John Quinley <jquinley@aros.net>
> This sounds like you were napping around late-afternoon. OBE's are more
> common when one is napping or dozing, due to the fact that the person is
> unable to go into a full or deep sleep. What happens in an OBE is you
remain
> conscious or, as in your case, very close to conscious, as your body goes
to
> sleep. As your body drifts off into sleep, it releases a chemical that
> effectively paralyzes you so that you don't act out your dreams. Sometimes
> this malfuntions and people end up sleep-walking and so forth. Anyway,
once
> you become conscious after your body had paralyzed you, you experience and
> OBE. You are not really out of your body. You are basically in a
> dream-state. But it feels much more real than a dream (in fact, it appears
> just as real as reality) due to the fact that you are living it with your
> conscious mind.
Isn't this commonly referred to as the Hypnogogic State? That state of consciousness can be the source of some very creative insights. It can also be the source of some real crap.
I read a lot on this subject 10-15 years ago and remember one author describing how the astral body is always connected to the physical via "The Golden Cord" . . . an umbilical analog, I guess. And that often the astral body will "snap" back into the physical from great distances causing the physical body to suddenly jolt. Of course, many people have this experience and wrongly conclude that, "Oh, so that's what that is. I was having an OBE!" I think most if not all of us have experienced this sensation where we're almost asleep and suddenly jolt back to wakefulness. For me, it often feels as though I am dreaming that I'm tripping or jumping. Is anyone more familiar with the real mechanics behind this phenomenon?
Here's another memorable story I read about a university professor who tried to research and confirm of deny the accounts of children in India who claimed that they remembered their past lives. Allegedly, children would provide great detail about who they had been, their family members, the neighborhood they lived in, their work, etc. A number of these stories had been followed up by non-professionals and the stories were supposedly confirmed. The professor attempted to use every means at his disposal to confirm of deny the possible validity of these stories. Most of the cases could not be verified, but some were (in his opinion) inexplicably accurate. The most bizarre turn of events according to him, involved one child who gave a quite detailed account of his past life. When they went to the house (in another town far from the child) where the child was supposed to have lived in his previous life, the person that he was supposed to have been answered the door! An unusual number of details of the man's life were apparently confirmed but he hadn't died yet! The professor concluded that this single case suggested to him that reincarnation was probably hooey, but the possibility existed that these children were telepathically tapping into some sort of thought-pool that included information from the deceased as well as the living.
This is all written up, but I would have to do some digging to get the reference.
Of course, what the professor didn't realize was that the children were probably having OBE's and traveling to other towns. And if I'm not mistaken, can't astral bodies communicate with the dead? There . . . that would explain it.
Scott Badger