About 4 years ago, I posted this story on Bruce's site.  But the landscape here has totally changed since then and I thought I should post it again so that newbies might discover what makes me tick with respect to this site's retrieval claims.  

I dated Janet seriously when I was in grad school.   Our relationship came close to engagement, but I was a poor young grad student distracted by great academic pressures and by compatibility issues.   Besides, Janet, a social worker, was unusually prone to depression and I found it hard to deal with this.   So we eventually broke up.  

She occasionally threatened to commit suicide and I somehow sensed she was serious.  But you can't marry someone just to prevent suicide.    She moved to D.C. and dated other men, who basically treated her like a sex object.  Janet was very pretty.  I was worried about her and kept tabs on her for a year or so, but then we lost contact.   To my horror, I eventually learned that she bought a gun and blew herself away.   It was then I realized how much I love her, despite my hang-ups, and I felt intense remorse over how I had mishandled that relationship.  I can only say now that sometimes we grow up at other people's expense.  

At that time, I had never heard of retrievals, but I desperately wanted reassurance of Janet's postmortem wellbeing.   Using self-hypnosis, I taught myself how to have an OBE.  I floated up to the ceiling and looked down on my body in my bed.  I was struck by my messy hair!   Then I worried about whether I could safely reenter my body; so I floated down and lay on top of it.  But my astral fingers just couldn't merge with my physical fingers.  This frightened me and I woke up.

Not long afterwards, I had a particularly vivid dream.   I floated up to a small booth in the etheric realm, where I encountered an official looking woman at a  desk with a green curtain behind her.  I asked to see Janet.   She informed me that Janet was not ready yet to see me.   This should have sent me on my way.  But suddenly I was overwhelmed with emotion--a combination of love for Janet and rage at the thought that she was still in deep distress.  With an omnipotent-like  feeling, I blurted out, "But I must see her now!"  

At that, the woman vanished and the curtain shook violently as if buffeted by an etheric wind.  Janet suddenly appeared before me and we embraced passionately.   She kept saying over and over again, "I'm OK, Sweetie, I'm OK, I'm OK!"   The tenderness of that reunion was one of the most profound experiences of my life.   I was struck by the fact that she appeared to me as a smaller teen-age version of Janet rather than as the mature young woman I had known.

I was ecstatic about all this for a few years.  My glee vanished when I taught myself to experience lucid dreams.   I wanted to know if a lucid dream about astral projection might invalidate my OBE and retrieval experience.  I decided to project to Boston at high noon when it was midnight in my New York home.   During this projection I was fully aware of my sleeping body back home.   I stood opposite the Boston Common on a sunny day at noon, heard the honks and the din of many pedestrian voices, smelled the gas fumes, and saw the scenery and buildings in as much detail as in real life.   I was awestruck: never before had I had a dream this real!

Then I was struck by the thought that I was god in this dream universe because I had created all I saw and experienced.  As pedestrians passed by, I decided to stop a lady and discuss the dream with her.  But when I grabbed her arm, she screamed.   I calmly explained that I was dreaming, that my body was "back there" in bed, and that she was a mere fignent of my imagination.   She looked at me like I was a wacko and got more scared.   By now I was attracting the attention of others and got scared myself.  The woman was acting just the way a real woman might react if accosted by a stranger and I had no control over her reactions.  My increasing fear soon woke me up.

After my initial elation over this dream faded, it gradually dawned on me that this dream was every bit as real as my OBE and my retrieval of Janet.   I eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that those treasured experiences were also just lucid dreams and nothing more.  

This disillusionment makes me a bit too touchy about this site's poorly verified retrieval claims.  Most posters here seem to construe every dream about deceased loved ones as a genuine contact.   This strikes me as naive.  But I'm glad people are still trying and I wish them success, despite my skepticism.   All my bogus OBEs have occurred during sleep.  I've never had an OBE in the waking state and hope that if and when I do, I may finally retrieve Janet for real some day.  Until then, I must content myself with my belief in the possibility of retrievals on biblical grounds.

I don't have the time to both post regularly here and experiment in a disciplined way with astral exploration techniques.  So when I complete my extended dialogue with Spitfire, I will abandon this site indefinitely in the hope of finding the discipline to seek astral travel.  I will use my Gateway CDs and the techniques in the Brian Mercer and Robert Bruce primer "Mastering Astral Projection."  I've used both apporaches in the past in an undisciplined way.  If those methods fail, I will probably buy Bruce Moen's latest book and experiment with his techniques.

