My attempt at OBE

So I've had a few lucid dreams in the past and don't get me wrong, lucid dreaming is very interesting and very fun, but I already know what it feels like to have a lucid dream. I want to try a new experience now like having an out of body experience. (this doesn't mean I'm done with lucid dreams btw I still plan on having more of them in the future :D)

I did some research about out of body experiences and I read that you're supposed to lie perfectly still on your back and imagine yourself climbing a rope out of your body. Well last night I tried doing it. I got in my bed and lied on my back. I kept my hands to my sides and didn't cross my legs. Then I tried imagining myself grabbing a rope and climbing out of my body. Although, I have poor visualization skills. It was hard for me to visualize a rope over my head and my hands grabbing it. for the most part I just saw nothing darkness. After trying to imagine my a rope over my head and me climbing it, I tried just imagining myself thrusting out of my body and that was actually a bit easier. I actually started to see and feel myself leaving my body. However, after I imagined myself thrusting out of my body over and over again, I fell asleep and had a dream that I was on youtube watching a vid of my astral body leave my physical body. So it was admittedly a failed attempt :chuckle:

Thanks for reading this :) and if I could get some tips on visualization that'd be a big help. Tell me what you think! let me know if I did anything wrong. Again thanks for reading

hey there some call it OBE (more esoteric approach) and some call it a WILD. there is no (big?) difference.
like with wild do you attempt after 4-6h of sleep.
when you imagine climbing up a rope go more for the feeling that for the visual aspect. its more about the tactile sense, sure try to imagine ("see") how you do it but mostly try to feel it.
you also can imagine climbing up/down stairs. climbing up/down a ladder or do any imaginary movement with your body. you can lift and lower your legs or your arms or you can imagine to spin in your bed or start to levitate out of your bed or roll out.

try around what suits you best and what feels most natural to imagine. and remember its about the tactile sense.

read up chapter two here: https://www.dmt-nexus.me/doc/Astral%20Dynamics.pdf
that should shine some light on your questions ;)

I certainly agree with Relax above me. The methods in the book 'astral dynamics', which he has posted, are some of the best I have found. Whether or not one agrees with the 'out of body hypothesis', the methods work. The primarily tactile methods described have been a break through for me.

Perhaps spend a few minutes a day practising both your tactile and visual imagination. These things are skills in themselves and can be developed, the better you get at these practices the stronger the effect they have on your mind/brain, the quicker they induce the desired altered state, the better they will work when actively trying to induce a WILD or AP.

You could when sitting somewhere, maybe watching TV or something, spend a few minutes practising both tactile and visual imagination. For example imagine holding something small like a tennis ball in your hands, vividly imagine your mental hands feeling it, moving it around, and so on. Then visually imagine it a few feet in front of you, spin it around, see its detail. This is just one simple way to work out your brain, I am sure you could think of some that fit your character, they can be as simple or complex as you like. There are many suggestions like this in the book as well.

Another way to induce an Obe easy is to grab an object within the dreamscape chant the mantra OM and then wish to awaken. You will teleport back to your room vibrating with the object still in your hand. From there you can explore your room and beyond in a quote on quote obe state. Works 4 me Gd luck!

Depending on what you consider an OBE to actually be, you might not feel as though you really had a new experience. It's debatable what an OBE actually is, precisely. I don't want to actually debate that in your thread, but I do think I can offer you some tips that might help, but I personally believe an OBE to be an altered state of consciousness extremely similar to a lucid dream, if not just flat out being one. So, while I have had some success with things like getting out of my body and inducing REM Atonia (you might know it as sleep paralysis) utilizing various tactile sensations, I can't actually say any have gotten me an OBE (or I guess I can, but I don't think there's much of a distinction between one and an LD; it's just a specific LD).

Visualization:
There are quite a few older tutorials on the site about visualization, sometime I will try and dig up some helpful links for you if they are still around. The only thing I can really help with here is that you shouldn't try and strain your mind too much trying to make every detail of your visualization perfect. Not only does it not really work, but it seems to work a lot better if you lay the ground work and try and let your mind take care of the highly specific things. For instance, if you are trying to do something complicated like, not only visualize a clear, sharp, and highly detailed image of an apple, but you try and make it rotate or move in real time, your visualization will fall apart. Forcing your conscious mind to do that much work interrupts the natural, unconscious processes that normally form the image "for you", so to speak, based on your general desire or understanding for what it is that you want to see or experience. This is also something you have to practice a lot, and it can be very overwhelming to try and visualize explicit dream-like scenes or scenarios you come with up. On top of trying to simulate what it looks like in this scenario, you are trying to simulate all the tactile sensations from your posture and clothing, your breathing, the things you smell, the things you kinda-maybe hear, how fast you move, sense of balance and where gravity is oriented, etc. You have to work up to doing all of this. Practice each thing separately and challenge yourself to integrate more of these things in your visualizations as you progress (also, don't get discouraged, but unless you are simply a natural or somehow predisposed to success, this might take you a very long time and a lot of work to get good at).

