness and materials. Not that i don't trust science to come to the same conclusion.. Is the mind able to influence matter? I would bet my computer and television that the majority of quantum physicists would say yes. The mind is able to influence matter And this is like , what? a 20 year old science? I propose that the mind is indeed inseperable from material reality.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Uh... lucid dreamers have been doing just those things for many many years. I myself have been doing them for over 10 years, I just don't see a reason to call it astral projection.
Why should I?

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To go in on that. I mean that an AP-practitioner is able to move through physical walls. In physical reality. Able to retrieve data from a distance. Like reading a code from the inside of a locked door.

I don't know why you should call it astral projection.. It helps to understand what people are talking about sometimes. But clearly, there is a line between traveling through walls in a lucid dream. Because in this lucid dream one is not able to determin whether your girlfriend is cheating on you. Or if your grandmother is making your favourite food over at her house.

Actually, i think you are able to determin those things in a lucid dream, lol. But you understand the difference between a wall in a lucid dream and a wall in the physical dream. :lol:

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Originally Posted by Empedocles

Huh? I'm not forcing any opinion on anyone, nor am I frustrated. I simply want to know why people call some lucid dreams astral projection instead of calling them lucid dreams.

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I understand you can't read tone on an internet forum so it's hard to determin what's what. If i am wrong about this you can regard this message as non-existant. About not forcing your opinion on anyone, it's always good to make people aware of that fact. Again, you sounded absolute in your statements. But that might have spurred from inspired argumentations that you where forming. Sorry if i have misinterpreted.

A couple of small points:

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Originally Posted by Dthoughts

Orly? How do you know this? That is an assumption as far as i can tell. The term Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore i am) comes to mind. There is no sureproof way of knowing there is a universe without a conscious observer. Think about it. If all of humanity was to disappear completely. Including your own mind. How would you tell there is still an earth to observe?

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So you're saying that the entire universe, all 100 million+ galaxies, would cease to exist if the human race ceased to exist? Doesn't that sound a little arrogant? Do you actually believe that a planet must be observed by a human on order to be real? Do you also believe that when you leave a room, it no longer exists as well? After all, no one is observing it.

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I mean that an AP-practitioner is able to move through physical walls. In physical reality. Able to retrieve data from a distance. Like reading a code from the inside of a locked door.

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Isn't that OBE? Aren't you supposed to be going to other planes of existence when you astrally project?

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Is the mind able to influence matter? I would bet my computer and television that the majority of quantum physicists would say yes. The mind is able to influence matter And this is like, what? a 20 year old science? I propose that the mind is indeed inseperable from material reality.

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You would definitely lose that bet. Actual quantum mechanics physicists do not tend to believe that the mind influences matter. The human component of observing the state of a subatomic particle has nothing to do with the mind influencing matter on a macro scale. I personally think the whole point of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is that the mind is truly separated from material reality, and not the other way around. Oh, and Quantum mechanics has been around for about a century now, not 20 years.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

So you're saying that the entire universe, all 100 million+ galaxies, would cease to exist if the human race ceased to exist? Doesn't that sound a little arrogant? Do you actually believe that a planet must be observed by a human on order to be real? Do you also believe that when you leave a room, it no longer exists as well? After all, no one is observing it.

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+1

And please, Dthoughts, if you aren't a quantum physicist yourself, don't bring them into conversation because I see you have no idea what they are talking about. Even they aren't 100% sure in their theories.

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Originally Posted by Dthoughts

Orly? How do you know this? That is an assumption as far as i can tell. The term Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore i am) comes to mind. There is no sureproof way of knowing there is a universe without a conscious observer. Think about it. If all of humanity was to disappear completely. Including your own mind. How would you tell there is still an earth to observe?

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Answered by Sageous.

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So what? It means we can not agree on observable reality being the same for everyone. The colour is are frequencies. We interpret it as light. You could also translate the frequency unto sound. And vice versa for sound. This should not be possible, because according to our senses. The light is a strictly visual phenomenon, and sound is an audible phenomenon. Yet, here it is. Purple sounds and high-pitched colours.

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Please don't make me laugh. Yellow is yellow, and red is red. We know what makes yellow yellow, and what makes red red. Everyone will recognize yellow as yellow or red as red, unless he/she is color blind. How one person actually perceives this color, it's "visual", is completely irrelevant, and of course, it has absolutely nothing to do with astral projection.

