Other than a few coincidences and an overall pervading feeling of the nature of reality during the time that an OBE is experienced, how can you tell, during that experience, that you are not simply dreaming? It has often been my experience that what you experience can be profoundly convincing, but in reality be an illusion. In the past I went overboard and experimented with all kinds of hallucinogenic drugs. Dissociatives, psychedelics, deliriants, and even all different combinations of those groups. I came to realize just how much you can be fooled into becoming deluded. If I had simply tried one group of the drugs, I would find myself believing what I see enthusiasts of those specific drug types believe about reality, but when comparing the experiences of the combinations and individual experiences of these drugs, it became very easy to view things more objectively. I found myself believing similar things about the nature of reality when I was going through various phases of trying more of certain types of these drugs.

To name a few of what I have tried in the past, here is a list: DXM, 3-MeO-PCP, 4-MeO-PCP, MXE, MDMA, 5-APB, Psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, Escaline, Dipropyltryptamine (DPT), Diphenhydramine, Chlorpheniramine, and Doxylamine.

As I said, comparing all the (many many) individual experiences at all ranges of doses (from microdoses to megadoses) and combinations, I was able to see where the realizations I had profoundly come to understand, the "enlightenment" I thought I was receiving, etc. was mostly if not all completely in my head and reflecting various amounts of psychosis mixed with very delusional beliefs and even delirious mindstates. I knew better to trust what was happening or what I was feeling (such as being God, being everybody, being the entity fabricating reality, life going in endless cycles, being connected with God and even communicating through feelings concepts and thoughts, and contact with various entities) or experiencing because these altered/distorted perceptions of reality were the result of normal functioning of the brain being altered to the point that interpreting what we know as objective reality begins to completely crumble as various electrical signaling is either stopping nearly completely, running out of control, and changing the nature of how we interpret reality, but not reality itself.

As a result, I began to understand through experience how the brain appeared to function in many ways. The way we see and predict movement, how we view the shading and lighting of objects, and even the proportion, depth, and size of the objects we are viewing. Dissociatives are known to cause what are known as Lilliputian Hallucinations. Having experienced these (many times now) has been one of the most revealing things about how the brain works. Each object I saw was simultaneously changing it's height, width, and length all the time. If I were to look at my hand, I would have a stick thin arm with a huge beefy fat palm, and then my arm would be massive and really wide, and my palm would be absolutely tiny and my fingers like long alien fingers. They would constantly be changing. Any object I was looking at, including roads, people, TVs, computer monitors, phones, literally anything would be doing this independent of each other. Distances of miles looked like inches away, and a few inches could span the length of three American football fields. A room could look like a massive dome structure or an infinitesimally cramped space. Navigating through the world was highly disorienting. Objects could even look tiny but be understood as being massive, and vice versa. To think that under the right conditions, you can't even begin to tell the size of an object, how far away things are, what things even look like in some cases, based on a change in neurotransmission was mind boggling.

So, given the mind can be so convincing with these delusions (even false memories, ever had those in a dream before? I've experienced them in dreams and on deliriants) and hallucinations, how can one be reasonably certain that what they are experiencing during an OBE--without the aid of outside sources at your disposal, with nothing other than what your brain is telling you is going on--that you are not simply dreaming or hallucinating instead? How can you be certain of it after the experience, either, without rigorous and controlled conditions designed to prove the experience's validity?