My previous post was made just a few hours ago, so please don’t forget to read that if you missed it.

Cutting to the chase: I got a video of myself having an out of body experience, but it doesn’t look like anything amazing is going on from the video :-P. I suppose I should be bummed out or something, but honestly I just feel really excited! I can’t believe I was able to catch the experience on tape - even though there isn’t anything amazing in the video itself.

I’ve uploaded the uneventful video to YouTube, for those that really want to watch it. The second half is a zoomed-in high-contrast version.

(Note that in my excitement, I accidentally typed the timestamp of 3:55am, when it was actually 3:38am - I must have been thinking of my previous night’s OBE when finalizing the video).

I had been trying to get an OBE on video for about a week, and had just recently perfected my technique. Last night I had an OBE, but it turned out my camera ran out of tape mere minutes before the OBE actually happened. This night, I tried again. I found another setting that extended my tape length from 92 to 94 minutes (by changing the sound from 16-bit, to 12-bit). I pushed the record button, and jumped in bed ASAP - in order not to lose any time on the tape.

I tranced out from 2:05 to about 2:45, listening to music. I shut the music off, then did some more meditation for another 30 minutes. Then I rolled over to my side in order to get more comfortable, and attempt an OBE.

I fell asleep and started dreaming. I was dreaming I was laying in one of my old beds, trying to trance out :-). My mother came into the room and laid next to me. She started talking to me about my sister, and I was getting annoyed, because I was really focusing on trancing out, and wanted to get the OBE on video. My desire to OBE was so strong that even my dream-self kept the mission alive :-).

Eventually I told my mom about my frustration, and she didn’t say anything - just gave me this really strong bear hug. It was really painful, because it wasn’t a nice hug or anything. She grabbed me and started squeezing the breathe out of me. This snapped me out of the dream state, and propelled me into having an OBE. I “woke up” out of body, but laying inside my body.

My right arm was free to move. I checked the clock (while out), and it was 3:38am. I did some quick math and realized I only had a minute or two left on the tape! I started to frantically wave my right arm, and tried to escape my body, but I was mostly stuck (probably because I was trying so hard :-P). All I could do was wave my right arm. So I just kept doing that. After about a minute of that, I jumped back into my body, and wiggled around to wake myself up. I got up, waved at the camera (with my left arm, instead of my right), in order to show the camera where I had just been waving.

I got over and looked at the camera - Tape End! Oh no!, I thought :-). I was about to flip out, thinking I had just missed my OBE for a second night in a row. When I checked the tape, I saw that the tape actually ended right after I had woken up and waved at the camera. I literally had about a 10 second buffer :-). The end of the video on YouTube is the exact end of the tape itself (I just trimmed off the first 92 minutes of trancing out).

It’s 5:40am now, and I really need to get ready for work. I just played the tape again, and it’s getting corrupted for some reason. There are large green bands across the video. Luckily I was able to extract and watch the end before the data corruption took place. I’ll have to mess around with it to see if the tape is really corrupt or not. At least I have the digital data :-).

I had another out of body experience (OBE) last night.  Three in a week!  This one was induced voluntarily.  I’ve mastered the technique :-).

A good portion of the questions that people ask me are concerning OBEs.  The question might be, “I can trance out, but then nothing happens!”, or “How do you know when it’s time to actually leave?”, or “I had a weird experience… do you think it was an OBE?”  These are all great questions!   Unfortunately, my honest response to each one is: “I don’t know” :-P.

Maybe I can be more helpful than that though…

The hard part about learning how to have an out of body experience is that it is so dependent on feel, that it’s very hard to teach.  There is a certain feel that goes along with the build up to having an OBE.  Whether that “feel” is a brainwave frequency, or chemical imbalance, or some other weird thing in the brain - I don’t know.  What I do know is that I can usually predict within the first 5 minutes of a trance whether I’ll be able to navigate to the correct feel required for an OBE.  Not intuition, not talking with my subconscious… it is a feeling in my mind.

Having an OBE is just one of many outcomes of trancing out.  In order to have an OBE, you must navigate your trance towards the OBE-feel. So, if you’ve never had an OBE, how can you figure out where to navigate your trances towards?  Basically, brute force.  You trance out, try new things, mess around, and just hope for the best.  Yes it sucks, but I can’t think of any better way (maybe hemi-sync if you want to cheat :-P).

