Comment by torotonnato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torotonnato | Hacker News Reader

I read "Out of body experiences" by Robert A. Monroe a long time ago, a time of gullibility and innocence. If I remember correctly he used a technique to induce that effect and I made it mine. Sometimes it worked, here is the recipe: lay on your bed with eyes closed, try to avoid any disturbances. Concentrate you attention to your inner ears and you'll hear a high frequency hiss (similar to tinnitus). Don't sleep and keep focused! After some time (I think as you are falling asleep) the volume hits a dramatic crescendo and, in my case, culminates in a devastating powerful dry explosion without a discernible source. It lasts a moment but can be really scary.

If you can keep calm without awakening, you'll be on the "other side". There is no transition. In my case, the "other side" is just me, in my bed as if I'm awake. I tried some experiments, but I felt too weak to do anything really interesting. I moved a couple of pillows, for instance, and when I woke up they were in the original position, untouched.

A really bizarre experience, I stopped trying when I finally got close to full-replication-mode on three consecutive nights. I felt very weird as if I was starting to mess with the boundary between dream and reality.

If you know more about this phenomenon let's keep in touch!

I‘m a lucid dreamer. You are describing the WILD (Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming) technique. It’s basically entering sleep without losing consciousness by staying focused on some thing (usually your breath but anything works). It’s not an out of body experience. You were dreaming.

Hearing sounds (exploding head syndrome or other sounds), the feeling of spinning, seeing shapes etc. are symptoms of the hypnagogia (transition from wakefulness to sleep) stage. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

LD is a learnable skill. I can recommend resources if anyone wants.

You would be doing the universe a service by recommending resources. I think everyone should at least be given the option to check out lucid dreaming.

Please share! This is something I've always wanted to explore.

Set periodic alarms on your watch or phone, 3-5 per day, same times every day. Every time it goes off, take a few minutes to look around you and try prove to yourself you're not dreaming. Note the stability and regularity of the world around you, and that where you are and what you're doing makes sense (hopefully).

The point is to establish a habit such that you end up repeating this habit even when you're dreaming. Often you won't realize you're dreaming when you do this while sleeping, but sometimes you will. This lucidity sometimes doesn't last long, but duration will get longer and frequency increases with practice.

This is a DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dreaming) technique, reality checking. These techniques are generally not as reliable as WILD, you can’t control the timing of your LDs and they tend to create pseudo-lucid dreams[1]. If you have a consistent sleep cycle (REM and non-REM), I recommend WILD techniques. If you are young it’s even easier, as sleep phases tend to get messed up as you get older.

1: These are just regular dreams in which you dream about that you are lucid dreaming. Your awake consciousness is not actually present, your memory is as suspended as it is in regular dreams, you don’t notice flaws in the dream reality and it feels distinctly like regular dreams (like a “bystander”) as opposed to the self awareness feeling in lucid dreams. See https://youtu.be/fqWikLRVby8?si=J0E2BpxO4ff4mam4

Thanks! Resources are much appreciated

Basically, stay away from all the totally clickbait LD YouTubers and Reddit kids who are too hyped to care enough to learn what they are talking about. There are two guys I know who aren’t a scam, and I recommend this one[1]. He is clickbaiting with thumbnails and titles too (tbh to survive in YouTube you need that) but at least he doesn’t lie in the video. Tho at this point he exhausted every possible video that can be done about LDing so he is mostly reuploading old content.

On his website there’s a FAQ, Basics and a list of techniques[2].

The real gem was the lucid dream forum[3] which was closed this year. You’d find people who are veterans at things you’ve never imagined was even possible. People doing Tibetan sleep yoga (remaining conscious throughout the entire night sleep) and dream yoga (meditating in dreams), LSD-style experiences without LSD (seeing in 4 dimensions), people who have advanced their degree of control to basically playing Minecraft in creative mode, floating in void or going to space or mars in dreams, dream achievement contests (do X in your dream), theories about sleep and dreaming derived from anecdata which seemed to be one step ahead of today’s science, even a guy claiming he is doing ADA (All-Day Awareness, an impossibly hard technique). One notable thing I learned was that the LD veterans were of the opinion (from their own experiences) that so-called “dream logic” is a myth. They believed that simply the part of the brain responsible of memory remains asleep during REM sleep, and this lack/unreliability of long/short term memory leads to a broken reality, not any inability of your brain to reason. This rings true to me from my own experience as well.

I know all I recommended was a single guy’s website, forum and channel, but to be honest this topic is so niche that he’s the only guy I know who is earning his living through LD without clickbaiting people and thus have an incentive to take it seriously.

