Thread: A.E.P Experiment (Accuracy of Ethereal Projections)

Alright, so the serious trials will begin soon. I recently started a new work schedule that may give me a great opportunity to EP each day (in the daytime), whereas before I was simply trying to it at 4am. I will keep you posted with results (may take some time to get back into the stride of things)

As it turns out, I have been using this free time so far to do some Christmas shopping, went to the dentist today, and in general it seems to be a great time to get things done that simply need to get done as an adult living on earth.

But it's OK, because I have at least one whole day a week (where I can totally screw up my sleep schedule if I need to) to attempt to LD without it affecting my day to day life, nor cutting into my weekend playtime.

Seeing as there is a necessity to compromise here, giving myself a set day to try will not only allow me to get other things done, it will also keep me more motivated/focused as compared to thinking I can "just try again tomorrow..."

So, seeing as I will be doing these trials late Thursday night/ early Friday morning, each Friday afternoon check back for my results. I will post weekly here (even if it's the trial was a complete failure to LD).

OK, so I used the Lucidweaver timer last night/this morning in my attempts to project. The alarm was scheduled to go off 3 sleep cycles after going to bed, and then every 90 minutes thereafter, 3 alarms (one every 12 minutes) would go off so that I could Rhythmic Nap my way into several projections. The only problem was that my damn cell phone paused the application at some point during the night because of inactivity...which totally squandered this opportunity.

I'm actually very disappointed right now, I may try again tonight/tomorrow morning but I hate messing with my sleep schedule before having to go back to work for the week.

Wait... that doesn't make sense... your cell phone alarm has a repetitive sleep timer function that paused when it went inactive?

App fail?

Lucidweaver is an application I downloaded onto my phone that allows multiple alarms to be set in accordance to your rhythmic napping needs. I set this alarm to go off after my first 3 sleep cycles (about 270 minutes after I went to bed). It was then supposed to go off 3 separate times, 12 minutes apart, on the onset of each sleep cycle there after.

Here's what actually happened. I woke up around 6-7 am on my own. Naturally I was confused by the daylight I could see through my blinds because I was expecting to wake up around 3-4 am to the sound of an alarm. I walked over to my phone and it was in standby (the screen was no longer displaying). I got it active again and there was a message that said "the application has been suspended due to inactivity, do you wish to resume?"

So basically what seemed to have happened is that, because the phone was inactive for so long, it went into a sort of "hibernation" like a computer might if inactive long enough...and in the process it interrupted the alarm application.

I will most likely use the saltcube timer from here on out (from saltcube.com) seeing as it can do everything lucidweaver can (and more) but it will require the use of my computer which is less convenient that my cell phone.

Funny, seems as though you've made about as much progress in your attempts to prove OBEs as I have! Granted...I only tried a few times a few years ago, and gave up mostly out of frustration and a desire to do more interesting things with my LDs/OBEs than trying to read a playing card.

However, some things have changed...so I might be starting up my own experiment soon...though it will be quite different. I plan to involve other people, because usually I have trouble being convinced of something until another person can verify it. I'll post when I have the details smoothed out.

Yeah, I feel you. My best results with playing cards were with a very small sample size several years ago (more info found here)

This is basically what all the info came down to (I had some help crunching the numbers):

O.K. I did some analysis on your results)

Values of the cards (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,J,Q,K,A)
You got 3 hits out of 10 trails = 30% hits
Simply guessing should lead to 1 out 13 = 7.7% hits
First thought, not bad!
Symbols (hearts, spades…)
You got 2 out of 6 (4 times you did only guess the color) =33% hits
Simply guessing should lead to 1 out of 4 = 25% hits
First thought, not significant, but at least above 25%
Colors
You got 7 out of 10 = 70 % hits
Simply guessing should lead to 1 out of 2 = 50% hits
First thought, not significant, but at least above 50%

