Posts Tagged ‘insomnia’
O.B.E. Vibrations – Why Everything You Know About Them Is Wrong
Here in part 10 you’ll find out why everything you’ve read about O.B.E vibrations in books is wrong and you’ll find out the 3 easiest ways to tell how close you are to an O.B.E.
The Top 3 Signals To Tell How Close You Are To An Obe
If you’ve never done an O.B.E before, it’s extremely difficult to know if you’re making any progress until you’re actually already out of your body or in a lucid dream. What you need are easy to detect signals that you can use like road signs to tell you how close you are to succeeding. In this section we’ll cover the top 3 most common road signs. These are:
1 – The sleep paralysis wave 2 – Pre O.B.E rushing noises 3 – Vibrations
Sleep Paralysis Wave: Your Primary Signal
We already covered the sleep paralysis wave in Lucidology 101 part 2. Essentially when your body shuts itself down in sleep paralysis you’ll feel something like a heavy lead blanket feeling being laid on your body. This feeling is unmistakable and a sign that you’re very close to success and you can use the exit techniques we’ll cover in part 12 to turn the paralysis into an O.B.E.
Pre-O.B.E. Rushing Noises: The Second Most Frequent Signal
The second road sign to watch for are pre-O.B.E rushing noises. When you tune in between stations on a radio you get the sound of random static and white noise. Once you’re back on a station again things come in clearly. It’s the same thing with O.B.E.s. You start out completely focused in your normal waking environment and as you drop into a subconscious focus you pass through a kind of no man’s land where you’re not really conscious and you’re not really subconscious.
Rushing Noises Can Sound Like A Tornado Or Freight Train
When you’re tuned to that no-man’s land frequency you hear rushing noises that sound like random static or a train rushing by.
Vibrations: The Most Famous Progress Signal
About the same time you hear rushing noises you may feel what are called O.B.E vibrations. Vibrations are probably the most famous phenomenon associated with O.B.E.s and they’re also the effect that has the most misconceptions. Almost everything to be found in books on O.B.E.s about vibrations is simply wrong and so this is a place where a lot of people get stuck. They reach the vibration stage and then get hung up because they use an ineffective method from bad advice they read in a book.
The 3 Critical Vibrations Misconceptions
The 3 misconceptions about vibrations are:
1.) What they are
2.) What they mean
3.) How to use them.
What Vibrations Are Not
Here’s what vibrations are not. Vibrations are not a subjective kind of thing where you it’s like you’re “feeling the vibes, man, far out!”. Vibrations are much more mundane than that.
What Are Vibrations Like?
If you make a VVVVV sound, the feeling of vibrations in your lips is very similar to the feeling of vibrations that often appear along with medium stages of paralysis. Sometimes the vibrations can been extremely strong and feel like electricity, other times they are entirely absent. It’s very rare for vibrations to be strong enough to be painful, usually they just feel like a harmless buzzing in your head and chest area.
Types Of O.B.E Vibrations
However sometimes they can go throughout your entire body. These can be incredibly loud and feel like you’re holding on to a chain saw. A lot of people report feeling them in the spine. In one case I woke up into an O.B.E in my bed and it sounded exactly like there was someone with a hedge trimmer outside my window. I realized it was because I had off the chart vibrations that were coming from what I later found to be the L1 lumbar vertebrae in my lower back. I used deep breathing to return myself from the O.B.E because I was running more energy than what seemed safe.
Most O.B.E Vibrations Are Harmless
That was a very unusual experience and most of the time you actually won’t have any vibrations at all and if you do it’s no more powerful than the feeling of a vibrating cell phone.
The basic thing to know is that once you’ve had vibrations, you will know it. There won’t be any question in your mind about it because it’s just a buzzing feeling and noise.
Misconception #2: What O.B.E Vibrations Mean
The second misconception is that most books will tell you that when you have vibrations you’re ready to exit into the O.B.E. This is completely the polar opposite of reality. Vibrations mean that you are NOT ready to exit and here’s why.
