Thursday, March 1, 2012

The Truth About Out of Body Experiences in Lucid Dreams


There are numerous online sales gimmicks about learning lucid dreaming in order to perform out of body experiences (also called OBEs.)  Some articles, e-books or blog posts will state that using a particular herb or device can help trigger OBEs. 

Except there's one big problem:

OBEs have never been proven to exist.

Yes, thousands of people believe in OBEs in or out of dreams.  Yes, OBEs have been used by shamans and saints for tens of thousands of years.  But just because a lot of people have a certain beleif doesn't make that belief right.  Everyone believed that the earth was flat, for example.  That gturned out to be wrong. (Sorry if that bit of information shocks you, but the Earth is round.)

Yes, you may have dreamt about travelling or looking down on yourself while you are asleep.  But this is a dream -- it does not mean that your consciousness actually left your body.  I'd like to see if people reported OBEs more after the introduction of motion pictures and television, but I haven't been able to find such proof.  When you think about yourself doing something, you tend to mentally see yourself as if you were watching a movie.  This may be what is really happening in OBEs during lucid dreams, notes Robert Waggoner in Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self (Moment Point Press: 2008.)

But what is really happening during an OBE?  They are products of a confused mind, notes a 2011 University of Geneva study.  If you've ever tripped on really REALLY good acid, then you know how real hallucinations can be.  The mind can also be confused due to illness, oxygen deprivation, extreme insomnia and from being disturbed in the sleep state.  This can happen to people with or without any kind of mental illness.

If you meet someone who has insisted that he or she has had an out of body experience, that person isn't necessarily trying to lie to you.  That person experienced something powerful -- but did it in his or her mind, not outside of his or her body.

Lucid dreaming is awesome enough it is.  There's no need to "sex it up" with false claims filled with magical thinking instead of real thinking.


Artist's depiction of an OBE from Wikimedia Commons

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