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Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever conducted a simple experiment to prove you were not just lucid dreaming? It is a pretty easily falsifiable claim

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Easy. Have someone go to the other room. OBE yourself into that room and see how many fingers they're holding up. Confirm if you were correct.

Now try it with someone skeptical and not credulous. If I'm in the other room I won't be holding up any fingers at all I'll be doing something else entirely which you won't guess.

That's something I wonder myself. I need to do a few more, maybe up to fifty before I have enough subjective data to be certain. What is this experiment to prove I'm not lucid dreaming? You can put your fingers on your nostrils and blow through fingers in lucid dream, irl the air stops, but in OBE, you might not have a full body. One time I did, other time I was just like a shadow, half formed. Really weird.

There's a progression I've experienced which I don't think is something a lucid dream is characterized by. Got a hand out, fell out and quickly went back because it scared me. Got out and couldn't see and gave up. Got out and out the front door and that freaked me out. Then finally a half mile down the road.

My next journey I'm going to go farther in my area to places that I've never been and see what they compare to on a fully conscious visit.

One thing that shocked me though was going through my front door. At the time in the OBE I thought this isn't the same front door, particularly the stained glass. Then I went and looked at it in real life after and I realized my OBE recollection was more accurate than my previous knowledge or memory of it.

>What is this experiment to prove I'm not lucid dreaming?

For decades magician and debunker of supernatural claims James Randi placed a new object on his dining table every month, and offered a million dollar prize to anyone who could tell him what the current object was. Of course the prize was never claimed.

Ask a friend down your block to put something on their dining table. Do your OBE thing and write down what you saw. If you're right you'll have proven you're not lucid dreaming and be world famous for demonstrating the reality of psychic phenomena.

Yeah I could try something like that. Maybe even stick a playing card that I don't look at somewhere.

I don't really care about proving this to anyone else. My main reason is to try to talk to my daughter I lost last year. Been really hard...

How could you not care about proving this to others? You seem to harbor some hope that you can talk to a passed loved one via this or a related means? If you could prove this isn't just lucid dreaming then you could have the help of other people interested in taking the same path. Think how many people you could help and how this would revolutionize science. Don't you want to validate the method by which you're investigating the world? Shouldn't that be step one? I'm completely dumbfounded by your response.

> How could you not care about proving this to others?

Because he knows he couldn't. Maybe only subconsciously. The OOBE phenomenon is so old, experienced by so many, it would be ridiculous to thing the proposed tests weren't conducted before. They were, many times, and they failed.

It's just not my driving motivation. The other thing to note is that its not the exact physical world, this plane is similar though. So these proofs might not even apply.

I lucid dream regularly without even trying, and what you're describing sounds exactly like that. I hope you're self-aware enough to realize that your circumstances (personal / emotional investment in having this be real) make you one of the least reliable people to trust on this subject.

This is technically feasible with the secret key of Kriya Yoga, leaving the body through the third eye stargate.

I mean you could ask someone to leave a note (maybe a couple of random sentences or a password) somewhere that you have never seen. Go read it when OBE then when back in your body write it down and then get your friend to compare the note you wrote to the original.

A simple experiment would be to have someone else write down a number on a piece of paper while you weren't in that room, have you do your OBE thingy and then accurately tell that number several times.

Even just once would be near proof, assuming care was taken to ensure the secret didn't "leak" somehow. Maybe have an open-minded neighbor put a sticky note on the wall by his bed. If you find the number, you'll know it's real.

You can see what's going on on your roof perhaps? I'm very interested in the subject and spend a lot of time meditating but have yet to experience anything one might consider mystical, outside of the use of psychedelics.

Gateway tapes but that book I referenced in another post here really works. Just takes a few nights. Essentially you go to sleep with intent to exit. Wake up six hours later. Get out of bed for a few minutes. Go back and practise exits as you get yourself in the mind awake body asleep state.

Doing it straight from meditation is quite advanced, takes decades but can be achieved for many in weeks with binaural beats that trigger the brain to get into theta state with a frequency following effect.

My friend I don't want to be critical, given that you have written that your are grieving, but you are likely dreaming, not astrally projecting. There's no way for you to tell them apart.

That's possible. I think it will take another year to truly know.

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