The goal would be to consciously think these sensations out separately and get a good feel for how things should be, and do it enough that your mind kind of gets what you're going for, and it starts to be a process that becomes integrated with unconscious thought processes. In a way you are consciously practicing these different things separately and making sort of "profiles" or "templates" of them... or another way to think of it is like muscle memory. At that point, these processes can be relegated to lower consciousness thought processes that are actually capable of doing the work without overtaxing you, and letting your conscious mind handle things in a way that don't tax it so much that your visualization is destroyed. The reason too much conscious thought can interrupt things is that, like muscle memory, people are able to do a much better job of whatever it is they learned by having made a strong connection between groups of neurons that strengthens over time and happens unconsciously. People are better at sports when they simply "feel" what they are supposed to do and do it, rather than thinking about it every step of the way. Remember the mind works by a series of electrical impulses (not trying to sound condescending, sorry if you knew that or everything I'm explaining here). The impulses that should fire smoothly along the neural pathway that formed as a part of learning the task are literally interrupted by other nerve impulses caused by conscious thought on how to do said task. In this case, the task is visualization, and the conscious mind should stick with what it does best: make a somewhat informed general decision based on the overall big picture it is presented. It's a lot like the head of a big company--the CEO doesn't need to know exactly what's going on with everything, that task is divided efficiently among employees that are designated to handle specific things on their own. The CEO is the conscious mind, and the various workers are unconscious thought processes (which is a fairly nebulous concept, as it includes learned and conditioned reactions/reflexes, emotional regulation, all kinds of stuff). You, as the conscious visualizer, want to arm your unconscious mind with the knowledge of the sensations you want it to simulate kind of on it's own, but under your loose direction once you put it into full practice.

Escaping your physical body:
When it comes to escaping your body, I mostly utilize various tactile sensations. Something that helps immensely is to have already slept some during the night, and to wake up very early in the morning, like a WBTB kind of... although you don't necessarily need to leave your bed or get up and do anything. In fact, unless you are too prone to falling immediately back to sleep, it's best to move as little as possible. Moving around releases hormones and other chemicals that bolster the wakefulness promoting system in your brain (there are the wakefulness promoting and sleep promoting system, and their interaction isn't exactly straightforward and can actually be kind of complicated, it's a topic for another time). It's significantly easier to induce REM Atonia or otherwise try and escape your body when you're pretty much already asleep. Many people, at least in the past, used to have a problem with properly allowing themselves to actually fall asleep in order to induce REM Atonia or WILD/WBTB, and the same is true for reaching other altered states of consciousness: in this case, OBE and AP (assuming for the sake of discussion they aren't just a specific type of LD).

Something that has had decent success for me is making good use of my ability to feel as though I'm moving through space when lying down: I can make it feel as though I'm lying down and swinging on a mario 64 style platform moving like a pendulum, or like I am rocking on a boat or something. I am able to make myself feel as though I am rotating/rocking up and down on my bed, which I used to "build momentum" and rock myself further down on each successive rock. Eventually my bed is able to get around 90 degrees downward and I am able to simply peel away from my physical body on the way down. I imagine all the while that I am pulling ever more free from my actual body and try and feel my dream body or whatever you want to call it pulling further out of the boundaries of my physical body. I have a specific goal in mind, to rock out of my body, and I let my mind sort of feel the rest out and take care of it all for me, sensation wise. I just guide the experience with my expectations. Similarly, but with a less chance of success (I actually don't try it much, sometimes it just kind of happens), I will feel as though a trap door suddenly opens underneath me and I fall through it quickly enough that my dream body separates from my physical body.

If you find yourself in REM Atonia, you may feel as though you've hit a dead end. Many people don't know how to enter a dream or leave their body in this state, but it's always been as simple as expecting something for me. When I experience REM Atonia or even at times sleep paralysis, I always remain calm to begin with. Getting too excited, scared, or anxious can easily wake you up and pull you out of the experience. What I typically do is imagine that there is a vortex/black hole/worm hole type thing by my feet for head, and that when I get sucked through it, I will be in a dream. It's the first thing I ever tried when I found myself in REM Atonia or SP, and it worked ever since the first time I tried it. In fact, I can't remember a time that it hasn't worked. The trick is to fully expect to get sucked in and wind up in a dream. It might be easy to doubt, but as long as you don't think too hard about it and really just let it happen, it works. As far as leaving your body goes in REM Atonia or SP, I use some kind of variation of the tactile sensations I mentioned before, of rocking out of my body or falling down a trap door underneath me or something. It's much easier for this to work when you are in RA/SP than before hand, as a matter of fact (or at least in my experience).

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of climbing a rope out of your body, but I feel like it requires you to visualize and sense too much to work that well most of the time. My ideas work, imo, because I'm still lying down in both cases, and I don't really have to imagine my body doing too much. I use expectation more than I do visualization (btw when I say visualization/visualize like I have in these last few sentences, I'm including feeling tactile sensations and other things, not strictly visual stuff), but that might be because visualization has always been a challenge for me and I tend to play to my strengths because I know they work. It's not that I can't visualize so much as it's just a lot of effort when I can achieve good results with less.