This topic was split from a topic in the Lab. 
They most definitely exist. I have experienced one myself. The real question is whether you are merely dreaming or whether you are actually out of your body. The whole thing would be rather hard to prove. It can get very confusing.
I’d like a third option: None of the above. It may be a separate kind of experience that is neither dream or out of body. Like meditation.
Assuming it’s not out of body, it’s a lot about definitions. 1. It’s just a dream. 2. It’s a different type of dream. 3. It’s not a dream.
The definition of dream is apparently “A series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep” which points toward number 1 or 2. I personally think 2 or 3 sounds correct. Meditation can cause those effects but you’re not really asleep while you meditate. Maybe you’re not really asleep during an OBE? In that case it would be number 3. Once again, assuming it is not out of body.
I will definitely conduct my own experience. I’ve thought about telling someone to write down something on a piece of paper and put it somewhere and then read it if possible.
I’ve had only one experience with what could be called OBE and from that experience I would say that OBE is a type of a dream, but I can’t say that because I don’t have enough experience with that.
Although inducing that one OBE is what made me think that… I was on my way to do WILD and at point where I would usually let myself to fall asleep I thought I could try to OBE and I use advices from Bob Monroe for inducing OBE. I don’t remember whether I fall asleep or if I was doing this technique for OBE while I was still in WL…
So yes, I need a lot more tries and then I could say accurately what OBE actually is but only for me because this experience is just too subjective and personal…
And something else, I don’t know if somebody else had this feeling but after that experience with “OBE” I was kinda less interested in lucid dreams, they felt like less experience then OBE or whatever that was…
I totally believe OBE’s are real! I don’t need to convince anybody else…and nobody can prove me wrong, so…I utterly delight in believing it and believe also, that my belief lends itself to the intensity of the experience itself…which is a pure pleasure 
OH…just read the “lab” post. Yes, I have utterly no proof whatsoever that they could ever be considered scientifically real, nor do I give a mashed potato to ever have it scientifically proven. So I’ll respectfully extract me-self from this discussion 
Tally ho!
Most people are saying that OBE’s are real. But the thing is, that you don’t give any scientifical proof for it, just tell your experiences. I would like to clarify, that personal experiences are not regarded as proof in the science community.
To prove OBE’s, you must do two things:
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Find a theoretical reason why they would exist. What body part is responsible for creating OBE’s, how does it work, how does it function? If you suspect a body part being responsible for OBE’s, look up information on it, and improve the theories.
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Prove your theory with experiments. If, in example, the body part responsible for OBE’s, according to your theory, is a specific part of the brain, do a brain scan while the person is performing an OBE. Record all the brain activity. Then compare it to the brain activity of a person, who does not have an OBE. If the scan shows that the brain part is indeed active during an OBE, it may be your proof, but not yet.
You must compare your results to other experiments, which may be confused with your results. In this case, it would be dreaming/lucid dreaming. When you have your results on an OBE’s brain activity, compare it to LD and ND. If they match, you can state that OBE’s are caused by the same brain part, as dreams, thus OBE’s are dreams. If the results don’t match, you can take all the glory for proving a new branch of science - OBE.
What I mean is, that if noone of us does any scientifical research, such topics will go on forever, with everyone arguing about their opinions.
If someone has the ability to run such experiments, please do it.
While I haven’t run any experiments yet, I can already see lots of similarities between OBE’s and dreams. If you aren’t convinced, remember when dreams and OBE’s occur. If you haven’t noticed yet, somehow, OBE’s only occur during the REM phase of sleep. Secondly, inducing an OBE works the same way as inducing a LD - with the WILD method. Thirdly, there have been reported occasions that OBE’s have strange colours, inaccuracies, illogical objects, thus making them extremely similar to dreams. While I don’t have access to any better proof against OBE’s at the moment, I think they don’t exist just because of the similarities with dreams. In my opinion, OBE = Dream. It’s just the scenario which is different.
Paulis, I would like to point out that not everything in the scientific community is based of scientific fact. In fact, a lot of things are based off of experiences. As a part of my own proof for the above statement, here is the Higgs Boson An anomaly that scientists have not proved yet, but know exists.
I believe that OBE’s exist, and that is from personal experience. I do not LD, and I have a friend who also does not LD. In a waking moment, for both of us, he OBE’d to my side and I knew he was there without his telling me. It was after feeling him that he told me what he saw and could describe my position exactly. He told me what he did, which confirmed what I felt him do.
I do not need brain activity to tell me if that was real or not. I would also like to point out that there have been troubles with brain wave activity in the past, where the patients believed so wholly that things were taking place, that their brain waves reflected this. Placebo effects cause troubles in science, therefore even fact cannot be trusted.
