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 :-).
January 23rd, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Talk about the biggest fish that got away… =P
Better luck next time though!
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Ouch, that would really suck. I think that the Wake-back-to-bed method is one of the hardest to try to OBE or lucid dream from. Mainly because of waking up in the middle of the night. I would try it but I’m afraid I would be very sleepy the next day.
Good luck on trying to get that video >.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Neo - Actually, WBTB was the method I used to achieve my first OBE. It was called the “SunEye” method back then :-P. I’ve had good success with it, overall.
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Awsome! it would be amazing to catch any visual effects of an OBE on camera. I just hope it’s capable of recording it in some way, maybe you can flare up your OBE body like a psiball?
January 24th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
I think that WBTB is actually one of the easiest and most effective techniques for lucid dreams or OBEs. It does however, take a lot more dedication because you do tend to end up tired afterwards.
-Hatter
August 3rd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
you know, im not exactly sure how to do it, and ill look if you want, but im pretty sure you can capture footage directly to your computer, and that would allow you to film for quite a while if you have a few gigs on your drive open