You can reduce the risk by being more rested before a session.

Hi Brian,

I don't know or remember if there's any way to prevent a click out, but one way to work on it is to practice the balance of the Perceiver and Interpreter.

It's good practice that you're imagining and visualizing but don't just set intent on "projecting" or OBE because that's not the correct intention.  Look at it this way, I believe we naturally project and go out of body all the time.  The problem is that most of us don't remember the experience.  Your focus needs to be on learning how to hold focus on your conscious awareness regardless of the how of your experience.  A complete full-blown OBE is not necessary to experience retrieval.  Review the Components of Consciousness chapter in Bruce's Guidebook for help with the Perceiver-Interpreter balance. 

It's not necessary to be fully asleep to do retrievals but for those of us just starting out, a light stage of sleep is a great way to learn.  My advice would be to try this in bed before sleep...get comfortable and prepared for your night's sleep.  Then lie there and program your mind.  Think to yourself something like this, "I want to experience doing a retrieval.  I want to have conscious awareness during the experience and conscious memory of it when I awaken."  Really feel and believe in your desire.  Really desiring what you are saying is more important than just reciting the words.  This is what true programming really is.  It will sink in.  It may take the devotion of doing this every night for several nights until it works. 

So for instance at bedtime, if you learn to hold onto your desire and stating your intention in your mind while at the same time allowing your body to naturally shift into sleep, it's a perfect, easy, natural time to practice the Perceiver-Interpreter stuff.  Each time you begin to feel yourself drifing and you try to hold onto your thought and desire and intention, just remind yourself of your intention for a retrieval (or OBE or whatever it is you're programming for)...and remember to include the desire for conscious awareness.  Then continue to allow the feelings of rest and sleep and that letting-go feelings take over.  I've found that I kind of lightly jerk awake every few minutes, but that's when I remind myself of my intention again, and keep doing this back and forth. 

If you start to "see" things in your mind in this light stage of sleep, that's a great opportunity because it means that you're already starting to shift to an altered state.  That's when you can utilize Bruce's outline in the book, like imagining yourself walking through the path in the forest, coming to a place where you will meet your Helper, etc.  Ask for a Helper.  In this already-shifted state of consciousness it should be quite easy. 

It may take a lot of practice and trial and error.  You might start to shift and start to see things in your mind that are more like "dream stuff", but you can consciously acknowledge that you notice it, but then just let it go and wait for what else is coming along.  Don't "follow" dream stuff or thoughts or associations because that's your Interpreter running away with you, and you don't want to do that.  You'll end up just dreaming or clicking out. 

As long as you can maintain awareness of your desire while moving through these states, you'll eventually learn to balance your Perceiver-Interpreter, giving you more opportunity in your experience to do what you intend and have memory of it too. 

Hi Harvey,

I don't mind your questions.  Yes, I do have proof for myself in what I wrote up there.  I've learned and worked on and used this method for myself so yes, for me it works.  I assume it works for anyone.  What kind of proof?  Well that's subjective.  I know that people don't like proof to be subjective but I'll try to explain. 

Second, I myself have not and do not visit the "Hall of Records" or that kind of stuff so I cannot speak about it in any way.  I have no opinions whatsoever. 

The kind of imagination work I do and try to teach from my own experience is related to learning how to shift your conscious perspective from your normal everyday physical perspective to a broader area of consciousness.  For simplicity of conversation I just refer to it as nonphysical reality.  We could spend lots of time discussing what reality is but it's not necessary.  Think of reality as simply being consciously aware of being in the present moment.  Breaking it down into physical or nonphysical reality is not necessarily important.  I say that because life isn't just black and white. 

You give the Tsunami example.  Of course I would love to know events in advance, would love to help or change things for the better or prevent disaster.  But not being able to predict a major event doesn't disprove something else.  Lots of people could have had precognitive feelings, thoughts, or dreams of that tsunami but not enough experience to know how to interpret what they got, or not enough experience to trust or believe in that sort of thing.  It's easy to perceive something and then immediately let it go out of your mind, forgetting it forever.  It takes a lot of work and training to learn how to perceive and interpret correctly.

So let me explain what I mean by using the imagnation to shift consciousness.  Once you experience a shift in consciousness that opens up perception beyond the normal physical world perception we're used to, you have access to other areas of awareness you didn't have before.  It may very well be that I could eventually learn to predict major world events, but I haven't learned how to do that yet.  Why?  I don't know. 