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Ofcourse science has reasonable explanations. But something like synesthesia has not even been acknowledged for a long time (deemed biologically impossible). Yet, schizophrenics have experienced them for generations. In this regard i'd rather trust other conscious beings to understand differences or similarities between consciousness and materials. Not that i don't trust science to come to the same conclusion.. Is the mind able to influence matter? I would bet my computer and television that the majority of quantum physicists would say yes. The mind is able to influence matter And this is like , what? a 20 year old science? I propose that the mind is indeed inseperable from material reality.

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This is complete and utter nonsense. Read what Sageous said, as he put it very nicely.

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To go in on that. I mean that an AP-practitioner is able to move through physical walls. In physical reality. Able to retrieve data from a distance. Like reading a code from the inside of a locked door. I don't know why you should call it astral projection.. It helps to understand what people are talking about sometimes. But clearly, there is a line between traveling through walls in a lucid dream. Because in this lucid dream one is not able to determin whether your girlfriend is cheating on you. Or if your grandmother is making your favourite food over at her house.

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Although Sageous already commented, I feel the need to do the same. I think AP-lovers first need to agree on what astral projection actually is. Go read the earlier pages of this same thread, or better yet, read some other threads in Beyond Dreaming. You will see a variety of "thoughts" that have little to do with each other. By reading these posts and experiences, astral projection seems to be...

a) Projecting an astral body into an astral plane which has nothing, or very little to do with physical reality.

or

b) Projecting an astral body into physical reality. (your claim)

or

c) An experience closely related to (but not the same as) lucid dreaming, which as nothing to do with an astral plane, nor with physical reality.

or

d) Something fourth which doesn't fit in the above three.

So I suggest you guys should first agree on what astral projection actually is, before you attempt to argue about evidence for it's existence.

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Actually, i think you are able to determin those things in a lucid dream, lol. But you understand the difference between a wall in a lucid dream and a wall in the physical dream. :lol:

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Let me tell you what I understand: I understand that there are hundreds if not thousands of experienced AP practitioners, and there is not one single successful controlled study which demonstrates an astral travelers retrieving information from a distance. What do you think about that?

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I understand you can't read tone on an internet forum so it's hard to determin what's what. If i am wrong about this you can regard this message as non-existant. About not forcing your opinion on anyone, it's always good to make people aware of that fact. Again, you sounded absolute in your statements. But that might have spurred from inspired argumentations that you where forming. Sorry if i have misinterpreted.

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The burden of proof is on you, not on me. I am not forcing my opinion on anyone if I ask for evidence about the existence of astral projection.

@Sageous, sorry for the late reply. I wanted to make a short one while you where still online but i got sidetracked a lot and it actually turned out longer than i expected so i put some hours into my post. And did a little more reading into quantum mechanics. I'm working on the damn maths but in school i am still trying to figure out basic algebra. :lol:

My post is excessively long, i know but i hope you enjoy it :P

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Do you also believe that when you leave a room, it no longer exists as well?

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No i do not believe that when i leave the room, it no longer exists because i have no way of knowing whether this is true or not. I think a conscious mind has to be involved in whatever matrix holds together reality. Because somehow, without a conscious mind there is no reality to observe. If there is no reality to observe then what is the point of having matter in the first place? Vague, i know. But i've been having these philosophical stones for a while now and to me they serve as a useful counter-argument to Empedocles' statement that the is world is "certainly" not made of mind-matter.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

So you're saying that the entire universe, all 100 million+ galaxies, would cease to exist if the human race ceased to exist? Doesn't that sound a little arrogant? Do you actually believe that a planet must be observed by a human on order to be real? Do you also believe that when you leave a room, it no longer exists as well? After all, no one is observing it.