Double Energy From Two Signals
Physical and nonphysical awarenesses are both types of signals that you focus on. During the middle stage of an O.B.E exit you’re making the transition from one to the other and you experience both physical and nonphysical signals. These signals have energy. When you sum both of these signals together you pass through a phase where you’re running double the amount of energy you normally would.
Double Energy Can Result In Intermodulation Distortion
If this energy is more than your system can comfortably handle, you get distortion. The big fancy signal processing name for this is intermodulation distortion. The name is not so important as the fact that this energy hump does not go on forever, it comes and then goes and this is critical to understanding how to deal with vibrations.
Vibrations Mean You’re Not Ready To Exit: Wait For “The Quiet Zone”
Because the excess energy hump comes and goes, you get a ‘quiet zone’ once you’ve focused completely out of physical focus and in to nonphysical focus. So it looks like this: you start out in physical focus with no vibes. You relax into a near O.B.E and get light vibes. You relax almost to the point of separation and get majorly heavy vibes. This is where most people screw it up because of the bad advice in books. The trick is to simply continue to relax deeper and deeper past the vibrations until the vibes have smoothed out completely. Once you’re in the quiet zone after the vibes, that’s how you know you’ve completely shifted into the O.B.E.
Unbalanced Tires Analogy
The energy hump is like a truck I used to have with unbalanced tires. When it got up to 45 MPH it would start vibrating the entire truck. At 55 MPH it would smooth out again. The range of 45 to 55 MPH was a transition range that caused the tires to vibrate with each other. Pre O.B.E. rushing noises and vibrations are the same thing: you’re coming in and out of phase with two different physical and nonphysical signals.
What About Vibrationless O.B.E.s?
Keep in mind that the vibrations only happen when the total energy goes beyond what your nonphysical body is capable of conducting. The more O.B.E.s you do, the more energy you can run without problems and the less vibrations you’ll have. Eventually almost all your O.B.E.s will be vibration-free.
Vibrationless O.B.E.s
You’ll go from waking awareness, with no vibes, all the way to the O.B.E with no vibes which means you’ll have to rely on other signals that we’ll cover later to tell if you’re in the O.B.E. The up side to this is that vibrationless O.B.E.s are much brighter and clearer than O.B.E.s where you have to punch through massive vibrations.
Why Vibrationless O.B.E.s Are Brighter And Clearer
Why would that be? In a chainsaw, the noise is caused by friction. Vibrations are a form of noise, so vibrations are a form of friction. Friction is waste of energy. Chainsaw noise is a waste of physical energy and so vibrations are a waste of nonphysical energy.
When you’re in vibrations you’re wasting energy so it’s a state you want to relax through as quickly as possible.
Misconception #3: What To Do With Vibrations
The next misconception is what to do once you’re in vibrations. For instance, Robert Monroe wrote that you should try to ’sweep’ the vibrations up and down your body before separating. Is this good advice or not?
Relaxation Is The Only Solution
The only way to reduce vibrations is to reduce the pressure that causes friction and that means relaxing.
If you reach vibrations and then try to do something, whether it’s running the vibrations up and down your body or anything else, then the one thing you’re NOT doing is relaxing. And relaxing is exactly the one thing that you need to do when you have vibrations because only way to release the friction is to relax. No other solution will work.
This is why vibrations are a major obstacle for more OBEers, because when they try to do something, anything, they are unable to simply relax into the quiet zone.
Definitely do NOT try to force your way out when you’re in the middle of vibrations. You’ll almost certainly just get pulled right back into your body since you haven’t yet matched up with a nonphysical focus.
The “How Close To An O.B.E? Meter”: Relax Through Vibrations
Even if you do manage to muscle your way out, you’ll have spent so much energy on the exit that the resulting O.B.E will probably be so dark and low energy that you’ll just stagger around and not be able to do anything fun anyway. It’s far better to relax through vibrations into the quiet zone and then slip out of body effortlessly.
The Sneaky Loop Hole: Photographic Trance
By the way, there is a sneaky loop hole that allows you to cheat so you can do O.B.E.s even when you’re in the middle of vibrations. We’ll cover this sneaky cheat in Lucidology 102 part 3. The trick is to enter something called a photographic trance which allow you to have O.B.E.s at much lighter levels of trance so you don’t have to be in full sleep paralysis to separate.