I have had a significant amount of future information given to me while in a state of this shift in consciousness, information about my own life's future, information that I could not have known or caused in any way consciously.  For instance, think of an outcome or event that requires the convergence of event lines with multiple people being involved in order to make that outcome come into being.  I'm not responsible for all those people and what they do, right?  So how could I possibly know, i.e. predict, an outcome when there are clearly many, many variables involved?  I have no idea how that works or why it does.  All I know is that this is how I receive information sometimes.  If you want examples that are not just about my own personal life but broader than that, I'd have to look through my binders that I've kept over the years.  I make note of every single psychic, spiritual, and nonphysical experience I have.  It's hard to remember them all off the top of my head. 

Depending on what I want to do, what type of information I'm trying to gather, or what kind of intention I have, I have different methods I use.  I just see what works or what doesn't work.  Using the imagination in the way that I described in my previous post was specifically in reference of how to program yourself to doing retrieval work, and as I've shown it can be used for OBEs as well.  Lucid dreaming too.  The method is just a base to show how easy it is to learn to shift your consciousness. 

What I think is hard for people to realize is that your daily life physical conscious self is not the whole of who you are.  It's illogical to say that something isn't real unless it happens in the physical world while you are physically awake.  That's a narrow viewpoint of reality because if you're able to consciously move your awareness to other "areas" than the physical world while physically awake, then there's more to reality than just physical world proof. 

The big breakthrough that would bridge my idea of proof and yours would be learning as best as you can how to correctly interpret your own senses of perception.  I've gotten better and better over the years in my own study and development, but I still get stumped, baffled, disappointed, wrong, and angry at why I can't do what I want to do or know what I want to know.  For instance, if you've heard of the Jessica Ridgeway murder this week, she was a girl from my neighborhood who lived just a couple blocks from me.  How do you think I felt hearing about this case this past week and not having gotten one single psychic piece of information about any of it?  The way I've been feeling, well I can't use those words here.  Too profane.  That's how bad I felt.  Why can't I know something that would help in a situation like that, prevent a situation like that?  I don't know.  But just because I can't do one thing, doesn't mean that all the other things I have done psychically aren't real or true.  I'm just trying to learn and develop as best as I know how.  If there was a magic way to make it happen fast and all at once I'd do it, but I don't know of any. 

Now, back to retrievals and OBEs.  I do believe in my method, I know it works, and I have my own proof.  I've had hundreds of OBEs and lots with future information and physical world proof, but have only done maybe 3 or so actual retrievals.  I don't have physical world proof of any of the retreivals, like names, dates, and locations of people or places or events.  But my proof comes in a way that probably only makes sense to myself.  You see, when I have a psychic event in my daily waking life, I've become accustomed to how the information comes to me, how I see, feel, hear, or know it.  You could say that it's a sense that I've learned about myself, the same way a baby eventually discovers that he has hands and fingers that he can use, and as the baby grows he learns about all the other parts of himself, both body and mind.  I'm doing the same thing with my "nonphysical senses of perception" that I believe we all have.  I'm not special or different, other than the fact that I have an extreme interest in paying attention and using them. 

A silly quick example was that today I was doing a jigsaw puzzle while thinking about other things.  I was in an altered state of consciousness that wasn't just my normal everyday state.  I found that what I was doing was reaching into the box and picking up a piece and placing it exactly where it went in the puzzle without trying it around different places.  I literally just picked one piece at a time from the box, placed it exactly where it went, reached for another, did the same thing, and so on.  After doing quite a lot of these all in a row, it dawned on me what I was doing!  Of course, after my consciousness shifted back to normal physical consciousness, I couldn't do it anymore : )

So there's more to us than just our normal everyday sense of consciousness.  We are our whole self all of the time; we are not split and divided.  However, we usually only operate in the normal everyday sense of conscious awareness that we use in everyday physical life.  We keep our awareness grounded here in this one area most of the time.  If we begin to wander guess what?  We quickly shift ourselves back.  So what I do in my personal study and development is learn how to stop keeping that stronghold on that narrow focus of conscious awareness so that I can become aware of the greater parts of my own consciousness and the opportunities and abilities that exist out there.  It's always a work in progress. 

Harvey, have I babbled too much and missed the point of your questions for me?  Please, ask me anything you want and I will try to provide sufficient answers or examples.  I love this topic of conversation and am always willing to share my own experiences and beliefs.  I hate to use the word "knowledge" because that makes it sound like I know everything, which I don't.  I only know what I've experienced so far. 

Vicky