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I'm not saying a human has to be involved in perception. I'm just saying a conscious mind has to be involved in whatever way, shape or form possible. It would be a tad arrogant or atleast ignorant to assume humans are the center of all existence. I'm merely trying to say that, I believe mind is inherent in all matter and energy phenomenon. If the mind is anchored to the human senses the mind is sensing nearby energy patterns and translating them into sensual interpretation. Visual,smell,touch,hear,taste. The whole shebang. In reality, i think matter is more like a sea of energy, vibrating in the physical form that we see because we are conscious only of this current arrangement of a universal waveform. (borrowed that term from wikipedia, btw :cheeky:)

I would expect the presence of nearby coherences that are only slightly different from this particulair universe. In the future perhaps one where we destroyed the earth and the rain forest and no trace of humanity is left to be found. Another one with a future in which we have moved to save the earth and re-established a working ecosystem in which humanity thrives on the earth-life system. Perhaps you can find another one in which we choose to depart for space. Only to find we are not able to survive the harsh distance and die out anyway. I don't believe in space travel because i think we already have the means and ability to explore other planets and solar systems. Using only the tubes and pathways in our mind. I'm all for traveling to mars though, and see what is there. Building an ecosystem on another planet is a noble thing imo.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

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Originally Posted by Dthoughts

I mean that an AP-practitioner is able to move through physical walls. In physical reality. Able to retrieve data from a distance. Like reading a code from the inside of a locked door.

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Isn't that OBE? Aren't you supposed to be going to other planes of existence when you astrally project?

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Well yes and no. Terminology is the communication-killer here. People refer OBEs as means of traveling out of body into this physical reality. The terminology suggests a consciousness is able to travel outside of the human body. I mean to suggest with that quote that an OBE can lead you to this particulair coherence pattern. But i think it can also take you to parallel worlds. Some worlds that look just like this one, and some that are completely alien to us. This doesn't mean they are not a part of this same reality however. Take Robert Monroe as an example. I can interpret much of his experiences as time-travel , his layer of reality just has an extra dimension to it. It reveals ghosts and discarnate entities as flying through our physical space that are not actually seen by the majority of human inhabitants in this world, but whose presence is easily observed from the Out of Body state.

Astral Projection uses the same mechanic but it has a more alien vibe to it. I see it as the same thing, this is why i don't discern in terminology. I use ESP as a home-term because it is a much broader term and doesn't discriminate between different kinds of Extra Sensory Perception. It just piles all these things up into the same category and matches perfectly what i experience.

Just to clarify,
I think the term OBE stems from the belief that consciousness is somehow anchored to the human body. Which i think is a primitive belief and could rather be adjusted to a belief system where consciousness is prevalent in all of space-time and we are merely traveling through this consciousness. It still fits accurately, because the Experience is on the Outside of the human Body.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

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Originally Posted by Dthoughts

Is the mind able to influence matter? I would bet my computer and television that the majority of quantum physicists would say yes. The mind is able to influence matter And this is like, what? a 20 year old science? I propose that the mind is indeed inseperable from material reality.

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You would definitely lose that bet. Actual quantum mechanics physicists do not tend to believe that the mind influences matter. The human component of observing the state of a subatomic particle has nothing to do with the mind influencing matter on a macro scale. I personally think the whole point of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is that the mind is truly separated from material reality, and not the other way around. Oh, and Quantum mechanics has been around for about a century now, not 20 years.

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We are referring to the same study, i think. I am glad i have not made an actual bet. But it was just a bet ofcourse. I still think opinions are divised atleast 50/50 between actual quantum physicists. But it doesn't matter. Such is the beauty of science. One can extrapolate from it his/her own meaning and interpretation. The how is a question answered by science's trial and error. The why is still an open interpretation as far as i know.

But i am still puzzled as to this particulair piece of wikipedia, perhaps you can give me your interpretation because i am interested in your viewpoint :

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Originally Posted by Wikipedia

In the Copenhagen interpretation, quantum mechanics can only be used to predict the probabilities for different outcomes of pre-specified observations. What constitutes an "observer" or an "observation" is not directly specified by the theory, and the behavior of a system after observation is completely different than the usual behavior. During observation, the wavefunction describing the system collapses to one of several options. If there is no observation, this collapse does not occur, and none of the options ever become less likely.

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It mentions the wavefunction collapsing during observation. I can recall from reading into this a few years ago it is an act of measuring that makes different outcomes more likely or something. But how is this not evidence for consciousness affecting matter and energy. (Because it is affecting both systems. Ofcourse e=mc² , i think this states that both are inseperable anyway.)

NDE's are closely related to OBE's and reported by millions of people worldwide. In a lot of cases people are *clinically documented* as brain dead. Yet they manage to experience something independent of their physical bodies. Can u discount the experiences of such a large population in the same way you discount someone who says they have experienced an OBE? And these patients that have experienced NDE's under medical conditions do u say their liars or mislead in the same way u address an astral traveler??