Exiting Even In The Middle Of Vibrations
This loophole also opens the door to a technique called ‘trance recycling’ . Trance recycling allows you to have a dozen or more O.B.E.s in a row and quickly rack up a massive number of O.B.E.s in a single session. To find out more about Lucidology 102, visit www.Lucidology.com
Because many O.B.E.s are completely vibrationless, you need several other road signs to tell how close you are to success. In the next section we’ll cover the 5 crucial progress signals to tell how close you are to an O.B.E.
New To Lucid Dreams And O.B.E.s? Why Waking Sleep Paralysis Is The “Lucid Dream Holy Grail” Because It Puts You In A Subconscious Focus Without Using Visualizations
If you’re new to lucid dreams and O.B.E.s and you’re wondering what to do first, well here it is. Here is the big secret that I wish I had known when I first got started with lucid dreams and O.B.E.s. You’re about to find out why sleep paralysis is the holy grail for new OBEers because it’s how you can access your subconscious without having to practice using any visualizations at all.
If you’ve ever woken up in the morning and found that you couldn’t move or make a sound for a few minutes, you’ve had sleep paralysis. This used to happen to me and I had no idea why or what it was. But as it turns out, this was the trick that opened the door to frequent O.B.E.s for me after having insomnia for years.
Sleep Paralysis Protects You During Sleep
The question is “what is sleep paralysis and how can you use it?” Sleep paralysis is a protection mechanism your body uses when you fall asleep. If you were to dream you’re doing something very active, such as running, and you weren’t in sleep paralysis then you would move your limbs when you’re asleep and you’d wake yourself up. To prevent that from happening, your body disconnects your voluntary muscle system from your mind so that you can dream all you like without waking yourself up.
Usually You Enter “Mind Asleep, Body Asleep”
Normally you’re not aware that of this happening because by the time your body shuts itself down in sleep paralysis, your mind is already asleep and unaware of what’s happening. In other words you enter a state of ‘body awake/mind asleep’ before entering ‘body asleep, mind asleep’.
Sleep Paralysis Is Actually A Lucky Break
The whole trick to lucid dreaming is to enter a subconscious focus without losing awareness. Here’s how sleep paralysis does this for you.
Sleep Paralysis Automatically Puts You In A Subconscious Focus
When you’re awake your brain is in what’s called a ‘beta’ state. Beta means your dominant electrical brain waves are oscillating at around 14 to 30 cycles per second.
When you enter sleep paralysis, your brain automatically puts itself in “dream mode” which is called a ‘theta’ state. Theta is slower than beta and is around 4 to 7 cycles per second.
Knowing this secret allows you to avoid one of the major mistakes most people make when first starting out in O.B.E.s.
Major Mistake! Most Books Say To Do O.B.E.s In One Step
Most books on O.B.E.s say to simply induce an O.B.E in what is basically a one step process. Going directly from a waking state to an O.B.E is possible but it’s difficult so this is not what I recommend you start out with.
Two Transitions To Success, Not Just One!
Instead, you’ll progress much faster by making it a two step process. You first use the sleep commands we’ll cover later to trick your body into falling asleep and enter sleep paralysis.
You then use exit techniques we’ll cover later to convert sleep paralysis into an O.B.E and separate from your physical body.
How Most People Discover Sleep Paralysis: By Waking Up In It!
Now, how do you do that? The way you’ll usually become aware of sleep paralysis is that you wake up in it and find you can’t move or make a sound.
Sleep paralysis often feels like there’s a heavy lead blanket on you. It’s not that there is really anything on you or that your muscles have become weaker. The feeling is because your brain has to send a stronger nerve signal than normal to get the same muscle movement. That makes it feel like you’re having to overcome some kind of resistance when you try to move.
This feeling also usually makes it feel like it’s harder to breathe but it’s actually a natural sleep process. Sleep paralysis happens every single time you fall asleep.
But… Isn’T That Dangerous?
You may be wondering if sleep paralysis is dangerous and if there’s a way to break free. Sleep paralysis is not dangerous because it’s something your body does every night. Plus, here is a secret “safety release” trick you can use to free yourself from paralysis so you always have a backup plan.