Comment
All probabilities are above the guessing values but only the first (values) seems significantly above the expected number, therefore I’ll look at this a bit more closely.
Value of the cards, how good is your result really? We can say something about this, if we look at the chance to guess your result by chance. On average, how many times will a computer score 3 or more hits if he tries to guess the values of 10 playing cards?
This is calculated as follows:
Probability to guess 0 out of 10 is (12/13)^10 = 45%
Probability to guess 1 out of 10 is (12/13)^9*(1/13)*10 = 37% (one needs to multiple by 10 because there are 10 different ways to score 1 hit and 9 misses out of 10 trails!)
Probability to guess 2 out of 10 is (12/13)^8*(1/13)^2 *45 = 14% (one needs to multiple by 45 because there are 45 different ways to score 2 hits and 8 misses out of 10 trails!)
This adds up to about 96% which means 96% of the time a computer would score 2 or less hits if he performs 10 trails, which means if one is guessing one will only score 3 or more hits in 4 % of the attempts, which means it is pretty likely you did not just guess the cards but perceive some info about the real cards while out of body.
The chance you did not leave you body is below 4%! That’s it! That’s the result! It’s a success, I would say!
But, 10 trails are way too few to say much anyway!

Cheers Tom

o.k. I'm know I'm crazy..........
I calculated the colors as well. 7 hits out of 10, doing this by chance will happen on 17,2% of the trails. The symbols can not be considered since the colors and the symvols are not independent Variables. The colors and the values(from above) can be multiplied though, since they are independent.
0.172*0.04=0.00688=0.688%
This means that there is a chance below 1% that you just guessed the cards!
If you want more prove, you need to do another 10 trails.......

Since then I have refined the process to elimnate the many variables involved with playing cards. Keep me posted if you start up again. I find this endeavor particularly interesting.

I enjoy tests like these. There are lots of experiments along these lines; they require thousands of trials (comparable to using thousands of dice!) in order to notice an effect, but the effect is statistically significant (which means the chances of getting as much accuracy as was gotten is abysmal). One of the better summaries of this I've encountered is in the book The Field by Lynne McTaggart. (Just bear in mind that McTaggart is a writer, not a researcher, and some of what she says or how she presents the information comes across as a little flaky.)

I think one core problem you're going to run into with this experiment is that what you're observing has too much symbolic linear meaning to it. I'm pretty sure the part of the brain that recognizes and appreciates abstract symbols is partially or entirely offline when the body is in a dreaming state (which I think holds just as true for OBEs based on LaBerge's assertion that they're just semi-lucid dreams). I think that's why reading is so difficult in dreams. But that's the very part of the brain you're trying to use in this experiment when you're going to a box and trying to count dots. The counting process - at least for numbers greater than three - is part of how our brains learned to develop higher-order linear structuring in the first place.

I therefore suggest that you make one of two adjustments.

One adjustment is to use some system that doesn't require you to count above three. Three is a magic number for human neurology; it's the largest quantity we can subitize from birth. Using something like large coins with a big dot on one side (for "one") and a big 'X' on the other (for "two") would make it so that your perceptions don't have to filter through the very part of your brain that's off during these excursions.

Of course, this means you'll have to change the math a little bit. What you're looking for is called a binomial distribution. It's actually much easier to compute the probability of getting the result you got (or something more extreme) after you get your results; otherwise you'll have to compute the entire distribution, which can be obnoxious. I can help you figure the math out if you like. (I used to teach binomial distributions in statistics classes.) The way using coins instead of dice will change the math is that you'll need more trials (i.e. some combination of more observations and more coins per observation) in order to get the same degree of certainty in your conclusion as you would get for dice. It's been a while, but I think it might work linearly: since dice have three times as many possibilities as coins, I think you might have to have three times as many trials.

The other option is to do something that matters to the part of the brain that is active. This basically means attending to something emotionally charged. For instance, you might try printing out several emotionally charged (for you) pictures, handing them to a friend, and asking him to choose by some random method (e.g. rolling a die) which one he'll tape up in some spot you think you can get to in your OBE. Since you'll have seen the pictures beforehand, you'll have a 1/n chance of guessing the right one where n is the number of pictures you've printed. (If you pick n=6, your math will be identical for these as for rolling dice.)

Another, more compelling option (which, incidentally, is an awful lot like the approaches done in the Maimonides dream telepathy experiments in the 1960s) is to find some way of not knowing what pictures are possible. That's harder to manage and it's close to impossible to compute realistic statistics on the probability of success, but success with an approach like that tends to be a lot more personally compelling.

Let us know how it goes! Good luck!