Wiki Definition

A near-death experience (NDE) refers to personal experiences associated with impending death, encompassing multiple possible sensations including detachment from the body, feelings of levitation, total serenity, security, warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, and the presence of a light. These phenomena are usually reported after an individual has been pronounced clinically dead.

I did enjoy, Dthoughts, thanks!

One more quick response:

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Originally Posted by Dthoughts

But i am still puzzled as to this particulair piece of wikipedia, perhaps you can give me your interpretation because i am interested in your viewpoint :

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Originally Posted by Wikipedia
In the Copenhagen interpretation, quantum mechanics can only be used to predict the probabilities for different outcomes of pre-specified observations. What constitutes an "observer" or an "observation" is not directly specified by the theory, and the behavior of a system after observation is completely different than the usual behavior. During observation, the wavefunction describing the system collapses to one of several options. If there is no observation, this collapse does not occur, and none of the options ever become less likely.

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It mentions the wavefunction collapsing during observation. I can recall from reading into this a few years ago it is an act of measuring that makes different outcomes more likely or something. But how is this not evidence for consciousness affecting matter and energy. (Because it is affecting both systems. Ofcourse e=mc² , i think this states that both are inseperable anyway.)

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As you yourself noted, this phenomenon is about observation, not manipulation. It's about how the methods scientists use to observe subatomic particles define their observations, not the nature of the particle. For example, the only way they can define an electron's position in space is by stopping its passage through space, but by doing so they are unable to observe its motion (the wave bit). Conversely, if observing a electron's motion, they can never say exactly where it is (the particle bit). In other words, the particle's state of existence is either as a wave or particle, depending how we look at it. We might be defining the state through our method of observation, but we are in no way creating, manipulating, or changing that state the particle's existent reality; the particle retains its nature regardless of our presence. The wavefunction collapsed because we had to collapse it to observe the electron by stopping it in its tracks (i.e., it's traveling merrily along in the particle accelerator in a wave, but then, bam, it collides with a sensor plate and becomes a particle). And yes, if we were not there to make these observations, the electron would still exist, as it did for billions of years before we were around to do any observing. A very bad macro example of this: you can freeze water, boil it, or liquify it, and, though each state is very different from the other, it is still water.

I hope I got that right; this is all off the top of my head; I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong! But even if I am, you must remember that all that famously mysterious language about quantum mechanics (quantum entanglement being another popular phenomenon in this department) is based on observation of subatomic particles. There is no evidence, or even real scientific consideration, that any of this stuff happens to anything much bigger than a quark; much as it would be cool if it did, this stuff simply does not translate to the macro world.

I am a physicist by the way, though not a very good one, and have only an MS degree. Having skimmed through the comments since this weekend, here are my two cents....Or three or four cents, as the case might be, if we're being graded for word count.

Sageous is right that there is an objective reality, we're not just projecting it in the manner that we project our dreams. We've argued about this at great length in other threads, and I hope I'm not being biased to say that the pro-objective-reality side has won the arguments. Similarly, its true that astral projection is basically a lucid dream, and that the perception of the physical world in such a dream is mostly imagined, its not real.

However....This isn't the whole picture, and that's a big part of the reason these arguments keep coming up. As physics-ignorant and maybe even logically impaired as the "life is but a dream" proponents may be, there is an element of truth in that perspective. We as human beings may not be projecting the physical world, but it does have some of those characteristics, and however it is that it does get projected, we don't seem to be entirely separate from that process even though its mostly beyond us.

Regarding quantum mechanics: There are macroscopic effects. The Schrodinger cat thought experiment was cooked up to illustrate this. More recently Schrodinger's cat has been re-branded as a metaphor for something that only happens to subatomic particles, in my opinion because that dodges a lot of confusing questions at the edge of current physics theory. But there was a reason Schrodinger described the problem the way he did, and it does seem to me to be valid as described for cats. The fact that the cat is not a coherent wave-function doesn't change this. From a standpoint inside the box, the wave-function is collapsed and the cat is alive or dead. But from a standpoint outside the box, the whole system is in an indeterminate state that doesn't get resolved until the system comes into contact with the external system. So to some extent, things that we are not personally in contact with really don't exist, at least not as far as physics theory is concerned. They exist as a restricted superposition of possibilities, so its not valid to say that they don't exist at all without us. And they concretely exist for themselves, and for other observers unconnected to us. But in some sense they exist in multiple ways which aren't necessarily consistent with the way in which they would exist for us if we made the observation. It is generally believed that these inconsistencies always get completely resolved in when the systems interact, and I think its indisputable that they do in general, and least from our perspective. But there isn't actually anything in the math that I know that says it has to be that way in an absolute sense. And from my personal experience I'm pretty sure that its not true. So the mystics are right in that regard, even though they're generally terrible at relating that view with the current scientific understanding.