Don

wow, pretty nice story there don.you are correct in that, it's very rare you hear that people say obe's could be mear dreaming.

I would suggest doing an experiment to see wether these claims are true or if that they are mearly fantasy's.

when you manage to go obe while awake, - i would suggest visiting someone you know, find out what they are doing and looking for things which are unusual. such as a person visiting his mothers, or other unusual occurance's to which, once you wake up - you can verify them.

if you reproduce that experiment a number of times, it would build a strong case, that your obe's are real.

i would appreciate if you shared your results with me.

cheers
craig

Betson,

I've read through Bruce's archived retrievals and  honestly don't find them convincing.  Yet I'm confident that I have as strong a desire to believe in retrievals as anyone here.  In fact, if I could perform just one convincing retrieval, then my life direction would dramatically change to do and promote such rescue operations.  I might even try to start a church devoted to retrievals because I can't imagine a nobler cause and I can show that, as late as 200 AD, the church encouraged OBEs during the Sunday worship service.      

I meant that I'm "touchy" in the sense of the tension between my need to believe in retrievals and my frustration about both my own bogus retrieval and those posted on this site.   But Swedenborg's example keeps my mind open to the possibility that I may one day succeed.  If and when I do, it will be one of the most important moments in my life. 

Craig, the type of retrieval you suggest is important.   It is so easy to succumb to wishful thinking like I did for my "encounter" with Janet.  Also, I suspect that it's easy to confuse lucid dreams with genuine OBEs.  Swedenborg's success in this area demonstrates that impressive verifications are possible. 

Don

Give it up dwdream. I'll tell you what the sceptics would say: You just tapped into hidden/unconscious memories, which also could be regularly achieved in states of hypnosis. Right, Berserk?

Yes, Berserk. It's this thing what for me is kind of sad to see: The crown of your efforts, so it seems to me, would be to get a proof that a retrieval is true. But I see no possibility how that could be done. Even if one gets informations which no other could know than the retrievee (the treasure hidden in the ground or similar things, and even with this one can't be sure if no other knows about that so telepatic contact can't be excluded), you could still say someone didn't meet a deceased, but got access to an information pool, often called "Akasha Chronics". So, you only can get personal evidence, means the experience must such impressive for you that you just don't think about anymore what kind of real it is. (To verify OBE is of course easier, though you have to interpretate how the data come to you, during traveling with another body or via remote viewing etc, as I know you know.) But, an impressive experience you had already! Ok, without verifiable facts maybe.

So, do you see a possibility at all for you to be satisfied with any of your possible future OoBEs or retrievals after seeing this theoretical limit of possibilities?

Spooky

don, actually has gone oob.

does that not make him truely qualified to justify what he saw, and wether it was real or not?.

someone who was not open to different possibility's would have not had the conviction to even try to go obe.

we all have ability's which we excel at, anyone who aint willing to prove there experience's, must have some weak validations or are extremely selfish, it almost seems like people who go out of body are like people giving someone a small bit of heroine to get them hooked, so they keep having to buy the crap there selling. if i could go out of body, i would be proving it to anyone who asked me, for without using external source's of verification - one could not be sure wether there deluding themselves.

it's very easy to think of tests, which would prove that reality of these claims. But no one steps forward to prove there experience's.

dwdreamer,
Your example is excellent! Bruce David Rubin, author of Brain Storm, is a spiritual / kundalini adept/master?, who studied in India and is so at home OoB that he teaches, writes, and is working with technology that promotes OB to help others experience some of what he experienced. Let the skeptics tell that master he doesn't know what he's doing!  
I was so fortunate to cross paths with him in the early 1970's and he took me on a OoB Exploration then.
bets

10 years of trying to have an obe? seems like a waste of time if it takes 10 years, might as well wait till you die and stay there 24/7.

Robert monroe, goes well beyond whats considered feasible, he claims he's met someone on earth who's thousands of years old, and that he's met a race of umpa lumpa's, not to mention meeting future and past versions of himself.

all these claims are very nice story's, but without real time experimention, thats all they are.

I dont believe it requires, personal experience to believe in the afterlife. some people choose not to fly, but they know it's possible.