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When I was still a child, I stumbled on a method for inducing an out of body experience that I later started calling “the Zen trick.” It has been the most consistently successful method I’ve used. Today, I tell the story of how I came across it, and explain how it works.
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There are several competing theories on how and why sleep paralysis occurs. One of them is that while most of your brain is still electrically and chemically asleep, the circuits involved in hyper arousal—active during states of excitement, anger or fear—switch on. That brings you more or less fully awake, but without the electrical and chemical changes needed to allow you to perform voluntary motions. One day I decided to test that notion, and I deliberately let myself become afraid while half awake and half asleep. I became afraid, reached the state of sleep paralysis, and had an out of body experience. If you have the courage, you can embrace and use your fear.
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After some time working with the rope technique, I got sick of it, and came up with a method of my own. There is no such thing as a perfect method that works every time you use it, but I had much better luck getting out of body with the method I came up with, and describe in today’s episode.
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Today, we finally start to explain some induction techniques—things you can do with your mind, in order to cause your mind to seemingly step out of your body. We’ll start with a method called the rope technique. You use an imaginary pair of hands, to climb an imaginary rope.
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Lucid dreams and out of body experiences are a realm in which what you think and expect greatly influence what you experience. I don’t buy it, but as this model was what was in my mind when I had my early deliberate successes, I’ll share it with you.
I’d planned to make an entry, just oh so chalk full of intriguing philosophical questions. In my personal project journal, this is entry 13, and it was going to be about the use of death in AI and digital life projects, specifically, my project. How so some ever never clever, I hit a snag.
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Sometimes, if you are falling asleep, or waking up, you find that you are awake, but you cannot move your body. Though it can be frightening, especially if you’re not expecting it, this state, called “sleep paralysis,” is the state from which you can have an out of body experience.
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There is a strange state of consciousness that you pass through whenever you fall asleep. It can also happen while you wake up, so long as you wake naturally, and not because of something like an alarm. In this state, strange images and sensations take place. You’ve probably noticed them before. Even if you haven’t, exploring this mental state is simple. You need only pay attention as you drift off into slumber.
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The mainstream scientific community has their own biases and preconceptions. Several misguided ideas have cropped up in the research into dreams and dream states, that later turned out to be false. Today we look at a few of those ideas and the way science has bent over backwards, to hold onto certain ideas, and avoid others.
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If you become aware that you are dreaming, while you are still dreaming, you have an opportunity to experience almost anything you’d like. However, your dreams seem to have a mind of their own, and sometimes, odd things happen when you try to control them.