Technique-wise I can explain one which works well for many people: 1. Have a consistent sleep. Go to sleep early.

2. Wake up 4.5 or 6 hours after you sleep. You need to wake up at the start of the REM. Maybe use an Apple Watch or something.

3. Wake up yourself enough (walk around, drink water) to commit to the thing you’re gonna do next.

4. Go back to bed. You are going to sleep now, so tell yourself you are going to now sleep. Do everything normally, get into your normal sleep position etc. Then, once you are completely ready to sleep, continue with the process of entering sleep, except a single thing. I say except a single thing, this is crucial, because your body and brain needs to believe that it’s gonna sleep now like it does every single night before you sleep. Everything is the same. Your body is in the same process of relaxing, your mind is in the same process of maybe wandering in pre-sleep thoughts, if that’s how you sleep. The thing is: focus on your breath. Focus on its sound or the sensation of it in your nostrils. Pretty soon you’ll start experiencing hypnagogia. I usually get a feeling like I’m spinning in a washing machine, but different people get different things. Maybe a sound or visions. Focus on whatever is the symptom. The more you focus, the more it will intensify. After a short while the dream starts. You may have vision or not in the beginning. For many it starts in your bed and you may think you woke up. Use some reality checks like counting your fingers (5 or 6?) or opening the light (does it work?). If you believe they’ll show whether you are in a dream they’ll work.

1: https://youtu.be/fqWikLRVby8?si=J0E2BpxO4ff4mam4

2: https://www.thelucidguide.com/lucid-dream-resources

3: https://www.thelucidguide.com/forum

When you become a lucid dreamer, and you consistently have lucid dreams, how do you have a "normal" dream/sleep night?

You choose when to lucid dream, at least with WILD class of techniques. I don’t have any sources for this but from my own experience, I believe while LDing you don’t the full amount of rest you’d otherwise get. I believe this is why we by default don’t LD.

I’ve not seen any consistent LDer (like once every night) complaining about it.

I have, for many years, experienced sudden loud buzzing/sine tone sounds accompanied by vivid monochromatic zig-zagging phosphenes (as I have more just learned they are called) when I’m in the process of falling sleep and suddenly jolted awake by some external stimulus (a sound, usually).

These appear to last just a fraction of a second and are rather jolting. I wonder if my mind was “playing” these sounds and sights as part of the normal sleep process, and the sudden waking just raised my consciousness enough to catch a glimpse of them.

Anyhow, thank you for sharing, I have long wondered if this was a known phenomenon, and now I have a name for it!

Interesting! I'll try to keep this as short as I can since I am writing on the phone, but I came up with another technique which I used with success a few times, and it's similar to yours in a way.

I should point out I think out of body experiences are controlled dreams and what I achieved was a regular lucid dream, didn't even had the illusion of me lying on the bed, I just were somewhere else.

The technique is this, also great for relaxing, since it does not focus on trying to relax

Instead of focusing on your ears, focus on your eyes. Close your eyes but keep staring through your closed eye lids. When you do, you usually see some optical illusion moving , I guess that happens to everyone. Keep staring and try to make those things into some image (a glass, a table, a mountain, etc). If you may briefly have a real vision of that. Depending on how much you have gotten good with it, it may last a fraction of second or you may start a mostly controlled dream.

Works best when you're tired or just woken up (depends on how you wake up though).

There is a lot of amateur literature on this topic, written by Monroe and others, even though Monroe in particular made an honest attempt to tell what he knew. To my knowledge, some dzogchen and especially bon authors talk about this, although very reluctantly. Among the western authors, the most direct work on this matter is Leadbeater's "astral plane", but if you're looking for instructions on how to obtain such clarity of perception, you won't find anything, except the usual "learn to control your mind and everything will follow". I think the reason is partly to fend off lazy curiosity, but mainly because many who already have all that's necessary don't need any secret instructions, and those who are not there yet can't use a safe method. It's quite possible that in the near future this will provoke a social strife between those who can and those who can't.

I'll make a guess that the loud sound is just switching audio source. Sometimes the new source is some internal process, like breathing, but unfiltered. I personally heard my own breathing in this transient state that was amplified to the loudness of the Niagara falls, and "colored" with the same waterfall sound texture. Even though at the mental level I recognized the pattern of my breathing, it was hard not to yield to fear, so overwhelming the sound was.

I think you have pointed out something very important here concerning social strife. Even outside of this topic there is already a huge gap in understanding between those who perceive and those who judge.

I have read something similar, like there is a vibrating sensation and the loud sound is breaking a boundary condition.

How can we stay in touch?

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