Thread: OBE or LD?

I would like to know if what I experienced was a lucid dream or an OBE, and I'm still not sure I know the difference between the two.

Since my teens I've been experiencing sleep paralysis. They would happen in spurts, where I would have them on a nightly basis for weeks and then they would go away for months and start back up again. Not until this past year have I begun research and foudnd that everything that I'd experienced has been documented and discussed. So I found this site, and decided that my sleep paralysis could be used as a lucid dream. Before whenever I would have the paralysis I would panic, scream to myself to wake up or call to my girlfriend to wake me up and eventually I would jump awake, usually projected in the direction I was willing my body to move. A lot of the things and "symptoms" I've read about I've done automatically since my sleep paralysis, but nothing as real as my first attempt at LD, having read only this site so far:

I was laying down in bed and following the steps on this site, particularly waiting for my sleep paralysis to kick in so that I could try to discover that I was dreaming. Suddenly I heard the buzzing noise, which wasn't new to me. I've heard this beforeand while I was well concious, but I never knew before what it meant or what to do with it. I stared into the darkness and a line and a head shaped oval appeared. I stared at it until I felt a sinking, underwater sensation. I decided now that I should start spinning, but I don't think that I actually did anything, although I tried to "will" it. I still felt fully awake and concious, but I was suddenly in a "tunnel" of black circular vortex with a slight spinning/tilting of the black walls with a oval shaped colors aligning the wall, pointing inward. It was at this pointed I paniced, said I had enough, returned to my resting state, had a second of paralysis still, and awoke shaking

I had another episode of sleep paralysis since then where I tried to struggle myself awake again, but I felt a corporeal version of myself leaving my sleeping self with an elastic aura around me that kept snapping me back. I awoke with a startle and I feel as though my body was actually jumping up and down like I felt.

Since then I tried to further investigate lucid dreaming in books but all I have found are on astral projection and OBE's, but from what I read my experiences sound more like the beginnings of an OBE. It's tough to figure because first of all I'm not well educated on either matter besides from my experience with sleep paralysis but also both methods (OBE and LD) are very similar in that they both require that you relax and "go with the flow"

but OBE's truly scare me in that I feel I'm playing around in a spiritual sense rather than a cognitive sense. And since these two events things while I'm awake are beginning to feel much more "surreal" and I feel less grounded in my body than I do before, which is frightening to me. Is this just my imagination or perhaps just suggestions from the books I've been reading? What do I need to know, be wary of, etc. And what exactly is it that I experienced?