Once you have your first OBE, then you have a basic idea of where the OBE-feel is.  But it takes practice to really pin-point it down, and possibly years to get there willfully.  I don’t know why it’s this hard, but it is what it is.

I can have an OBE using a lot of different techniques because I know where the OBE-feel is located, and I can use the techniques to help control my mind to get there.  If you don’t know your destination, you can have all the control in the world, but it won’t really help you :-P.  Only until you start to lock on to the OBE-feel can you start having them consistently and willfully.

My OBE last night was induced via a Wake-Back-To-Bed method (those in the Lucid Dreaming circles will know the basic idea).  What I did was fall asleep at 8:00pm.  I told myself to wake up at 2:00am, but my body must have hit the snooze on my internal alarm clock, because I woke up at 3:00am.  I got up, walked around, surfed the net, thought about my future OBE, etc.

At around 3:15am, I felt awake enough to have confidence that I wouldn’t just zonk out once my head hit the pillow.  I set up my camera, with hopes of recording my OBE.  I found some new settings on it, which allows for (crappy) night-vision, and changed the settings from SP to LP - which basically meant I could record for 92 minutes (instead of 64 minutes).  I put it on record, then laid down.

I listened to some Daft Punk music - specifically, their live album.  My alarm was set for 6:00am, which is the time I get up to go to work.  I got a decent trance going for about 30 minutes, and then decided that the music was distracting more than it was helping, so I shut it off and went solo.

I fluttered in and out of consciousness for quite a while.  I kept trancing, and nearly fell into a dream state, but managed to keep myself from falling asleep.  Between black-outs, I noticed I was in the right state of mind to have an OBE.  I left for a short while and had a lot of trouble with my vision.  I didn’t remain passive, like I had been on my previous OBEs last week.  I was really disorientated, and having a hard time in general.

I floated over to my door, then back to my bed, and then it dawned on me: I’m filming this!  So I quickly floated towards my camera.  I couldn’t see anything, but I knew I was where it was pointing, and I tried to do crazy stuff with the intention of being caught on film.  I went back to my body, woke up, and checked the clock - 4:55am.  I made a mental note to myself that my OBE was probably around 2-3 minutes long, and made sure I wouldn’t forget the time frame.  I needed to remember exactly when my OBE occurred so I could check the tape when I woke up for that exact moment.

Well, for those of you doing the math, I’ll cut to the chase.  My tape ran out at 4:47am.  My OBE started at around 4:52am.  Noooooo :-).

I checked the tape, and I didn’t see anything noteworthy.  I’ll check again, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.  The good news is that I have locked on to the OBE-feel, and I am confident I can OBE at will.  This should make future experiments much easier, and tonight I may even catch myself on camera :-).

I’ve been training in OBEs lately, and I think I just had an OBE last night.

The technique I used was to sleep for 3 hours (around 5:30pm to 8:30pm), wake up, and then go back to sleep around 1:00am. I’ve done this the past couple nights. Upon going to sleep the second time, I will listen to music in order to trance out. After trancing out for a good 30-40 minutes, I’ll remove my headphones, and go to sleep.

If I had an OBE, and it wasn’t just a dream, then this marks a significant milestone - I haven’t had an OBE during the night time in what feels like years. Almost all of my OBEs occur during the transition from sleeping -> wake. It takes a lot of training for me to accomplish an OBE from the wake -> sleep transition.

I’m learning to better control them, and make them longer. I’ve finally figured out the key to a long and clear OBE: remaining passive! HA! I always thought that I was passive, but I’ve realized that in the past, I was never passive enough. In the past, when I had an OBE, I would try to be passive, but also have strong motivation to explore and take advantage of the OBE. Now, I have removed these underlying motives, and have a true passive feel - I don’t care if the OBE lasts a minute, or 30 minutes, and I don’t try to force myself to experience anything. If my OBE consists of floating immediately outside of my body for a few seconds, then so be it.

