A lucid dream... or was it?...

Hi, I'm Daniel, I've approached lucid dreaming with various intentions and I found out about this forum a few weeks ago. I have a history of spontaneous lucid dreams and recently I've been trying to purposely increase their frequency and get them on demand when possible. I've had various success, but that's not the reason I'm writing here. The reason is that I had a rather weird experience in a lucid dream the other morning. So the dream had just started and something made me think about dreaming and realised I was in a dream. So, I thought, let's see if what I read is true, let's make a reality check. And I looked at my digital watch, which had a slightly different design in the dream, memorized the numbers, looked away, looked back and they changed. I thought to myself "yeah it's true, they do change". Then I had another thought, how much did they change? Wasn't it just the seconds that changed? Then I looked at the watch and noticed time was advancing on it and it was faster than regularly. I looked away again and checked back on it and it almost seemed like the watch was showing the right time, just advanced a few seconds like it should have. Then I felt I was losing my grip on the dream, I tried to spin but my body was slow and hard to move, something like the "etheric" body described in some OOBE books. I was just looking into the dream and seeing my vision change into reality. I didn't wake up and open my eyes, I was seeing the dream and then it part by part changed into wakeful vision.
I had another experience with this vision change before, once I had a dream I was standing in my room and I realised momentarily that I was dreaming. I thought to myself, here it is, I had an OOBE... but my body wasn't there. My bed was made. I went outside and saw my mom working on the pallisade wall around the house. It's been there for years so I thought maybe I went back in time. I went to my mom and asked for the year but couldn't get a definitive answer as my dad was interrupting her. I asked my mom if she knew where I was and she didn't seem to understand the question. I looked around and saw myself behind the barn. I told mom "look, there I am!" and I was about to meet myself when I felt I was losing my grip on the dream. So I looked into my hand and tried to retain "coherence" but it didn't work. My vision like in the above story slowly changed from dream to wakefulness and I was in my bed looking straight into my hand. No, i didn't wake up lift up my hand and look at it. My vision changed directly and my hand was in the same position as in the dream. At times like these, I sometimes ask myself if I'm really awake right now :D So, my question is, have I actually achieved an out of body experience or was it another type of a lucid dream? Any input would be appreciated:)

Hi Dan,
From my experience, I would say it was a licid dream. I've been messing around with this on and off for years now. Having experienced a lot of unusual dreams as I'm sure you have you know that the mind is very good at delivering what we want. An OBE is in a different catagory than dreaming. Our minds will accomodate us because we want an OBE and wanting it bad enough we can fool ourselves.
As far as "coherence" it seems to me that my subconcious would like control of the dream instead of my conscious. So when I start feeling that I'm losing control, I relax and let the dream (or my subconscious) take me where it wants to go until I (conscious) feel back in control again. So that is how I handle that.

Mike

Hey Mike,
Thanks for your reply. I've been wondering on this because I'm not even sure anymore how to tell the difference between an OBE and a lucid dream. I've had lucid dreams of amazing picture quality, as if I'm watching a plasma TV, and then some guy from a lucid dreaming book guaranteed that numbers on a watch would change in a dream. Too bad I didn't have time to try and see how it would work with text... in another book it said you can tell the difference between the dream body and the astral body using these reality checks, that's why I was confused by the watch. Yet another book said astral vision can be used with open eyes like when looking into a crystal ball and that would explain the view shift. And sometimes in a lucid dream I try to manipulate it somehow and I fail, but like you said the subconcscious could be in more control and it could cause that failure. It would be nice if there was some definitive way to tell apart lucid dreaming from an OBE. Thanks for your input and the advice on holding control, I should really try that:)

For info on the so called "out of body experiences" please go to beyond dreaming. Personally I believe (I have no reason to believe otherwise) that OBE's are just misinterpreted LD's.
If you aware that you were dreaming, it was an LD. Real simple.