Im really sceptic about that in OBE you actually leave your physical body behind and atleast in this point, I dont believe it. All my OBEs have been dreamlike, when Im in my room, my frunature are messed up and disordered, it’s like my “astral plane” is messed up or somehow wicked and I can shape the image and do things I can do in a normal LD, thats why I dont believe its nothing more than a high level ld.
Im not trying to offend/to be offencive against anyone who really believe that OBEs are real or/and that they have something to do with spirituality.
Just give me your own experiences why are you so convinced, that in OBE you actually leave your physical body behind.
And I’ve heard that they have even proven OBEs to be real with some scientifical tests
If so, I would like a link that has the results of the tests and info about the test group.
I told it here on this forum before dead…
I did test in my OBE with my bodydouble that was sleeping in my bed…
i tried levitating it and i throwed it into the garden through the open window…well then i tried to wake up and i succeeded…i woke up in my bed not in the garden…
I did several of those test while in an obe and they showed to be verry verry realistic dreams…
But of course i can only speak 4 myself…so in my case they are lds!
I dont think you leave your body at all. They are dreams. It can all be explained very rationally, as for seeing things on Astral trips and confirming them later, I think that could fall into an ESP experience, in the construct of a dream. Nothing actually leaves the body, but information is sensed and then presented to you, just like how you see and hear, only this happens on the virge of sleep.
Just my opinion based on stuff I’ve read though. I’d still like to do an actual OBE and then do a few state tests.
Its all up to what you call real.If you mean “in the real world” then theres no point to discuss cause its definetely not.Like Jeff mentioned-too many variables too many things mixed up.To me its separate realm,something “in between”.If we assume theres few or many different levels of astral planes the OBE one would be just next to ours…not that far to not be able to see some of the real world but far enough to have no “sures” about it.Thats why its so hard to prove.
If You mean real as existing im sure it exists…ive had both Lds and Obes and only reason im dividing it is that Obes has definately different feeling to it.I explained more in Big OBE topic or somwhere where theres more details.But roughly thats it.
problem is that when you sleep there is no surefire way to know whether you were dreaming or OBEing. Simply put if you goto sleep and end up OBE ing then chances are you are just dreaming about doing it. Particularly if it is something you are attempting.
is there proof that people can do such a thing? yes, alot of hospitals at one point started putting paper with 7 digit numbers high on a shelf because patients kept saying that they were watching the operations etc. when this became a big topic in america scientists suggested to put paper with numbers on a high shelf that none of the patients knew were there and should they saw anything would ask them what the numbers were.
only 4-10 correctly told the doctors the numbers, that said if i was out of my body i wouldn’t go looking for any stupid numbers either lol.
but yes OBE’s are possible but are quite often mistaken for while Lucid Dreaming.
It all depends on who you are, and what you beleive in. Most people’s OBE’s are nothing more then dreams, but there are some that are real…in the sense of you mind or soul or whatever you wish to believe in, leaves your body…as I said, its all what you beleive in…
Yes, I believe OBE’s are real, yet many, actually a big majority of them are often just LDs mistaken for OBE’s. I mean, when Jack said that he lifted his body and threw it out the window in an OBE, it couldn’t have been real, because he woke up in his bed. I think he was right saying it was an LD, but that doesn’t prove anything. I think alot of people who AP are just doing a kind of WILD, I mean, they have the same intention, same feelings. But that doesn’t mean that everyone does. I’ve heard of a scientific test once, where they set up two rooms, were completely sound proof, completely blocked off from each other, even seperated by a couple of floors. they put an American flag in one room, and asked the subject to astral project, and tell them what the object in the next room was. When he came back, he said it wasn’t very clear, and he didn’t know what the object was, but that he could draw it. He drew the American flag and hadn’t even recognized what he’d seen until he had it down on paper. All this was done under a very controlled atmosphere too. I’ll see if I can find a website on this or something similar.
I’ve never experienced an OBE, so I’m not sure what my personal views are yet, but I have just been reading about them in a book called ‘Concious Mind, Sleeping Brain: Perspectives on Lucid Dreaming’, edited by Jayne Gackenbach & Steven LaBerge, specificaly an essay called ‘A Theory of Lucid Dreams and OBEs’, by Sue Blackmore (just in case anyone cares).
Anyway, the point made is this: during day to day life, our brain takes in all of the sensory information it recieves and creates a model of reality in our brain from which we operate. In the case of LDs and OBEs, states of conciousness have been entered that change the levels of inputed sensory information - ie sleep and deep meditation. The brain tries to create a new model of reality, but all it has to go from is memory and imagination. According to Blackmore, the differences in LDs and OBEs come from the fact that they are actualy two ends of the scale - LDs occur when sensory input is low, and OBEs occur when sensory input is extremely high. This sounds fair enough for LDs - does anyone here who has eperienced OBEs agree with this?
Insane_goth, so why there arent global news announced that such OBE is “real”? It would be a dramatic news, because it would kind of “prove” that human has a soul.
I do believe in God and soul but still, not in OBEs being more than dreams because I’ve had enough OBEs to prove myself. Atleast with me their just dreams.
I dont think OBEs are real ether, but it wouldn’t really be on the news. If you are a profesional who people no ur not gonna suddenly sayy 'O ya everyone… you really do leave ur body!". And its the same with LDs, i’ve never heard a story on LDs on the news ever
I’ve had what I underderstand most people would call an OBE. An exceptionally vivid external viewpoint, from which you can seemingly observe the real world while your physical body is sleeping. I was able to see my self laying bed, and even move around the room to examine various objects. However, I can be absolutely sure that this was nothing more than a lucid dream.