In much the same way that I'm presumptuous enough to criticize mental yoga even though I'm not a swami, I'm pretty sure that a lot of working physicists don't understand these issues. It doesn't come up in relation to the research they do, and they just blow off anything that they can't grapple with effectively. This is actually a characteristic of a successful physicist, they are the ones who can consistently make high probability research choices and continue to get funding. But its bad for the philosophical development at the edge of the field, which in my view has been stagnating for decades.

Some physicists are materialists in the western atheist tradition, others are Buddhist, and many believe in paranormal phenomena. I haven't encountered anybody who seems to understand any of these issues. Certainly I don't. But I've explored it enough to think that I understand it a little bit better than the science journalism 'consensus' philosophical understanding. Even though I'm equally sure that a typical physicist understands quantum mechanics 1000 times better than the typical mystic who speaks in terms of quantum mechanics. Maybe the best we can do as 'beyond dreamers' is to say: We have no friggin' idea how phenomena X is possible, but here's what we experienced, here's some suggestive evidence, and here's what we did to eliminate the obvious fallacies in interpretation. Furthermore here are some limitations of the scientific method that makes certain knowledge on these subjects problematic, which we do understand. And though its very hard to prove such results for a general, public audience, here are some steps you can take, without giving up your objective honestly, if you have the time and inclination and want to discover something about it for yourself.

In most areas of science, there are large-scale dynamics that can be described in fairly straightforward way. But then there are also really small dynamics that have big effects, and which render certain kinds of problems very difficult. For example, the general way a wing works is trivial to explain even to a child, and for many things that understanding is adequate. However, the wing is 'big' compared to the thin layer of air right at the surface where physically important things happen on a really small scale. The math to deal with this kind of thing is really a bitch. Or to use a more colorful example, relativistic effects can generally be neglected when modelling atoms. But gold would not appear gold except for relativistic effects, so these do have to be taken into consideration when asking that question. My point here is that scientific theory is like this in almost all areas. Its really good for understanding the world we life in, insofar as we understand it. But there are areas, not always obvious in the linear, easily controllable realms where we're most comfortable, where theory breaks down almost completely. That's the way modelling is. A set of equations that describe an atom is not isomorphic to an atom. For some things the equations fail.

Sometimes people fall so much in love with the equations that they forget that there's more to reality. This is similarly true with sensory perceptions, which as I've mentioned earlier are a type of model, even though to a significant extent its a model that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years and is mostly involuntary. We're so used to it that we forget its there, but its not reality. An awful lot that isn't currently a part of our sensory model of the world is nevertheless real. And the model isn't actually wholly ingrained or beyond improvement. If you study it and improve your understanding of it, you can have new experiences.

^^ Excellent post, and I'm in as general agreement as I ever am, but I must mention one very minor thing that goes to the point I was making earlier.

Though I am among those who assume (and has read repeatedly) that Schrodinger's Cat was indeed a metaphor for the problem of examining very small things, that actually is not important in this case.

The thought experiment was meant to show that we could not know the state of the cat, so it was both alive and dead, but the cat was always in the box. Just like those electrons, the cat's descriptive state could not be known until it was observed, but the cat was still there, in the box, real.

Objects in reality exist, whether we're watching them or not, and whether we want them to or not. They may not yet be defined, understood, or incorporated into our worldview, but they still exist without our input. To say they would not exist at all if humans are not here to observe them simply makes no sense, and may thoroughly exaggerate humanity's participation in reality.

I'm pretty sure you agree with much of this, but I just wanted to clarify my original point.

