Lucid Dreaming? Out-of-body Experience?

Most of us are not naturally owners of special or paranormal skills, OBE's & Lucid Dreaming being part of them. The good news is that they are learnable skills, though there are not many experienced teachers on this subject. There are a few high-priced, yet unreliable, New-Age teachers and their special schools. Then, what about using books? There are many books on the subject Lucid Dreaming and OBE, old and new. But again, many of these books are not reliable and honest writings, leaving us at the mercy of luck. Now suppose one finds a teacher. The question then is: is this teacher a natural OBEer or Lucid-Dreamer, or is he/she a learned one? I suggest one can learn from both types. If a person is a naturally gifted OBEer or Lucid-Dreamer, he/she wouldn't know about the natural difficulties of us ungifted ones. Someone who learned from scratch had to resolve and overcome lots of problems and difficulties. On the other hand, naturally gifted ones should be able to help one better in "otherworldly issues", as one expects they should know what they are doing "over there" better than the ones not as skilled... Still, the path to learning OBE or Lucid-Dreaming is characteristically an individual learning experience, due to its special internal-mental characteristics, and knowledge is frequently built by self-experimenting and studying ones own possibilities and experiences.

My case is one of those not naturally gifted ones. I became involved with OBE and Lucid Dreaming through a series of coincidences that generated experiences. Then, my learning was helped by my natural curiosity and self-experimentation. I have to admit that I have not overcome all of the problems I have encountered with OBE and Lucid-Dreaming. Problems with "how to always have an experience at will", though I am able to recognize the characteristics of an OBE-type or a Lucid-Dreaming experience and act accordingly. Problems with "how to keep a clear and lasting awareness", though I have had relative success in keeping it at a certain extent. Besides, I have not found a truly sure-fire set of techniques because I have kept to one set of techniques I once learned in Brazil. What I have found personally, is how to increment those techniques for my own purpose, and how I discovered interesting phenomena through the use of these techniques.

In the following I will be describing the procedures I follow on a more or less regular basis. I have divided these procedures in two parts. In the first part I introduce the technique which I call "the bare bones exercises". In the second part, which I call "the filling in the bones", I will comment about what I have learned that works, as a result of the years of (on and off...) practicing these exercises, most of the time by myself. They include techniques of concentration, relaxation, fixing of memory, and most importantly, of MOTIVATION, that I use. It includes the next important trick (at least it's important for me): that of detecting the "phenomena", as it will demonstrate if the whole procedure is working or not. I also comment on how to detect or produce sleep onset features, that lead to the conscious leaving of the physical body, the OBE-type experience. Where applicable, I include samples of experiences from my own notes.

Perhaps my difficulties and successes might give some good ideas or new insights to "wannabe OBEers or Lucid-Dreamers". Also, they might help you to not be shocked or disturbed with "phenomena" that you may experience on the threshold of the sleep/awakening onsets. So, bear them with me.