I must say, that the scientists don’t know that it exists, just of the point you have stated - it has not been proven yet. Only the theoretical part has been created, which is exactly what is shown on the wikipedia page you pointed to. At the moment, to prove the exsitence of this particle, scientists are doing experiments with the hadron collider. However, until they’ve done that, it doesn’t exist. It’s just a theory.
I wouldn’t agree with the statement where you said that science has proof based on personal experience. Science does not accept such proof.
I respect your beliefs, but OBE’s are still not proven.
I find this interesting because I personally have a recurring dream theme where I wake up in my bedroom. Usually when this happens I get a sense that I’m dreaming and become lucid and fly out the window (from three stories high no less!, lol sometimes I think twice just to make sure I’m dreaming 
)
Though when I go around to explore outside it’s usually vastly different from WL so I suppose they don’t count.
zyonc posted a very interesting book in the “Dream Journal” topic.
obe4u.com/files/SOBT.pdf (page 8 - 23).
=> It teaches you OBE as a part of LD. The technique is much more agressive than what we usually do.
zyonc is trying it here : [community.ld4all.com/t/scythe-le-journal/36209/1)
OBE Exist! Proven by me 
You can see your body, all real waking live around you. You become astral, Like Ghost/Spirit. You can do anything like in LD, but playground Real World.
In my second OBE i tested it. I looked what is happaning in other room. (It was early morning, my friend was up, and i saw what he did. I fast back to my body and went to watch it was true or not. And he did exactly what i seen) So i prove my theory
Yes, this happens with my OBE style WILD’s as well…my apartment looks the same, for the most part, but when I go through the front door, !BAM! the setting changes almost instantly…although there have been a couple that I remember where I was still in the vacinity of where I was actually sleeping, with everything “in place” so to speak.
For me, the term “OBE” is simply a descriptor of the type of WILD from the dreamer’s perspective. If I have a WILD where I go from waking state and then emerge directly into a dream scene that has nothing to do with where I’m sleeping, usually…then that’s a typical WILD for me. If, while laying awake, I get the perceptual sensation of expanding beyond my reclining body to then roll out of it or pop up and out of it, then i call that an OBE simply because it feels/looks like my awareness is moving directly from “in body” state to an “out of body” state right there in the room I’m sleeping in. Sometimes I’ll be able to look over and see my sleeping form with my wife laying beside me, sometimes not…and sometimes elements of my room or apartment will become malleable and shift even as I look at them…shapes of doorknobs, seeing my kids playing around even when, later, I’ve found out they are asleep. I think this type of occurence might lend itself to OBE’s not being “real” in a way that waking consciousness is real…but then again, some OBE-ers have much more stable OBE’s and insist that they are very real indeed. Personally, I couldn’t care less whether or not they are “real” in terms of classification of what is considered provable reality. What I’m interested in is the depth and quality of what I perceive when in these states and how it enhances my daily experience IRL. If they are “real” in the classical sense…that’s exciting. And if they are “not real”…that’s just as exciting…mind-boggling even, given how real they feel when they do occur en force.
I think I’ll go over to the “shared dream” section to see what’s cropped up there. Fascinating stuff! 
My poor but real experience is that OBE is much different than LD (sorry for my bad enflish).
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In fact OBE are SO CLEAR, so stable, it’s like “over real” compared to dream who are “steamy” or “smoky” or “blurry”.
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dreams are for me always difficult to remember, even if it’s going better. OBE is total clear, and I remember everything (but this can be explained for the moment by the short length of it or the happening near the waking up).
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OBE starts for me from an awaken state.This wake up state is initiated by a short LD, where i say “i want to wake up”. Then i’m totally conscious in my “asleep body” and strive to go out of my body. The consciousness is the same as in the daytime. I can think to everything about my reallife (the day we are, my next day etc)
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The fear I feel during an OBE has not a single common point with the fear of a nightmare. In a nightmare, if you’re threatened you try to fight or run or everything you can. In OBE, the fear is SO amazing that you can do nothing more that returning to your secure and sweet body.
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OBE gave me the unforgettable sensation that “i am NOT my body, but so much more”.
But how can you know it’s not just a very lucid dream? What you describe could be an LD aswell. My LDs can be more real-like than reality itself ( and are not blurry) and at the majority of the times not to mention, why is it excluded that what you had was a false awakening inside an LD?
If we do a WILD like an OBE and an OBE like a WILD, why do some people still say that OBE is real ?
ALIENS !
Ok, then, if I follow your way of thinking, how can you be sure that you’re not actually dreaming your whole life. And that you’re not in a LD since your birth ? “Am i wrong ?”