Sageous,

I think I have to disagree with your point here. The problem is not merely one of knowledge, the state of the system isn't actually defined except to the extent that its "made real" by an observation. This is why Young's double slit experiment works the way it does, for instance. If it were merely a matter of not knowing which slit the electron goes through, there would be no interference pattern. A ghostly, half-real electron goes through one slit, and another, ghostly, half-real electron goes through the other slit, and they interfere with each other. When people speak of wave-particle duality, another way to say this is that the distribution of the not-quite-real particles is wavelike. This isn't to say that the electron isn't real at all while it is unobserved: there are still limitations on the different states it can be in. But those limitations mostly have to do with past and future interactions with other objects. Feynmann's sum of histories formulation is even more obviously weird this way, the particle has taken every possible path, not even limited by the speed of light. But its out of phase with itself and cancels itself out almost everywhere. Where the infinite possibilities don't quite uniformly add to zero is where it is likely to be observed. The speed of light is a statistical result, its not even an absolute limitation on where the particle can be except in a probabilistic sense.

I think we agree that humanity's role in all this tends to be exaggerated, that we're just one small part of our environment. But that small part isn't nothing, and no, stuff really isn't as real when its isolated from other things. Just as mystics tend to interpret physics terminology to support whatever religious ideas they want to believe in, there's also a strong tendency among science journalists and a lot of physicists to make the world as concretely defined as possible. I think its a part of their desire to understand, to master everything. But as I understand it, the reality of physics really is a bit ambiguous, or spirit-like if you will.

Maybe I should do a better job at highlighting the point that we're agreeing about: As far as physics theory is concerned, its not the consciousness of an observing scientist that defines the state of the observed system. The system interacting with any other system defines it for that system, whether there's a scientist present or not.

Whether any of this would exist without consciousness is a question that's well outside the scope of present day physics.

In other words, for the most part you and I are not projecting the physical world like we would a dream, it is not our dream. Yet it does seem to me that there is some kind of a dreamer, even if we're only a small part of it and mostly don't understand it. Otherwise it doesn't seem to be possible to account for some of our more bizarre experiences.

^^ Agreed on both posts, Shadowofwind, especially the last paragraph of your second. But...

Note that your disagreement is supported by (excellent) examples of particle/wave behavior. Yes, the double-slit experiment is remarkable, and even to someone of my limited knowledge curious indeed, but you've sort of amplified my point by bringing it up:

There are no cats going through the slits. If they were, I imagine that they would behave much differently, and far more predictably. This is because they are cats, and not subatomic particles. All I was trying to say, if I can remember properly at this point, is that what works and mystifies on a subatomic level does not seem to translate to the physical world we encounter with our given senses, and we are not creating cats simply by being there with them, and to assume that we do is, in my opinion, erroneuos at best.

Yes, there is much we do not know yet, and I personally believe we have barely scratched the surface of our (human) interaction with reality ... but that's because as a race we are very new to this sentient consciousness thing, and have much to learn about our reality -- learn, not create!

That's all I'll say on this, because I think you know what I mean and, honestly, the rest of what you've said has lent far more clarity to the conversation than I or any cat could have anyway.

Sageous,

I'm going to say at least one more thing because I think you misconstrued the implications of my double slit experiment example, or I explained its relevance badly.

As far as physics theory is concerned, as I understand it, macroscopic, "real life" objects are in a superposition of inconsistent states also, even though they can't be diffracted to produce interference patterns because they can't be described by a single coherent wavefunction. The different tangles of contradictory states are already 'collapsed' in relation to themselves, so when you make an observation you just get one tightly knotted tangle and not the rest of them, so its not easy to show that the rest of them are relevant. But not easy to demonstrate in a scientific setting isn't the same as effectively unreal or unimportant. I think my teleporting driver's license experience illustrates this kind of result, at least for myself if for nobody else. And I still have my 'parallel-world' bottle of turtle food on my desk. Assuming these events were objectively real as I've described them, did I observe them or create them with my mind? I don't think the answer to this is clear cut, and it depends in part on what we mean by "I". But there is definitely a creative element to it.

If we're fighting a Law Of Attraction battle here in subtext, I guess you know that I'm on your side on that one. Though we do create our reality to some extent, there are definite limitations on how we can do that, many of them still to be discovered. We can't just make up any contradictory thing and it becomes true because we believe it. But on the other hand, we do have a lot more power to create our reality than most people realize, or that we understand how to make use of consistently.

