Introduction

A few months ago I helped a fairly large group of people to learn how to induce lucid dreams and out-of-body-experiences. We started with many traditional methods and received mixed results. While I am able to induce OBEs and LDs at will, I find it difficult to pass my experiences to them. The traditional methods require too much conscious efforts and improvisation, and they are not all that effective to begin with, often laden with mysticism and misconception. We needed a simpler, more direct approach.

By analyzing my own routines and the successful cases of my students, I developed a simple recipe -- a set of exercises that can be easily practiced without requiring lots of mental efforts and fin-esse. The result has been promising. Many students were able to experience LDs or OBEs at much higher frequencies. Some people have even learned to induce the experiences at will, in as little as two months.

The Routines  

1. Lay flat on your back, take a few deep breaths. With your eyes closed, repeat the following procedures, for 10-20 seconds each:

a) Observe the blackness behind the eyes. Do this intently, with the expectation that you will start seeing hypnagogic images.

b) Listen to the noises in your head. Again, intend to hear humming, buzzing, or hissing sounds.
c) Attempt to move part of your body (hand, foot, fingers, etc.) without using any muscles. Do not visually imagine this movement; rather, you should imagine yourself feeling the sensation of the movements.

2. Cycle through the above procedures for at least 4 times.

The above are essentially warm-ups. You should do them with the intention that you will generate hypnagogic illusions, but chances are you will never feel anything in reality. Do not let this discourage you. You should finish the required 4 cycles diligently. However, as you do it, do not focus so much as to wake yourself up. Perform the steps slowly, allow yourself to get immersed into your sleep. Random thoughts will start to enter your mind, and you may even at times momentarily lose consciousness. You will find yourself becoming slower, even getting lost in the process. All that is good! Just make sure you pull back from the random thoughts and resume from where you left. DO NOT do it so quickly. Try to stay fully awake and clear! If you finish the cycles in two minutes then they are not going to be useful at all.

3. Turn your body to find a more comfortable position and allow yourself to fall asleep quickly. Let go everything, and do not even think about lucid dreaming!

4. As you fall asleep, occasionally glance the blackness behind your eyes. Be relaxed and do not stare. Try not to move your eye muscles at all. When you begin slipping into your dreams, you will notice random thoughts popping up in your head. Do not restrain them. The occasionally glance should be able to keep them on a loose leash.

The Result

When successfully executed, you may experience the following:

You fall asleep, but then suddenly wake up with a strange sensation all over your body. It is difficult to describe, but when it happens you will know. This is when you are ready to experience an OBE.Your random thoughts materializes into a dream, with you being fully aware.A false awakening. This can happen a lot with this exercise. Therefore, you should remember to always perform dream checks no matter how convinced you are.During the warm-up phase, you see hypnagogic images, hear buzzing sounds, or genuinely feel the movements of your body without using muscles. If this happens, you can simply forget about the rest of the steps, and instead try to amplify the sensations. For the images, try to allow it to become more vivid, to the point it finally wraps around you and develop it into a dream scene; for the sounds, try to increase its volume; and for the movement, you should try to increase its range.

When to Practice
DO NOT do this as the first thing you go to sleep. This is a common mistake with novices. You are simply wasting your time! You should NEVER do this exercise without at least 4 hours of sleep under your belt.

I recommend doing the exercises after 6 hours of sleep, or combining it with WBTB for best results. If you normally wake up naturally at night, you can also take advantage of these natural awakenings, and do the exercise multiple times per night.

Conclusion

Please keep in mind -- inducing LDs and OBEs is by no means an easy task. Therefore you should not give up too easily. It is possible that you may not experience anything at all with your early attempts. Do not be discouraged. Keep at it and you WILL see results. And should you have any questions please do not hesitate to post them here. Good luck to you all!  

Originally Posted by angie746:
Ok you have explained it well but like Origami says this method is already in the WILD section, not sure if you have seen it , if it's not there it's definatley somewhere on this site..not exactly like yours but more aless the same but like I said you explained it well

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Thank you angie. You actually said it -- "not exactly like yours". Please keep in mind, inducing OBEs and LDs is a "subtle" task; therefore, any subtle differences may play big roles in the process, and result in radically different experiences.  

Originally Posted by Darkmatters:
Ok, now that you've responded several times it's clear you're not spamming or anything like that. However, Origami was making what seemed like totally correct assumptions based on a few facts.. namely like he said, it's a brand new account and the method is so similar to techniques already well-known. Plus the fact that you seem unfamiliar with forum policy concerning making multiple posts in a row and having multiple accounts adds up to puzzling. I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to explain why people would think that.

But now I hope people can get on to discussing the technique itself rather than the circumstances surrounding its posting. It does sounds like a good method, and similar in many ways to what I use. I'm glad you mentioned toward the end that it's to be done after at least 4 hour's sleep... I thought you had forgotten to mention that.