No, you are not wrong, there are no definite signs that your own life is NOT a lucid dream or something alike. Lucid dreams, at least for me, are dreadfully faithful to reality. If hypothetically you were in a coma somewhere else than the current reality, nothing excludes that you are currently lucid dreaming. However although you cannot be absolutely sure for that, the complexity of our world, it’s “reasonable” structures and basis, the duration of our life, the coherence between things and so on doesn’t make it so likely that we are currently LDing, but does not exclude it 100% aswell. LDs, appart from the fact that they hide LARGE worlds inside them, dreadfully detailed, and with an overal plan sometimes of how the dream begins and how it ends, still incosistensies, biased things can be found and reasoning of why you dreamed everything inside can exist. But that whole logic of yours even then does not negate what I said originally - that an OBE would be absolutely unseperatable from a very lucid dream. And at that point you should have to travel inside your OBE and check if what was happening inside your dream actually is happening when you wake up, only then would I be convinced that someone really had an OBE. Actually lucid dreams are the strangest ever thing I experienced in my life, I would never fully believe it if someone told me he had one if I hadn’t had one at that time. I don’t know if my mind is playing me tricks, it did before with the rest of the dreams I thought were very much real like. What I know is that the experience of my lucid dreams are safely, even if my mind is faking me on “reality”, 100% real like, the complexity, plan inside them is simply scary.
This is groundbreaking!!! 
See my previous reply that is just above, and although I wasn’t 100% sure OBEs didn’t exist, I doubted alot! I was ignorant of my, ignorance at parts!! Never trust your current perceptions fully. OBEs DO exist and I know now WHAT seperates them from a fully lucid dream that begins from where you slept. Also I managed to enter my blurry thoughts-fantasies in a more evolved version of WILDs, that could qualify as neither a WILD, nor an LD or OBE. When I close my eyes and everything is dark then ( as everyone can see) not-so clearly everyone can see shapes such as gears ( try to press a bit your eyes with you hands inside your skull), now at that state ( among the final states of the very state between being awake and sleeping) my controlled, semi-controlled or non-controlled fantasy of a place that comes to mind ( chosen or not) can become through multifractals ( the gears are just one instance of fractals, try to press your eyes more and for bit of time, others fractals will appear through the gears creating thus a whole image of multifractals) fully “real” and can be ENTERED! I haven’t quite read something like that in any WILD. Now what seperates OBEs from Lucid Dreams ( also OBE experiencers could have been more clear) :
- The gradual paralysis of all body parts, the head last
- The hallucinatory state when you are still in touch with your surroundings ( even with open eyes)
- The exploding head syndrome ( can be minimized)
- The vibrations of all your body ( can be minimized)
- The autoscopy
- The fact that you feel that you can mentally move different parts of your “non-physical” body and see still your physical body lying down, you can also see if you fantasize so the apparition of your hand, for instance, that you are moving at the time
- The hallucinatory state that begins after the 6th phase of OBE, and the fact that it’s almost always something scary and when you get back to your physical body (“awake”) nothing of that is true! For instance 2 wasps entering the room trying to sting you, kids playing down the road and one girl shouting that “your a coward (!)” and “can’t wake up”, then throwing you a multicolored object that flashes in the same time as time-set explosives’s beeping can be heard , you instantly perceive that it’s about to explode, the curtain in the corner of your eye being turned to an entity that you are afraid won’t let you move again if it reaches you
8.) The fact that the transition between the being-physically-awaken and astrally awakened state is smooth with no interruption and it can be felt - The fact that you awake astrally exactly where you slept
- The absolute clarity of your surroundings and the fact that you can check around and every single thing is in it’s place fully detailed, the lightning, time of day and all.
- The absolutely clear memory you have of when it begins and when it ends ( doesn’t turn into a dream, or can it also?)
- The fact that many events and settings, such as the wind, moving of curtains and all are very faithful to reality, hallucinations can exist at the same time
- The fact that you are very heavy and paralysed in your non-physical body, which BTW feels the same with your physical body
- The fact that you can do nothing to items and they too seem to have a non-physical self or maybe 2nd physical self, for instance personally I can’t take the blanket off me, I can feel it and pull it but I pull it infinitely and it’s image doesn’t change position
- The fact that you always get stuck back in your body, either because of feeling heavy or out of fear, also it seems that you don’t wake up and feel heavy like I do after some lucid dreams.
It is recommended that you are midly tired to achieve but sleeps engulfs you, also it is better to sleep upside down and let body parts be gradually paralysed, with the head last, so you can experience the before-OBE hallucinatory state or at least tranquility and can control the speed the hypnagogic jolt reaches you so you can enter your OBE.
And the proofs are ?
Aliens can exist because I THINK I saw them yesterday.
I know that this forum is “for every opinion” so I want you to explain us how do you know that OBE exist.
From what I’ve experienced, they seem very real and promising, and of course they exist!