In contrast to my dream premonitions and pseudo-shared dreaming experiences, I intentionally avoided repeating the alternative history phenomena because I had poor control over it and feared it would be too disruptive to my life. For instance, I want to be able to trust that when I look at my keys, and they're in my hand, I can then lock the car door without them turning up inside the car afterwards. And I want my computer to be able to find different parts of the operating system where it expects them to be on the hard drive. So I tried hard to shut down this sort of thing rather than pursuing it and getting better at it. (Though I admit I fudge this occasionally, when I think I have put something in the wrong place and don't want to accept that outcome.) I guess a lot of other people have this kind of fear too, and I think this is part of the reason these experiences aren't more common.

In summary: Yes to a large extent we do create reality, and I don't think we can honestly shrink away from that, even though we take issue with the people who think we can make it up any way we want to. I realize my qualifications to what I'm saying are mostly the same points you were trying to make, but there's a large enough element that's different that I didn't want to gloss it over.

As a possibly interesting corollary to this....Some of these experiences seem to suggest to me that the mind is at least partially 'outside' of the system that is defined by current physics assumptions, since the mind seems to be able to produce occasional objectively demonstrable 'miracles' that don't happen much otherwise, apparently. The conventional scientific approach of course assumes that reality is absolutely immune to such interference, and experiments are designed accordingly. So it should be expected that such experiments are inadequate for studying such phenomena.

Anecdotally, it also seems to me that a moral component of the mind is outside the 'conventional' physical system. In other words, I speculate that if you could completely understand a person's genes and the physiological effects of their past experience, it would largely account for their moral character, but not entirely. Since the 'physical system' lacks knowledge of that other component, the multiverse of alternative outcomes includes some that would never actually be permitted to exist by the mind. But those outcomes still influence intuition and precognition, since they are physically possible. Maybe I'm too lazy to give specific examples. But there's the idea to play with anyway.

^^ Well said, Shadowofwind, and I find myself reluctantly agreeing on the point of the poor cat's existence; thank you!

... Now that I think of it, I probably agreed all along (indeed this is some of the stuff I tend to write about in real life); I just needed my stubborn head rattled around a bit to be reminded!

My OBEs (I can relate to some aspects of AP, but can't nail it all down to AP specifically, so I'm sticking with OBE) are different from all other sleep activity because in OBEs, I get factual information about current or future events in waking life that I had no other way to obtain. For the last few years, it has happened with only two people - the same two people every time, always, no matter what. And then there's that pesky "feeling" lol, but the feeling matters. I understand that it's not enough for you, but it's a part of the equation. Not the whole equation(!), but part of it, and it is valid.

I don't recall ever noticing a clock, but if there was one, I would not choose to direct my attention toward it. The clock is not of interest because what I get out of these experiences gives me more validation than I believe a clock ever could. I don't say that to be rude or dismissive, but to address your clock question so not to appear to be avoiding it.

Can I ask why you need to validate others' experiences? You're ultimately saying that you once believed you were experiencing something that you later came to believe you were not experiencing at all. No problem. Why do you need other people to prove their experiences to you? You don't seem to want an explanation, you want proof. Nobody has scientific proof of this stuff. None of this it can be recorded or documented in a way that would please any majority group and apparently, it can't even be recorded or documented in a way that would please some individuals. I want nothing more than a whole set of answers myself, but who's to say? Nobody here can prove to you that an OBE is a different experience than a lucid dream, but you can't prove that they're the same either. I hope you can make peace with that. You kind of have to.

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Originally Posted by Elle

You don't seem to want an explanation, you want proof.

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He did not want proof either. He wanted AP and OBE to be lucid dreams without anything mysterious going on, and to challenge people's claims to the contrary.

I don know what people are talking about here. But the closest thing to proof I can think of is In a dream, if you stare at one spot for 6-12 seconds the dream ends. In APs, this isn't the case

^^ That may not be the case all the time.

I for one have stared at the same spot during a dream for far longer than 12 seconds and never had the dream end on me -- and I'm pretty sure I wasn't projecting. That's anecdotal, I know, but I thought it worth mentioning. [EDIT: on further thought, this may indeed not be so anecdotal, as I'm pretty sure that one of the things practitioners of dream yoga do is focus on an object in a dream for a lengthy amount of time, and they too do not wake up]

Aside from that, I hadn't even realized the conversation here was about proof at all; was it?

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Originally Posted by Elle

I don't recall ever noticing a clock, but if there was one, I would not choose to direct my attention toward it. The clock is not of interest because what I get out of these experiences gives me more validation than I believe a clock ever could.

