Dear Bryan,

Certainly Lucid Dreaming can open up into the Astral and Spiritual Realms, more directly than can actual Out of Body Experiences. Typically when a person does Out of Body work, they exit the body and enter into the lowest of all Astral Planes, the one which approximately overlaps this Material Plane. If you have ever did an OBE you have perhaps noticed that the Scene which you entered, while being substantially the same as the World you know, had odd differences and strange subjective-seeming contents around and about. It was the same and not the same all at once. That is the lower astral.

Lucid Dreaming, on the otherhand, ordinarily takes one higher. But if you absolutely insist, you can use Lucid Dreaming as a doorway into the lower astral. I've done it by adopting the same position as I thought my sleeping body to be -- after becoming Lucid I would levitate upward and stretch out horizontally. I would then launch myself upward, like a rocket. When it would seem like I was breaking out of the Earth's atmosphere, entering into the darkness of Outer Space, I would actually break into the Lower Astral, just a few hundred feet over my house. From there I could kick around town in the middle of the night... see some silly demons scurrying about. Really, Lucid Dreaming in the Higher Realms is so much more interesting.