How To Break Sleep Paralysis 100% Of The Time: Use Deep Breathing To Contrast Sleep Breathing
The only way your body knows for sure if your mind is awake is if you move. This is a problem when you’re in 100% sleep paralysis which is preventing you from moving. Luckily paralysis is limited to your voluntary muscle system like your arms and legs. Your breathing is semi-involuntary so you still have control over it even in deep paralysis.
If you enter sleep paralysis and decide you want break free and wake up, simply change your breathing pattern to something other than the sleep breathing pattern your body is in. The most effective way I have found to do this is to begin breathing deeply and slowly.
After 10 or 15 seconds your body will notice the change and bring you out of paralysis. Not many things are 100% reliable in lucid dreaming but this has worked for me every single time.
How To Find Out If You Have Sleep Apnea
A very few people have reported that they woke up in sleep paralysis and noticed that they weren’t breathing at all. The problem is not the paralysis itself, but that they had an existing health condition called ’sleep apnea’.
Sleep apnea basically means that you stop breathing when you’re asleep. So this is one of the side benefits of using sleep paralysis to have OBEs: you’ll find out whether or not you have sleep apnea.
Keep in mind there’s a big difference between the normal “heavy lead blanket” feeling that comes with sleep paralysis versus not breathing at all. If you find you stop breathing entirely then you may have sleep apnea and should see a doctor about it. If you only feel the heaviness sensation then everything is normal.
“Accidental” Versus “Deliberate” Sleep Paralysis
So far we’ve talked about the case where you somehow manage to wake up in sleep paralysis. However that’s basically an uncontrolled and accidental process. The question is what can you do to make it happen more consistently?
Toward Consistency: What If The Body Falls Asleep First?
The idea is to flip the sleep order around so that instead of entering “body awake, mind asleep”, you enter of “mind awake, body asleep”. When this happens you’re actually aware of the process your body goes through when it falls asleep. This is our main secret trick for doing visualization-free lucid dreams and O.B.E.s. This transition is the most important skill to learn in this part of the course.
Why? Because when you can put your body to sleep without losing consciousness at any point, you have 100% perfectly clear dream recall. This is called a “wake induced lucid dream” or WILD. It’s as easy to remember what you did in a WILD as it is to remember the last 15 minutes or so of normal waking awareness. With this method, you don’t have to think back through and hazy dream phase like you normally do with most dreams.
If You Actually Succeed… What Does It Feel Like?
So what does it feel like to actually watch your body falling asleep?
Instead of waking up in sleep paralysis and with the heavy lead blanket feeling, when you induce paralysis consciously you actually have the sensation of the heavy lead blanket being laid on your chest. It often feels like it begins at your feet, comes up over your chest and ends at your head. When that process is complete you’re in sleep paralysis.
So how to get this process to happen consistently? Here is the key. And this one fact is so important and so critical that I’m giving it a big fancy name. It’s called the “Fundamental Theorem of Sleep Paralysis”.
The Fundamental Theorem Of Sleep Paralysis
The Fundamental Theorem of Sleep Paralysis is that if you wake up and fall asleep without moving at all, sleep paralysis becomes extremely likely.
Sleep Paralysis Is Most Likely When The Body Was Recently Asleep
And when I say, without moving I mean you wake up and don’t move your eyes, don’t open your eyes, don’t scratch any itches, you don’t move at all in any way. The idea is that your body doesn’t really know for sure if your mind is actually awake or not. If you don’t give it any signals otherwise, it will assume that the mind really is still asleep and re-paralyze itself.
The Next Step: The “Stop, Drop & Roll” Sleep Commands
The foundation skill you need to develop this knowledge into a full-blown induction is to fall asleep quickly. So in the next section I’ll show you how you can make your body first ask for permission to asleep and then I’ll show you how you can tell it “yes it’s time to fall asleep”. This trick is called the “stop drop and roll” sleep command and once you have it you’ll never have a problem with insomnia again and you’ll dramatically accelerate your O.B.E progress.
