I've read here about the technique for inducing an OOBE by waking after less than a full night's sleep, staying awake awhile, then going back to sleep with the intention of an OOBE. 

Now I find that in Stephen LaBerge's book, "Lucid Dreaming" he gives an almost identical method for inducing lucid dreams.  He recommends waking after some multiple of 90 minutes (the dream cycle) like 4.5 hours or 6 hours after going to sleep, staying awake 30 to 60 minutes, then going back to sleep with a very focused intent to have a lucid dream.  He discusses other methods as well, but all revolve around intent, not surprisingly.

So are OOBE and lucid dreams the same thing, really?  Has anyone used this method to achieve a lucid dream? 

Greetings Pat & Bets,

Had lucid dreams when it seemed important that other individuals or maybe a higher self needed to remind me that I am more than my body.  My first vivid meeting was with my dad about 15 years ago, (he died suddenly back in '57) and the second was with my now ex-daughter-in-law 3 or 4 years ago.  Both of these rewarding experiences were filled with PUL and recorded in earlier posts.

The reminder type was more of a combo of lucid dreaming about being out-of-body. Ever since I first read about doing out-of-body in a how-to book more than 11 or 12 years ago and had my first intentional out of body travels, ie. flying above my home and or directing myself to use a quicker method to get somewhere during a dream by flying above the walkways thru the trees and sometimes meeting others who could see me. Some I remember having the opportunity to encourage them to also obe.  Although, since experiencing possibley a major crash and various life changing decisions s a result, these “dreams” seem to have deminished or possibly I just don't remember them.

Regarding my actual, planned, out-of-body using Bruce's CD's, they were a bit of an unexpected surprise because it actully worked. They were as real to me as my writing this response or maybe a bit more so. Anyhow, one was a retreaval, assisted by a guide/helper, of a woman that had gotten stuck probably back in the early 20's or 30's in her kitchen in a shanty town. Actually the helper “drove” us thru the air  to “the park” where she was reunited with her brother and sister. The other was a retreival of a disowned part of myself. This one was really a suprise because I thought that I was being instructed for another of Bruce's exercises but after the experience I checked the title on the CD and found that indeed, it was instructions for a self retreaval. Both of these retreivals were also recorded on earlier posts and were done on a day when I was really tired. They may have worked so easily too because my resistance was pretty low.

Meanwhile, I have learned that Bruce's, Bob's, Tom Campbell's, and many of the other's that know that these levels are possible to reach and have multiple uses for us humans and that sometimes it's pretty hard for me, at least, to draw a clear line about where a dream ends, a lucid starts, and the OBE.

Jean 

Pat,

Stephen LaBerge and other lucid dream experts celebrate their joy in experiencing OBEs at will.  But they insist that their OBEs are lucid dreams in disguise and therefore do not  support astral realms or postmortem survival.  The reality of OBEs will never be widely embraced until New Agers awaken to the urgency of developing criteria to distinguish OBEs from lucid dreams.  The neglected quest for replicable verifications is essential if OBEs are ever to be used as a source of comfort for survival. 

Don

Yeah Spooky,

I still remember a “whatever” dream I had when extremely tired and taking an afternoon nap. I rarely did this but that particular dream turned out to  have elements of sleep paralasis, pre-cognition, and the OBE experience.

While sleeping I was awakened when my husband opened the front door followed by, “Hi hon” but when I attemped to get up to go out to greet him, I could't move. After realizing that I was dreaming, the whole incident was immediately duplicated in C1 consciousness, exact same level of sounds, voice tone/inflections, door opening and shutting along with my responces.  I thought WOW!!!, that was one of those. Because it was so unexpected, I concluded that it was real, at least for me-as real as any of my other experiences.

Jean 

Hi Don,

Missed You! My husband and I really had a big laugh over that one. I continue to question your intentions behind the use of name dropping, New Ager labels, and the term “real experts” but then I remember, “that's just Don being Beserk or visee/versee” and that sometimes strong emotions do get in the way of reading comprehension.