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That's fine, but why not take 10 seconds and do the experiment? You have no interest in seeing if AP/OBE-clocks are stable?

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Can I ask why you need to validate others' experiences? You're ultimately saying that you once believed you were experiencing something that you later came to believe you were not experiencing at all. No problem. Why do you need other people to prove their experiences to you? You don't seem to want an explanation, you want proof. Nobody has scientific proof of this stuff. None of this it can be recorded or documented in a way that would please any majority group and apparently, it can't even be recorded or documented in a way that would please some individuals. I want nothing more than a whole set of answers myself, but who's to say? Nobody here can prove to you that an OBE is a different experience than a lucid dream, but you can't prove that they're the same either. I hope you can make peace with that. You kind of have to.

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1.) There is evidence of lucid dreaming. There are techniques that can make almost every person learn it if they are persistent enough and do it the right way. Aside from that, Stephen LaBerge managed to get people in a lab to signal specific eye-movements from REM sleep once they became lucid.

2.) There is no evidence to prove what you are saying. I don't know of any controlled study that shows people getting remote information (location of a hidden object, etc.) through AP/OBE.

3.) Regarding the bold and underlined part: You couldn't be further from the truth. The burden is not on me to disprove anything, but it is on you who is making these claims.

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

He did not want proof either. He wanted AP and OBE to be lucid dreams without anything mysterious going on, and to challenge people's claims to the contrary.

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Uh... your statement is flawed. I don't want AP/OBE to be lucid dreams, because as far as I know, they are lucid dreams, as there is no evidence to the contrary. The burden of proof is on you, not on me.

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Originally Posted by Tasca

I don know what people are talking about here. But the closest thing to proof I can think of is In a dream, if you stare at one spot for 6-12 seconds the dream ends. In APs, this isn't the case

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If you don't know what people are talking about here, then I can't help you. I think my post is very clear, the questions are very logical, and tons of people understood it.

Regarding your "staring at one spot" thing... I think it's ridiculous. Tons of lucid dreamers have done it including myself, and there is nothing that would cause someone to wake up because they're staring at a spot. If anything, it might prolong the dream state because you are directing your focus on the dream scene and away from your physical body.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Aside from that, I hadn't even realized the conversation here was about proof at all; was it?

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No, it's about honest questions and honest answers. If someone tells fantastic tales about astral projection I want to know why they think they are astral projecting and not simply lucid dreaming.

That's all. :)

I am amused that so many would choose to entertain the OP when he clearly wants only to argue rather than learn.

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Originally Posted by Chimpertainment

I am amused that so many would choose to entertain the OP when he clearly wants only to argue rather than learn.

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What I find even more amusing is the fact that Sageous "liked" your post.

Sageous... who believes in astral projection just as much as I do. :D

In fact, I'm pretty sure that I am more open-minded than he is when it comes to AP.

^^ Actually, Empedocles, I never said I believed or didn't believe in AP at all -- to me that is irrelevant to this conversation. What I "liked" was that Chimpertainment voiced an impression that I was getting as well -- that you seemed more interested in arguing and refuting than in gaining input from the folks contributing here.

Sorry if that makes me seem like I'm not open-minded. I understand that you can run your thread any way you'd like, but I felt Chimpertainment deserved some acknowledgment.

Also, for what it's worth, sometimes I might add a "like" just to indicate that I read a post; please try not to draw too many conclusions from such a small act.

I had a similar online exchange a week ago with a guy who asserted that dream content is just noise, and that there is no value in dream recall for anyone (Slashdot). He challenged others to prove otherwise, while proposing a method of proof that was almost comically ill suited to the question at hand, in my view. I agree with him that dream recall usually isn't of much value for most people, just as I agree that astral travel is a lucid dream and not what a lot of people imagine it to be. I see this the same way as Sageous, with minor differences in emphasis. The burden of proof is not on your opponent when you've been twisting their arguments and ignoring the evidence offered. Sivason and others made valid analogies about color earlier. Color is not directly related to light spectra. When you ridicule their point without understanding it or why it is being made, then the burden of proof isn't on them anymore because the ignorance is on your end. Likewise, your calls for proof became overtly false after you indicated that you regarded paranormal results as evidence, then ignored my offer to help you experience such results for yourself. If you don't want to explore that world, that's perfectly reasonable. But then it makes no sense to continue challenging others to 'prove' things to you.