New Lucid Dream Tricks: The “Stop, Drop & Roll” Sleep Command To Fall Asleep Fast
Here in Lucidology 101 part 3 you’re about to find out use the “stop, drop & roll” sleep command to fall asleep quickly by making your body ask to fall asleep & then giving it the “yes” command to tell it to fall asleep.
In the last section we found that sleep paralysis is most likely when you wake up and fall asleep again without moving at all. So to do that you need a way to fall asleep quickly and reliably. The question is, how do you do that?
Mind Body Independence
The key is in the principle of “mind-body independence”. Mind-body independence means that your mind and body never know precisely what the other is doing. For instance, your body is growing hair, transcribing DNA, digesting food, making blood cells and regenerating tissue. Your mind is mostly unaware of all these. If you had to think about each one you’d never get anything else done. This is mind-body independence.
Mind-body independence also works the other way. When you mind falls asleep your body never really knows completely for sure what happened and if your mind is really asleep or not. So how does your body know when to enter sleep paralysis?
The key is that even though the mind and body act independently, they still communicate using a language. By learning the words in this language you can talk to your body biologically and make it fall asleep when you want it to.
Your First Word In This Language
Your first word in this language is called the “roll over signal”. When your body has been very still and relaxed for a long period, your body starts to wonder if maybe your mind has fallen asleep. It would be a very serious mistake if the body went to sleep too early, so the body sends a test signal to the mind. This test signal feels like a strong urge to roll over.
The Roll Over Signal
If the mind is asleep, then mind does not respond and the body decides that the mind really is asleep and shuts down. If the mind does respond to the roll over signal and you move, then the body knows the mind is still awake and does not fall asleep. So this a major mistake that you need to avoid: Never respond to the body’s roll over signal because it sends a message to stay awake rather than fall asleep. This can be difficult because the signal can become so strong that it’s excruciatingly painful.
You can visualize the way this works with the two dotted arrows on this chart: As you become more relaxed, the blue dotted line gets lower and lower. At the same time, the red dotted line represents the strength of the roll over signal that the body sends out which grows and grows. When these two lines meet the body decides to enter sleep paralysis and shuts down.
So the question is: what can you do improve this?
The 4 Types Of Roll Over Signals
There are four types of roll over signals you’ll encounter.
Fast Relax
1.) The first type is the ‘fast relax’ case. This happens when you relax quickly and deeply and the body decides to just go ahead and paralyze without sending much of a roll over signal, if any. This is a good case to have because it happens quickly.
Slow Relax
2.) The second type is the opposite case. If you’re tense but stay still long enough and if the body is tired enough, the roll over signal builds and builds until it becomes very painful and extremely hard to ignore. However, if you’re too tense the body won’t paralyze no matter how long you’ve been still. This is called a “signal swell”.
Urge Surge
3.) The third type is called an “urge surge” which is a very useful case. In an urge surge, the body sends out a strong signal out of nowhere. If you’re able to resist the signal for three or four seconds the body ends the surge and paralyses all at once. If you’re not relaxed enough, this will probably result in only partial sleep paralysis which is not ideal. We’ll cover ways to transform partial sleep paralysis into a successful exit in Lucidology 102.
The Quick Switch Roll Signal
Finally forth type of roll signal is called a “Quick Switch”.
4.) If sleep paralysis is the holy grail for new OBEers, the quick switch signal is the holy grail of urge surges. It happens quickly and rewards you with nice and deep sleep paralysis almost instantly. It’s also a very unmistakable feeling which is extremely useful because it lets you know what’s going on.
The Two Cases That Cause A Quick Switch Signal
This usually happens in one of two cases:
First: when the body is really tired and wants to go to sleep right now
Second: when the body was very recently asleep and is deeply relaxed.
In order to make those cases more likely you need a way to bring on the roll signal as fast as possible.
So how do you do that? The trick is to use the right body position.
Body Position Is Key
The body position that brings it on the roll signal faster than any other position is to simply lay flat on your back with your arms at your side. When you lay with your arms at your side you will probably tempted to place your hands on your stomach or cross your ankles. This is a veiled form of the roll over signal. If you get that sensation it means you’re on the right track, just make sure not to give in. Keep your arms at your side and your ankles slightly separated.