Anyway, good post! Welcome back to DV!
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The reason that I'm switching to a brand new name is because I want this recipe to be credited solely under this user name, which I have been using on another LD forum with more than ten thousand users. This recipe has been in circulation among these people for quite some time now, and has become very popular due to the somewhat "unexpected" effectiveness -- yes in the beginning many were skeptical also and dismissed it as yet another WILD tutorial.

The initial hostility I've received so far from the above posts really was depressing... I agree with you and hope people will start focusing on evaluating the recipe instead. Better yet, I hope people will actually try it and not just read it.  

Originally Posted by Solarflare:
multiple accounts= ban
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Looks like some of us are more concerned with policies than anything else.  

Originally Posted by Solarflare:
im just saying
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Okay.... Don't blame you.  

Originally Posted by Sassafrax:
*shoves her dirty hand in origami's mouth*  Shh....

Ok so i tried this last night and got to the "find a better position and fall quickly asleep" part. And i got stuck in the half-sleep. I don't know if you know what i mean ( i made a thread about it called something like "half-dreams"). I was basically stuck in this all-gray half-sleep world where i can only slightly interact with my main DC and from there it's super hard to get to full dream mode.

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First, thank you for at least giving the recipe a try... sigh.  It is not uncommon that you experience this half-sleep thing while doing the exercise. There are several possible causes:

- Your mind is not letting go, so you never enter the dream completely. Sometimes when this happens it feels more like day dreaming. Random thoughts pop up all the time, and some may turn into dreams briefly, but do not feel real at all -- usually third person perspective or being narrated by you. When this happens, you should try to fall asleep ASAP instead of hanging onto your last string of consciousness. Chances are if you do fall asleep, your consciousness will come back soon after you enter a real dream; or you may experience a false awakening.

- You are in a prolonged false awakening state. Basically you think you are awake, lying on the bed and practicing; but in reality you have already fallen asleep. If you find yourself lying there for a long time, you should repeat the first and second steps in the recipe. By cycling through the watch-hear-move cycle, you are further pushed toward the state of phase entrance. Meantime, they serve as a detector -- if you are already in a false awakening, then cycling these techniques will likely generate results. For example, you may suddenly find your hands moving freely in a weightless fashion. Congrats! You are experiencing an OBE!

- You are stuck in a non-REM period of your sleep cycle. This can happen due to waking up earlier in the night and start doing the exercise without getting enough sleep. REMs come more frequently and become longer toward the end of our sleep. Even though we can experience OBE/LD without REM, those experiences outside of the REMs are hardly desirable.

Here are some suggestions:

- The best time to practice is after doing a morning WBTB.
- Do NOT be afraid of falling asleep. Keep in mind that none of the good things will happen if you don't at least fall asleep once  

- If you find yourself staying awake for too long, then try repeating step 1 and 2 of the recipe (the cycling technique).

- Develop the habit of performing the cycling technique at least a couple of times upon any awakenings during the sleep.

Hope that helps!  

Originally Posted by bigphil:
Thanks for the explanation. So what you're saying is basically when I have a false awakening I'm having an OBE. Since my room would be an illusion wouldn't it mean that I'd still be dreaming whenever I start moving around?

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Yes, the room is an illusion, just as in a lucid dream. This usually becomes more obvious if you step outside, as you will likely step into an all new environment. People who practice the old school methods do tend to see more realistic surroundings, and that's because their trainings have programmed their subconscious mind to do so -- you see what you believe during a trance. It's also the case if you exercise visualizations a lot.  

Originally Posted by Kilpikonna:
I agree with CosmicIron - good to see other people do realize as well, that what people call OBE is mostly a LD. I have been practicing "Astral projection" or OBE techniques and then realized when I got successful, that I am in a dream environment - even when the place looked mostly like my real bedroom, house and garden. Robert Bruce just calls the little changes "reality shifts" and says it is the "real time zone" (RTZ) anyway. The realization, that I had WILDs and therefore finding actually useful information on this forum here, gave me a big boost.

Still I believe there is a private dream area and a public "astral area", but as that is for the "beyond dreaming", I won't go into that here.

Back to topic: I like your recipe. I will apply it when I wake up during the night. So far I had no LD during nights, which I am working on now.

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Traditional astral projection techniques are usually very convoluted, but in the end your projection always works the same way as WILD. The complex trainings essentially just cultivate/program the subconscious mind to adapt to a particular spiritual/religious paradigm. As a result, lots of disciplines are injected into a practitioner's subconscious; thus, people tend to have more “realistic” and “stable” experiences during projection, in comparison to lucid dreaming.  

Having said all that, I'm not dismissing LDs/OBEs as pure illusions and nothing more. Through practice, people indeed can achieve a higher state of mind, which opens a portal that leads to all kind of wonders and miracles. Of course, as you said in your post, that is beyond the scope of this post, and therefore we will not get into that.