While in a dream I will become lucid and examine my dreamscape to stabilize within it. I read in William Buhlman's "Adventures Beyond the Body" that if you're lucid dreaming and your vision isn't too clear or if your dreamscapes aren't stable you can simply will it or intend it to become more clear and stable by saying forcefully and confidently, "INCREASE CLARITY NOW!", I used this effective technique and expanded it a bit further to use verbal commands to create just about anything. The most notable and important command I found was "INCREASE LUCIDITY NOW!!!" or "INCREASE LEVELS OF LUCIDITY NOW!!".
While in an LD I will say "INCREASE CLARITY NOW!!!" and this usually brings crisp resolution and increased awareness and focus. After I stabilize again and become comfortable, I will then intend verbally, "INCREASE LEVELS OF LUCIDITY NOW!". This brings even more intensity. The colours of the background may take on hyper-sensitive tones, possibly a wavering background, it's intense!!! It is essential to reground and become stabilized in the LD before you intend to INCREASE LUCIDITY or else what often occurs is that the increased lucidity will be too much for you to handle and you will either lose you visuals or just wake up immediately. Likewise after you have heightened your lucidity you must then re-stabilize until you are comfortable at this higher level before increasing it more.
I will repeat this process of increasing levels of lucidity and then re-stabilizing (usually three times is good enough for me) until I get to a point where I am SO lucid that I can just intend or verbally command or even just think "FIND THE PHYSICAL BODY BUT DON'T GET TRAPPED INTO IT. PREPARE FOR AN OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCE!!!" After practicing this for a while, I don't have to say the whole thing anymore, but it helped in the beginning. Now, I can just get to a sufficiently heightened level of lucidity and then just verbally say
"IT'S TIME FOR AN O.B.E.!!"
If successful at this point, I'll be more conscious of my actual body which before hand I'm not at all. Before I'm more in tune with my dream body if any body at all, whereas now I'm conscious of my physical yet still in an altered state of mind. It's like the interim phase between a series of lucid dreams where there are no visuals, you're conscious you're dreaming and of your body lying in bed but you just wait it out in the black void until some visuals start to form into a new dreamscape which you enter into the next lucid dream cycle.
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Well I am digressing, it seems almost like a slight bilocation of awareness, being aware you're observing this from somewhere/place beyond ties of the body and yet you're also slightly conscious of feeling your body but in a strange loose energetic way. So if I can get to this point, I will wind up being in a state of bilocation and my physical body will be in the vibrational state. There will be a flowing mild current of electric-like ripples through my body. It doesn't hurt but sometimes the vibrations can get very intense and seem "hard to take" even spooky or scary at first. (It gets easier each time until eventually it is pleasurable :)
But If I can just resist the urge to fight the vibes or analyse them, INSTEAD of thinking so much and analysing what's happening, I will just let go of all of myself into the moment. Because I know that if I am in the vibrational stage I am that much closer to lifting "out" of my physical body. I will now *know*
that I AM going to have an OBE and I just vaguely know and intend to have one. The vibrations will increase and become full-blown waves which are rippling through me accompanied by a humming buzz-like "Mmnmnmn" sound.
It's almost like all of my body is being contracted to one point which is slowly flowing up and then down my physical body.
At this point, once the vibrations are full-blown I now will intend to leave the body. I will just rock my awareness back and forth or sometimes just the thought and intent is enough, but eventually I'll just be catapulted somehow from the body, sometimes a lift-out, sometimes I can just stand up and get "out" of bed and body
It's definitely an OBE not a lucid dream, I'll be hovering in my exact room for a while then I go to explore my apartment, yet within a few minutes I will see things I know couldn't be happening: people I don't know in my living room, being able to move things, etc.... I take this as a sign that dream imagery is superimposing itself on the astral realm. When this happens I have two options I can re-induce an OBE which will zap me right back into my body which will again be in a full blown vibrational state and I can go through the process again OR I can just go with the flow of the semi-OBE/LD.
The amount of lucidity and consciousness are still at extremely elevated levels so I usually wind up just "running with " and maximizing the lucid dream and seeing where it takes me or using this state to follow through with whatever goal I have planned. I have tried to re-induce an OBE when the visuals indicate that I am now in a lucid dream, and I have had success with this, but the same thing usually will happen. After I'm "out" for a while the OBE will become a highly lucid dream...which ain't that bad :) So I usually am happy to be in the LD and explore it to see what it has to offer.
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I find that I can exit the body successfully but can only maintain "true" visuals of my real actual apartment for a few minutes before the OBE starts to merge with an LD-state. Although I may be setting far too strict of guidelines for an OBE, since I have heard from many accomplished OBErs who often travel in realms which are NOT "real" in the sense that they are NOT an exact replica of our "real" waking world, but I would love to be able to prolong the OBE awareness in this "real" environ. I did once manage to float through my door and into my roommates room and I saw them sleeping in their bed. They started to awaken and I was SO conscious that I really thought I WAS in their room and became scared that I had been sleepwalking and they would wake up and find me in their room.
It was that REAL or rather I was perceiving the incident as THAT REAL!!!
They did wake up and I hovered into the corner of the ceiling. They noticed me and that was when I realized this must be a lucid dream because there is no logical way to explain how I could be hovering on the ceiling and them "seeing"
me unless we were in a dream...or whatever altered state you want to label it as :)
But the story continues, I saw what they were wearing and noticed that his girlfriend was wearing a yellow felt sweater that I'd never seen her wear before so I thought how strange that I wouldn't picture her in something I knew she might wear. There was no way I could have seen her wearing this sweater that night because I was sound asleep before they had come home and she had NEVER worn it before. What was STRANGE was that the next day she had on the exact yellow sweater that I had seen in my LD or was it an OBE...or is the LEVEL OF AWARENESS that matters!!!!
Feel free to play the Twilight Zone theme right now, dodeedoo deedodee, -hehe -
Anyway, I hope this INCREASE LUCIDITY command/technique can be used to help others "out", and improved on or modified to fit your needs. Keep in touch with results or additions. And if anyone has advice on how to prolong the OBE without slipping into a lucid dream please share anything that you think might help...Or any other successful methods which may seem related.
I believe if you find a method which works well for you then you should stick with it because everyone seems to have techniques and methods which are tailored toward their individual characteristics. Try everything but continue to use what works. That way you can pragmatically develop a process which works for YOU. I'll always try new methods but usually have more success incorporating the new techniques with ones that have worked in the past or new methods which are similar to the ones that have already been working for me.
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Why reinvent the wheel when you can just upgrade it?? Maybe it's the subconscious responding and becoming used to certain techniques which allows certain methods to work better??