Using this simple bit of information we can eradicate the single biggest cause of insomnia: the toss and turn syndrome.
The Tossing And Turning Syndrome: Big Time Cause Of Insomnia
When you toss and turn in bed, what you’re doing is resetting your body’s internal sleep timer each time you roll over. The body is trying to go to sleep by sending you a roll-over test signal but you keep telling it not to sleep when you move. So you end up stuck in a toss and turn loop and never get to sleep. This results in insomnia.
So you may be thinking is that it?? You just lay there? Not quite There are a few things you can do actively to speed things up and tell your body to fall asleep.
3 Body Positions
What we do is add body positions before and after the hands-at-your-side position. The first position is to lay with your hands above your head. The final position is where you roll over and then fall asleep in that position.
We choose these positions very carefully so that when you move from one step to the next you release the maximum amount of tension possible.
“Stop, Drop And Roll” Releases Tension In Chunks
This way instead of haphazardly releasing small amounts of tension by tossing and turning over and over, you release it in a exactly two calculated big chunks and get it over with all at once:
Make The Body Ask To Sleep Then Tell It “Yes”
Here’s what is happening at each step.
1.) “Stop” – The Relax Step: In this step you have your arms above your head and relax as deeply as you can. Once you feel you’ve relaxed as far as you can, “drop” your arms down to your side which releases all the shoulder tension that you couldn’t get rid of from just laying there. This is the purpose of the first body position – to get rid of shoulder tension all at once.
2.) “Drop” – The Ask Step: When you drop your arms down to your side and relax the body will seriously start to consider that maybe the mind is asking it to go to sleep. This position will make you want to roll over which is what you want. The stronger the roll over signal, the more the body is asking for permission to sleep. If you get to a point where it feels like it’s plateaued, slowly roll over which puts you in step 3.
3.) “Roll” – The Yes Step: In this step you tell the body, “yes it’s time to sleep.” Simply roll over and then don’t move until you’re asleep. Your goal is to not move again the rest of the night.
Roll Over Signal Changes Depending On Your Position
The sneaky thing is that the roll over signal changes based on how you’re laying and that may trick you into moving. The roll over signal when you’re on your back tends to center in your chest. However the roll over signal when you’re on your side tends to make you want to move your legs. Don’t fall for that! Don’t bend them or straighten them or anything. Keep your legs perfectly still. The urge to move your legs is actually a disguised form of the roll over signal and you must resist it at all costs!
Best Body Position For Healthy Sleep
Here’s the best final body position that’s the healthiest for your back according to researchers at the University of Cleveland. You want to lay on your side so your neck and spine are neutral and relaxed Bend your hips and knees a bit to lower pressure on your spine To relieve sciatic nerve strain, put a pillow between your kneeson Sleeping on your stomach is not recommended because it puts your back in an odd position
Bonus Secret To Build Up Roll Signal
We have one last very powerful trick in reserve that you can use when you have a really hard time falling asleep.
The key is to build up a super strong roll over signal before even getting into bed. Rather than trying to fall asleep in your bed, lay down on the floor next to your bed on your back and relax.
This is unpleasant and after forcing yourself to lay there perfectly still for 10 or 15 minutes, when you finally allow yourself back into bed your body will be so grateful that it will grab the chance to fall asleep as quickly as it can.
In extreme cases you can even lay on an uncarpeted floor such as in your kitchen which will build up the roll signal very quickly.
In the next section we’ll cover 5 more powerful sleep commands you can use to trick your body to fall asleep while you keep your mind awake to have O.B.E.s.
Sleep Tracks – Sleep Aid Medication
Sufferers of insomnia often resort to using a sleep aid medication to get a good night sleep. They are often desperate to be able to sleep with ease. What they fail to realize is that their use of a sleep aid medication is not that advisable. Medication only makes them dependent, thus causing more sleeping troubles or problems to them.
Sufferers of insomnia often resort to using a sleep aid medication from the non-benzodiazepine medications. Non-benzodiazepine medications include Ambien, Sonata and Lunesta. They are often recommended by doctors because they are safer to use as they impose less risk of dependence and addiction to the drug and impose less harmful side effects.
