Does an OBE require REM sleep?
Or it can be induced at any time at will, unlike Lucid Dreams?
well, correct me if i’m wrong but an OBE occours during REM.
It doesn’t require REM to achive, but as soon as you “enter” an OBE i’d say it’s a good thing(Read: Otherwise impossible)? 
OBEs always occur during REM. That’s why OBE inducement techniques always need you to use WBTB or do it in the afternoon.
You do have dreams during NREM sleep, but they aren’t like OBEs. OBES (And REM dreams) have you exist in a 3D environment, where you can look around and explore provided that you aren’t bound down by an object of the dream.
I have no idea, and I’ve been OBE’ing and LD’ing for a while. This is more a question to pose to sleep researchers, I think… but I’ve never heard of any experiments where they put an OBEr and a dreamer under an MRI machine and compare how their brains glow.
OBE’s and AP’s are specific scenarios of a dream, therefore, they happen during the REM phase of sleep. Thus, REM is required.
Yes, otherwise your body would act out the entire scenario.
Let’s not forget that dreaming also occurs outside of REM (even though the REM phase is the definitely the arena where they happen the most and often most vividly). So saying that a particular experience happened outside of REM and therefore has to be a real out-of-body state holds no water. It could still be (and in all likelihood it is IMO) a lucid dream.
I still maintain that an OOBE (where one apparently separates from the physical body in some ethereal form) is nothing but a WILD that includes the illusion of leaving the body. Soon you discover that you have still lucidly entered a dream world).
In a sense, all dreams are out-of-body EXPERIENCES in that they give you the sensation that you are somewhere other than where you physical body lies (pragmatically, where you are truly lying).
You should all definitely read the link that MTMT posted:
explorations-in-consciousnes … ories.html
It cites experiments that show:
(1) OBEs happen outside of REM, and
(2) discusses the fact that dreams happen outside of REM. We have non-REM dreams.
Also, if you talk to regular OBErs, you’ll discover that many of them have experienced OBEs from a waking state without SP nor deep relaxation.
Consider this: if it’s really possible to project consciousness beyond the confines of the body, then that process will be influenced by physiology due to the fact that consciousness is influenced by physiology.
@electricsheep_0: I’ve never heard of anyone who claims to be able to induce LDs or OBEs at will–but it is, of course, possible to induce both with a high rate of success under defined conditions.
Theory around OBEs falls into two camps. One camp claims that OBEs are illusions–that no one is really leaving his body. The other camp claims that OBEs are, more or less, exactly what they seem to be. The skeptical camp demands that OBEs, if real, should be demonstrated to be totally different from dreams. That is, they say, OK, if they’re real, then a person should be able to perform OBEs at will from a high waking state a thousand times over in a lab and, while OBEing, undertake complex tests. Well, of course there’s nothing bad about having a high standard proof. It’s quite healthy. However, this demand is laced with black-and-white thinking: it assumes that if the “soul” exists then it should have smooth top-down control over the body. But what if that isn’t the case? Also, what if it’s the case that OBEs are possible and there’s still no such thing as a soul? What if the projection of consciousness is an entirely natural physical phenomenon which doesn’t require an immortal self principle?
My main point again: If OBEs are what they seem to be, our ability to have them, and their content, is certainly influenced by physiology (by way of the fact that our consciousness is embodied).
You see, I have a problem with the following quote from that link:
The reasons are simple. Besides the fact that the dream state can convey any sensation whatsoever - from angel visitations, alien abduction, parallel universe explorations, to the soul travel illusions - perhaps our understanding of what dreaming is needs to be expanded. Why can’t we expand our definition of it. Why does it always have to happen in REM (which it doesn’t) and why do the brain patterns have to be the same?
Can’t the OOBEs that happen with peculiar brain activity be nothing but a different type of lucid dreaming? It is true that it happens during trauma as in NDEs but that too can be easily explained. It has been suggested that during trauma, low blood pressure can cause bursts of REM activity in the brain which are unlike the normal ones due to the circumstances.
In such cases, your perception of self is lucidly thrust into a dream world because awareness of the physical body would mean awareness of pain reception during the period which could be unbearable - hence why NDErs often report pain and discomfort upon return! The pain is still there but not enough to be unbearable and so the mechanism allows consciousness of physical system.
I have a new term for NDEs: Trauma-initiated lucid dreams (TILDs)
In all my lucid dreaming experience (including the apparent separations from the body) I have never encountered anything indicative of my consciousness perambulating the external physical world. Only dream replicas. I also nearly died once (years ago when I was at uni and on a drug-fuelled self-destructive path) and I had an NDE. I can see people exaggerating their stories. I floated and encountered what I thought was the external environment first and thought I was out-of-body. Soon, however, I spotted the anomalies… it was a clever hallucination.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Let’s not underestimate brain power. The brain is the most complex biological system we know. Meanwhile, the existence of spirits and ghosts remain the stuff of belief and speculation.
