Don I felt I should address your posting concerning your disoppointment. Weither it be dreams, OBEs, it doesn't matter. All of these are alternate realities where one can pass and enter. Often people that have passed often appear in our dreams. It is our world they can enter to communicate with us. Actually a lucid dream is a form of a OBE. There is no connection to the physical body in either case. I agree the two are confusing to say, or label each of what it is, this is why labeling them under the umbrella of Alternate Realities is important. Trust your intuition, what you get is just that, do not judge them too harshly. Be thankful for what you have experience and look forward to more of them. As time goes on more doors will open.
Doug
Quote: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
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