This is in comparison with those benzodiazepine medications. A sleep aid medication can provide immediate relief to sufferers of insomnia. It can help sufferers get a good night sleep. However, it can also cause some problems.
It can cause dependency or addiction. It can cause hang overs and other adverse side effects. Use of a sleep aid medication must not be the first option of sufferers of insomnia.
There are some other things that they can try first like use of sleep aid guides or programs. One of the sleep aid guides or programs that they can try first is the Sleep Tracks by Yan Muckle. As of now, it is considered as the most effective program or guide that can enable sufferers of insomnia to recover and get good sleep without the help of any sleep aid medication.
New To Lucid Dreams And OBEs? Why Waking Sleep Paralysis Is The “Holy Grail” Because It Puts You In A Subconscious Focus Without Using Visualizations
If you’re new to out of body experiences and lucid dreams and you’re wondering where to get started, here it is. In this article you’re about to find out why sleep paralysis is the holy grail for new OBEers because it’s how you can access your subconscious without having to practice using any visualizations at all.
If you’ve ever woken up in the morning and found that you couldn’t move or make a sound for a few minutes, you’ve had sleep paralysis. This used to happen to me and I had no idea why or what it was. But as it turns out, this was the trick that opened the door to frequent O.B.E.s for me after having insomnia for years.
Sleep Paralysis Is A Protection Mechanism
The question is “what is sleep paralysis and how can you use it?” Sleep paralysis is a protection mechanism your body uses when you fall asleep. If you were to dream you’re doing something very active, such as running, and you weren’t in sleep paralysis then you would move your limbs when you’re asleep and you’d wake yourself up. To prevent that from happening, your body disconnects your voluntary muscle system from your mind so that you can dream all you like without waking yourself up.
Usually Your Mind Falls Asleep, Then Your Body
Normally you’re not aware that of this happening because by the time your body shuts itself down in sleep paralysis, your mind is already asleep and unaware of what’s happening. In other words you enter a state of ‘body awake/mind asleep’ before entering ‘body asleep, mind asleep’.
“Mind Awake/body Asleep” Is What We Want
The whole trick to lucid dreaming is to enter a subconscious focus without losing awareness. Here’s how sleep paralysis does this for you.
Sleep Paralysis Puts You In A Subconscious Focus Automatically
When you’re awake your brain is in what’s called a ‘beta’ state. Beta means your dominant electrical brain waves are oscillating at around 14 to 30 cycles per second.
When you enter sleep paralysis, your brain automatically puts itself in “dream mode” which is called a ‘theta’ state. Theta is slower than beta and is around 4 to 7 cycles per second.
Knowing this secret allows you to avoid one of the major mistakes most people make when first starting out in O.B.E.s.
Major Mistake! Most Books Say To Do O.B.E.s In One Step
Most books on O.B.E.s say to simply induce an O.B.E in what is basically a one step process. Going directly from a waking state to an O.B.E is possible but it’s difficult so this is not what I recommend you start out with.
Two Transitions To Success, Not Just One!
Instead, you’ll progress much faster by making it a two step process. You first use the sleep commands we’ll cover later to trick your body into falling asleep and enter sleep paralysis.
You then use exit techniques we’ll cover later to convert sleep paralysis into an O.B.E and separate from your physical body.
How Most People Discover Sleep Paralysis: By Waking Up In It!
Now, how do you do that? The way you’ll usually become aware of sleep paralysis is that you wake up in it and find you can’t move or make a sound.
Sleep paralysis often feels like there’s a heavy lead blanket on you. It’s not that there is really anything on you or that your muscles have become weaker. The feeling is because your brain has to send a stronger nerve signal than normal to get the same muscle movement. That makes it feel like you’re having to overcome some kind of resistance when you try to move.
This feeling also usually makes it feel like it’s harder to breathe but it’s actually a natural sleep process. Sleep paralysis happens every single time you fall asleep.
But… Isn’T That Dangerous?