Had it not been for the abundance of foreign objects scattered abut the place, I might have believed that I was actually viewing the world from outside my body. But then I investigated further. I read text several times over, and it changed. I moved objects around (which should be impossible). Above all, I was lied to by my trusty clock, source of many lucid dreams in the past.
I’m not trying to tell people that they are wrong, I’m merely pointing out that some LDs can be extremely vivid and realistic. I personally believe people mistake these for actual OBEs, without care to verify this claim by performing a simple reality check. Go on, give it a go. I bet the clock plays with you, as it does in any other dream state.
I think it’s too easy for people to think that they have to believe one of two extremes, that either everything is within the mind or alternatively that a person has a spirit that actually floats outside of the body.
Haven’t you ever thought that it may actually be neither of these? What if you don’t actually have a spirit that leaves your body but at the same time it’s not just all in your imagination? What if you are able to sense things beyond the 5 physical senses but without any part of you actually leaving your body? We may have other senses that we tap into when we are in altered states?
This doesn’t nesesarily mean that anything of us is actually leaving our body, merely that we are able to “see” things in a direction other than a straight line?
What I mean is, we all assume that in order to see something we have to be looking right at it? What if this wasn’t exactly true? What if in these altered states we had other ways of sensing things that appear to us as looking right at it?
We come up with all these logical reasons for things, but how do we know anything is how we perceive it?
The fact that somebody can see a number on top of a shelf while their body is lying on a bed, doesn’t have to mean that we have a spirit or soul that leaves our body when we sleep and so therefore when we die. Maybe it just means that our senses and perception (and also the universe) works differently to how we automatically assume it does?
Some people, as soon as presented with anything that seams to suggest that things may go beyond our 5 senses, seam too ready to jump to the conclusion that we have a spirit that leaves our body so therefore there is an afterlife and also a God, yet they seam to overlook what seams really obvious to me, and that is that yes it might actuallly be all in the mind but no the universe doesn’t conform to the simple rules our limited daytime perception leads us to so easily believe.
It almost seams to be a battle of Science Versus Religion. What if both are wrong? What then?
I said something similar to that. telepathically sensed information being presented to us, like how out brian creates an image out of light that hits our eyes, only this usually happens in sleep.
ESP has more to do with remote viewing and not OBEs. I think OBEs require a much higher state of consciousness than LD in order to be acheived, although it is along the same path as WILD from what I understand.
I know there are a lot of talented people on here that probably experienced OBEs and other things, and if I were one of them I’d keep it to myself also.
No, I’m not sayig ESP has more or less to do with anything. I know about remote viewing, I’m just saying that it may be possible that OBE’s are one of the ways telepathic information is sorted out in our brains.
But I dont know for sure, I’m just saying “Maybe”.
Alpha brainwaves are present during the onset of sleep. These are said to be the “ESP brainwaves”, from what I’ve read, and OBE’s, like you said, are kind of similar to WILDs, usually even initiated when trying to produce a WILD. WILDs also occur at the onset of sleep. I see a connection here.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to focus briefly on the subject of realism of experiences. For example, people who have Near Death Experiences claim that it was an extremely real and vivid experience, so this brings them to the conclusion that it was actual reality. However, even when we are fully awake and actually involved in “reality”, the pictures we are seeing and the sounds we are hearing are still in our heads, it’s still assembled in our heads, none of it is reality. It’s all just energy coming in though our senses, and our brain tries to make sense of it all.
So, if you think about it, to compare the realism of experiences had whilst in altered states (LD, NDE, OBE etc) against the realism of our perception of actual “reality”, and use this as some kind of a guide as to whether an experience is real or not, is actually completely nonsensical.
Note: This isn’t in response to anything in particular anyone else has said, it is simply something that I thought of whilst here, so I though I’d use this space to express it.
I agree Ed, well said. Our brains first process everything that is filtered through the five senses, so in a way everything we experience is “dreamed up” by ourselves. Arguing over what is more “real” is futile, in my view. What I experience during waking hours is real to me, when I dream those experiences are real to me, and when I experience an OBE it is real to me. Others may not agree with what I perceive to be occurring, but that does not make it any less real to me. I judge what is real according to my life experiences. Why do some people waste so much energy trying to shoehorn everyone and everything into a restricted and constrained worldview? Perhaps if they lightened up and kept an open mind they might discover new and innovative things about life and themselves, instead of constantly cross referencing everything with the current in vogue text books. I learn a lot from books and science, but I don’t allow other people to determine what I view to be my “reality”. Reality is for me simply what I experience and perceive through my physical and mental faculties. It would be improper of me to assume that everyone else will share the same experiences and perceptions.
It’s like that old issue of, how do you know we all see colours the same? This is something I thought about when I was a teenager.
What if how I perceive red is how you perceive blue? They would still be constant to us, so we’d still be referring to the same things and calling them the same names, but how do we know we see them the same? We don’t, and we never will. We just agree on what is constant, as in something being the same colour as something else.
Also, that brings me to another interesting concept. Have you ever heard of that thing where people experience one sense as a different sense? What I mean is, I heard that there are people whose brains our kind of “wired up” differently, and they experience taste as shapes, so for example, if they are tasting something sweet, they might experience it as as a round shape, and something bitter might be a cube shape?
Just imagine that though, what it’s like! Imagine if you experienced sight as sounds and vice versa, you’d hear strange sounds when you looked around you and see bizarre images when you heard music.