LOL (lots of laughs) Jean 

Thank you.  After I taught myself how to float up near the ceiling and gaze down on my sleeping body,  I performed a retrieval of Janet, a lovely young woman I loved when I was younger, but who became clinically depressed and shot herself in Washington, DC, a year after we broke up and she moved there from Boston.  That astral experience was among my most emotional life experiences and it greatly reassured me about her wellbeing--at least for a while.  Then I began to repeatedly ask myself this question: What is more important, Don, your need to feel good about Janet's welfare and to get on with your life, or Janet's actual condition and wellbeing?  I realized that her wellbeing alone ultimately mattered.  This insight gave me the courage to entertain the extensive NDE evidence that suicide is never an escape from your problems and that she might indeed still be trapped in a sad predicament.  This insight in turn freed me to learn how to have lucid dreams.  With that came the sad realization that all my OBEs that had so inspired me were most likely nothing more than lucid dreams about having OBEs--i .e. the fruits of wishful thinking.  But when I die, Janet's welfare will be one of my top priorities and if I am able and permitted, I will try to contact her for real and retrieve her if necessary.  I would do so sooner in this life if I could be convinced that I, at last, learned how to do astral travel for real.

Posting on this site over the years has taught me a valuable lesson: honest, open-minded truth seekers are very rare because the lure of comfort almost always supercedes the pain and angst of a genuine spiritual quest.  On the other hand, when I have been part of spiritual journeys that have produced thrilling paranormal verfications (e. g. evidential healings and ADCs), these experiences have stiffened my resolve to hold out for confirmations that bring lasting and contagious satisfaction to many.

Don

Spooky-

In support of your point - I think that the simple dualism of physical= real and non-physical = false/delusional remains a major stumbling block to progress. Insights from modern physics (esp. quantum) and the many studies highlighted in books such as The Conscious Universe (Dean Radin), The End of Materialism (Charles Tart), The Field (Lynne McTaggert) etc indicate that this simple dualism is inadequate as a model of explaining reality...

D

Lucid  dreams to me means: an individual with a clear system (no drugs of any kind & fairly mentally physically stable) experiencing possible 1 to 5 physical sensations in a sleeping or meditative state while being aware that they are not fully awake in the physical sense and therefore able to control or play an active role in the situation presented and have fairly good recall of that situation. Examples of how I experienced lucid dreams are after I read how others described them or explained how to do them but I don't really remember following those instructions or having these types of dreams, when sleeping, before. 

In what I refer to as “dream”  #1, which consisted of my then 40 year deceased father sitting in a chair opposite me as he explained the family purpose of his untimely death. By that time I must have also read about individuals that have died sometimes appearing in familiar or nonthreatening guise because I recall thinking, “that's nice, he looks the same as when I last was with him”. I recall also being so impressed by the experience that I was concerned during it that I might not remember everything that my dad was telling me but was reassured by him that the information would come back to me as I needed it. It gradually does and did.

“Dream” #2 took place shortly after my recently deceased 14 year old poodle died of complications due to diabetes and I felt so guilty for not being as sensitive to her as I could have been.  She came back to me in this “dream” and as I  picked her now “live” body, I could actually feel her weight, smell her smells, and the softness of her hair and I thought, I'm sensing that she does forgive me and love me in spite of my feeling that I let her down. WOW!!! To this day when I continue to feel, smell, and touch her whenever I recall this “dream”

“Dream” 3 where I was with my husband in some house near a water way when my son, his wife and kids came to visit. I was called out by my daughter-in-law for ignoring her and we proceeded to have a tit for tat verbal exchange but as I walked away thinking,” now I've really done it!” , feeling bad for being so nasty, and resigning myself to not getting any more family visits, she came up behind me giving the warmest hug, so filled with love, that to this day it brings tears to my eyes when I recall it. You have to understand that she and I have always had and continue to have a poor relationship, but I suspect that on some other (maybe non physical level) we're very close.

I want to state that for me these 3, what I call lucid dreams were very different than those I normally have had during these past 65 years or those “dreams” I experienced during a 2 week morphine induced coma in 2006 and different or maybe the same the OBE's that happened when I placed an intention, listened to the hemi-sync, was in a sleep deprived highly stressed frame of mind.

I recognized these as different, but again maybe they were the same as the retreival type done using Bruce's instructions.  I didn't really work at any of these 3 lucid dreams or take steps before hand by placing intention and didn't notice at what point in my night sleep cycle they occurred but I did recognize them as different. My personal experience seems to indicate that when I'm really tired and in a resting position-sometimes just waking up or being downright asleep, I sometimes drift between free thoughts, dreams, lucid dreams, worrys/conscious reflections, and OBE's. So I agree, in reality that there really shouldn't be firm lines drawn between the various states. And that the levels probably break down to the typical run of the mill variety of cycles we regularly go through during a relaxed period. But our left brains need to have details, numbers, and it appears constant verification of our experiencesand the dual realities become blurred.  Jill Bolte-Taylor makes an enteraining argument about the dual realities of our left and right hemispheres in her lecture  that can be viewed on      www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229,   and book, My Stroke of Insight

Jean