You may be wondering if sleep paralysis is dangerous and if there’s a way to break free. Sleep paralysis is not dangerous because it’s something your body does every night. Plus, here is a secret “safety release” trick you can use to free yourself from paralysis so you always have a backup plan.
How To Break Sleep Paralysis 100% Of The Time: Use Deep Breathing To Contrast Sleep Breathing
The only way your body knows for sure if your mind is awake is if you move. This is a problem when you’re in 100% sleep paralysis which is preventing you from moving. Luckily paralysis is limited to your voluntary muscle system like your arms and legs. Your breathing is semi-involuntary so you still have control over it even in deep paralysis.
If you enter sleep paralysis and decide you want break free and wake up, simply change your breathing pattern to something other than the sleep breathing pattern your body is in. The most effective way I have found to do this is to begin breathing deeply and slowly.
After 10 or 15 seconds your body will notice the change and bring you out of paralysis. Not many things are 100% reliable in lucid dreaming but this has worked for me every single time.
How To Find Out If You Have Sleep Apnea
A very few people have reported that they woke up in sleep paralysis and noticed that they weren’t breathing at all. The problem is not the paralysis itself, but that they had an existing health condition called ’sleep apnea’.
Sleep apnea basically means that you stop breathing when you’re asleep. So this is one of the side benefits of using sleep paralysis to have OBEs: you’ll find out whether or not you have sleep apnea.
Keep in mind there’s a big difference between the normal “heavy lead blanket” feeling that comes with sleep paralysis versus not breathing at all. If you find you stop breathing entirely then you may have sleep apnea and should see a doctor about it. If you only feel the heaviness sensation then everything is normal.
“Accidental” Versus “Deliberate” Sleep Paralysis
So far we’ve talked about the case where you somehow manage to wake up in sleep paralysis. However that’s basically an uncontrolled and accidental process. The question is what can you do to make it happen more consistently?
Toward Consistency: What If The Body Falls Asleep First?
The idea is to flip the sleep order around so that instead of entering “body awake, mind asleep”, you enter of “mind awake, body asleep”. When this happens you’re actually aware of the process your body goes through when it falls asleep. This is our main secret trick for doing visualization-free lucid dreams and O.B.E.s. This transition is the most important skill to learn in this part of the course.
Why? Because when you can put your body to sleep without losing consciousness at any point, you have 100% perfectly clear dream recall. This is called a “wake induced lucid dream” or WILD. It’s as easy to remember what you did in a WILD as it is to remember the last 15 minutes or so of normal waking awareness. With this method, you don’t have to think back through and hazy dream phase like you normally do with most dreams.
If You Actually Succeed… What Does It Feel Like?
So what does it feel like to actually watch your body falling asleep?
Instead of waking up in sleep paralysis and with the heavy lead blanket feeling, when you induce paralysis consciously you actually have the sensation of the heavy lead blanket being laid on your chest. It often feels like it begins at your feet, comes up over your chest and ends at your head. When that process is complete you’re in sleep paralysis.
So how to get this process to happen consistently? Here is the key. And this one fact is so important and so critical that I’m giving it a big fancy name. It’s called the “Fundamental Theorem of Sleep Paralysis”.
The Fundamental Theorem Of Sleep Paralysis
The Fundamental Theorem of Sleep Paralysis is that if you wake up and fall asleep without moving at all, sleep paralysis becomes extremely likely.
Sleep Paralysis Is Most Likely When The Body Was Recently Asleep
And when I say, without moving I mean you wake up and don’t move your eyes, don’t open your eyes, don’t scratch any itches, you don’t move at all in any way. The idea is that your body doesn’t really know for sure if your mind is actually awake or not. If you don’t give it any signals otherwise, it will assume that the mind really is still asleep and re-paralyze itself.
The Next Step: The “Stop, Drop & Roll” Sleep Commands
The foundation skill you need to develop this knowledge into a full-blown induction is to fall asleep quickly. So in the next section I’ll show you how you can make your body first ask for permission to asleep and then I’ll show you how you can tell it “yes it’s time to fall asleep”. This trick is called the “stop drop and roll” sleep command and once you have it you’ll never have a problem with insomnia again and you’ll dramatically accelerate your O.B.E progress.