The downside to having an OBE on the wake -> sleep transition is that I had a couple hours worth of dreams after it. So my memory of the OBE is extremely foggy. I remember leaving, remaining passive, floating around in my apartment, and looking at my hands. I remember playing with my breathing, and being confused whether my breathing pattern was actually being used by my body - or if it was just inside my head. I had lost my connection to my body, so I was unsure if what I was doing was affecting my body at all, or if I was just floating around, pretending to breathe. I’ll have to attempt to remember more.

Fun fun!

EDIT: I wanted to add a few more comments, just for the sake of having it documented. After thinking and remembering the experience, I am now positive that it was an OBE and not a dream. Specifically, I remember trancing out, and “swinging” my awareness around in circles, around my body. I also was playing with shifting my awareness to the left, which made me feel like my lungs where breathing to my far right (instead of below me). I remembering thinking at the time, “Oh cool, I’m probably going to have an OBE, because usually when I can get my awareness to fudge around like this, it means that I’m close.” I may post more on this technique in a future entry…

EDIT II: Another one! Two nights in a row :-). My technique was nearly the same - sleep early for a long time, wake up for a few hours, and then go back to bed. This time around, I didn’t listen to trance music as I fell asleep the second time. I just went to bed, and tossed for an hour or two restlessly.

The OBE consisted of falling through the floor at rapid speed, after which I said, “That was cool, let’s do it again!”. After that, I stumbled around without vision for a few minutes, feeling my way around my room. I returned to my body, and had a creepy feeling that there was another “presence” in the room with me (though it could have easily been my mind playing tricks on me). I played around for a few minutes longer, then fell asleep for good.

W commented, asking if I got a video of my first OBE. This made me think about how to video tape my second one. I didn’t attempt to video tape my second one for two reasons: 1. my room is dark. It’s night time, and it’s pitch black. 2. my OBEs take a long time to prepare for - I was tossing and turning for about an hour and a half before I began to trance slightly, and then it probably took another half hour to trance. My video camera can only record for an hour, maximum. I will have to see if I can think of some solutions to these two problems.

Alright, time to cast your precognitive vote.

Use precognition, or just follow your gut, and predict who will win the Democratic and Republican nominations, who the nominations will choose as their Vice President, and who will win the White House.

As an example, I will give my prediction.  I believe Obama will get the Democratic nomination.  I believe he will choose Edwards as his Vice President.  I believe Romney will get the Republican nomination.  I don’t know who Romney will choose for his Vice President.  And in November, I believe Obama/Edwards will win the Presidency.

Remember - this is not what you want to happen - this is what you predict will happen.  Optionally, describe the process you used to get these predictions.  For me, I used a combination of my knowledge of the races, and my general “feel” for what’s going to happen.  Post your results in the comments.  The people who get it right will have bragging rights for four years, until the next bid for the White House :-P.

Not a whole lot going on right now… But I do manage to keep myself busy. My current projects are as follows:

1. Win MegaMillions. The jackpot is below $45 million, so I’m not playing right now. My current strategy is to just pick numbers off the top of my head, with no overall understanding or strategy. This is based on the idea that I’ll never fully know how it works, but I just have to trust that it will work. I’m also working on my lottery machine, but since it’s construction won’t help my current strategy, it’s not a priority.

2. Video tape myself having an out of body experience. I’ve started getting into the habit of training myself to OBE again. I’ve noticed that my OBEs have dropped in frequency over the past months, and that bothers me. So I’m resuming my training, and also video tape myself at the same time, with the idea that if I have an OBE during a training session, it will be on camera.

3. I’m reading the book, Science and the Akashic Field, by Ervin Laszlo. It’s interesting, but it really hasn’t captured my interest completely yet. Perhaps in the later chapters it will do so.

4. Unrelated to the paranormal, I’ve been working a lot on another site of mine, codetank.com. It’s purpose is to teach programming, and provide a nice and fun environment to learn programming in. I have a few games online, and it’s slowly growing. Fun :-).

Nothing terribly exciting this moment, but maybe I’ll start seeing results with the lottery or start having some OBEs again. I’m beginning to have consistent lucid dreams (I’ve had an LD every night for the past three or four days now), which is usually a sign that my training is having an effect.