As far as I can tell, from my experience, the world that is entered is always a mental one… never the real physical world. If there is any kind of sharing in these experiences then it is most likely due to coincidence or even the possibility that brains can be telepathically connected within the geomagnetic field. I’m on the fence when it comes to the quantum entanglement of minds although I am intrigued by Michael Persinger’s recent research.
It seems that obes are a type of vivid dream. That means that it is more likely for it to occur during rem, though it could still happen during any other moment of sleep. The nrem periods are know to occasionally facilitate dreams and obes as said by previous posters 
It’s already been said though that the more vivid dreams that obes are most similar too don’t need, but do tend to almost always occur during rem. so you should treat the idea of obes as needing rem sleep to happen. Though it can still occasionally happen out side of rem
I don’t consider OBEs and LDs to be seperate phenomena, so I’d say you would need REM sleep.
I agree, I’d say your chances to experience lucidity and to have powerful and long-lasting experiences are increased by the REM phase.
Dreams can occur in non rem sleep so I imagine LDs and associated experiences such as OOBEs do too.
I’m looking at whether visitor experiences typical of SP happen in rem. To do that I’m using a Zeo alarm clock which has an eeg head band. It measures when you are in rem. Might be worth a thought. Got mine second hand on ebay
By “visitor experiences” do you mean alien abduction-type experiences and demonic/angelic-type experiences?
My ‘visitors’ are small and humanoid but I have an open mind whether they are the same as alien abductions and demonic/angelic types. I think they are part of the dream spectrum that includes lucid dreams, OOBEs and sleep paralysis. If I am to believe what I have read, it seems that your social status/background/knowledge may influence whether you see (dream) an alien, a demon or an old hag. Seems sensible when you read about it but when you start to experience these things you wonder whether that is the whole story. Science claims to know the answer from a clinical perspective, and it sounds plausible, but having experienced some of these things I’m not sure this is the whole story.
I can see how a person’s belief system might determine whether they see aliens, demons or old hags. But what if a person both dreams of contact with aliens and demons?
I suppose the rational answer is, “Well, that means he believes in both aliens and demons.”
About ten years ago I read a book called DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE, which is about a man who experiments (on other people) with a hallucinogen called DMT. A fascinating part of his findings is that a slight majority of them, while experiencing themselves out-of-body, had interactions with alien-like beings they described as reptilian or reptile-like, or insectoid.
Again, the rational interpretation would be, “Well, all of his experimentees must have believed in aliens.”
But does believing in aliens really make you have dreams of aliens? I’ve had plenty of lucid dreams where I’ve tried to dream of certain things—things that I didn’t only believe in, but knew existed, like a friend or a place—and I wasn’t successful at dreaming of it. The Expectation Effect, and the Belief Effect, is invoked to explain why we dream of certain things, but those explanations lack breadth, because they cannot explain why—if our thoughts and beliefs guide what we dream of—we’re not able to dream of what we want at any time in a lucid dream.
Plus, those explanations are often applied to situations in which the dreamer is quite certain that he wasn’t expecting something. It will be said, “Well, you must have been subconsciously expecting it.” I do think, of course, that the Expectation (and Belief) Effect have a lot of explanatory power, and I acknowledge that much of what happens in our dreams comes not from our conscious mind. On the other hand, I think an individual is generally qualified to say that he does or doesn’t believe in aliens. If he doesn’t, and he still encounters them in a lucid dream, it may be that the subconscious mind is simply appropriating the alien image regardless of belief. We do not have to believe in demons to accept that they’re (theoretically—or, in other words, imaginatively) scary.
So there’s expectation, belief, and the appropriation of images regardless of either, and maybe despite either. Is there a third option? I think there is. From a few experiences, I think it’s possible for the mind to encounter images that didn’t originate in itself.
I agree.
As you can tell from my Avatar, I have an alien theme going…interest in aliens actually led me to lucid dreaming and the 49days was inspired by the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. In the same book it was proposed that consciousness starts in the fetus at 49days with a flush of naturally produced DMT.
Anyway, to reply to your post. I dont ‘believe’ in aliens but I have tried to encounter alien greys in lucid dreams. I have never succeeded in this although the content of the dream was definitely changed by the intent to encounter an alien.
In SP episodes I have had recently, its not grey aliens or demons I encounter. I would call them goblins and I have no idea where the root of their creation is. I dont think its just my sub conscious. I’m inclined to believe i’m taping into the same source that our ancestors encountered when they described goblins, elves and other small folk. I dont know whether my geographical location, heritage or culture is feeding these ‘creations’ but I do think there is some kind of external feed that I’m taping into in this state of mind.
Going back to the original question whether an OBE requires REM sleep.
I happened to be looking through Lucidity Letters and found ‘Comments on OBE’s and Lucid Dreams’ by Stephen LaBerge. You can find the paper here:
spiritwatch.ca/lucidity_1985_december.html#4.2l
LaBerge seems to think they are associated with REM sleep but does point out that Rogo argues that the two states are difference since OBE’s occur from any state except REM. I guess Rogo is trying to justify that OBEs are not in the LD spectrum. Further reference to both LaBerge’s and Rogo’s earlier work in the paper.