First i'll start with my experiences. I have taken hallucinogens many times, i have also(Out of interest) read about the many hallucinogens i have not taken, and read many trip reports as well as the documented effects of each. I have not yet been in an extreme DMT trip, but have read many reports of course. I have a problem with the DMT = OBE or NDE, the problem would be that i have had 2 OBEs in my life. Once on acid, and once straight. I know many people would quickly say, flashback, but thoughs people would not seem correct to me, as i have had flashbacks as well, and its nothing like an OBE.

The first OBE: On acid walking down a road with my friend, suddenly for no reason he puts his arm out and stops me and him, yet my vision continues to travel down the road like i'm still walking(2-3 seconds), i realize my body has stoped moving and feel as if my vission snaped back to my head.
-My Peak was over with by this point, and i wasn't really hallucinating anymore, no waves, no colors, no nothing but acid buzz.

The Second OBE: Sitting in a bathroom experimenting with the Pin-Wheel, got bored and continued to look at the pin-wheel(6ft away) while thinking of random shit, managed to slip away in thought(zone out,Space Out) and then started drifting towards the pin-wheel, as the wheel was in my face(within inches) i started to turn sideways, like i would see if i leaned my head to my shoulder, as i took notice the object that was 6ft away was now only inches from my face i had the exact snap back to my head feeling. Same deal maybe extended by one second (3-4 seconds).

How can OBE's be considered hallucinations? They really don't share anything in common(To my understanding). Say DMT is released in the brain which causes the OBE, considering this as fact(I know its theory, Consider!), my question would be, why are none of the other and most abundent effects not present at all? Where are the tunnels? Where are the typical hallucinogen effects? Effects: Visiual distortion(objects stretching, waves, colors, patterns), not to add the whole very intense buzz which all hallucinogens have.

The theory is DMT is released in the pineal gland to cause OBE's & NDE's, but if an overdose is taken, even created by the brain is still an overdose as above the normal, why do you get an OBE or NDE and not a DMT Trip, many parts of the DMT trip aren't present. In my OBE experiences, i never felt any effects other than weightless, floating sensation, but as soon as i realize i'm back to the state i was origanally, which is the same, only i'm aware of my body. Most important though is the no buzz on my straight experience, during the entire experience, as with DMT or any hallucinogen it gennerally takes quite the buzz before you even start to mildly hallucinate, yet i had no effects at all.

I don't think that DMT produced by the pineal gland or other organ causes OBE's.
There probably isn't one specific chemical responsible for these sensations.
Endorphins could cause this effect, but also endogenous nitrogenoxide.

People who meditate frequently are also familiar with this phenomenon.
The effect occurs as soon as you have brought your body into a very relaxed state. At the moment your muscle tension has been brought to a certain minimum, your mind can simply 'forget' the body.

The moment all attention of your mind is drawn away from the body, you have this effect immediately. Chemicals can cause it since they can block signals from the body to the brain, but also very intense concentration on something. Psychedelics make you more open to this effect, but are not nessecary.

Yes, but i wounder if its not just seeing lies of the brain, thats why i have had many ideas with hallucingens, because that state in which only some people can get to through meditation, many can get to on hallucingens, and my guess is with pratice of achieving to get that sensation and visuals(or State) of leaving your body would become alot more reproducible for valuable research in the lab. As it becomes very easy for someone and they have a near 100% rate of Visually leaving there body when trying on hallucigens, you can put it to the test to really 100% confirm weather it is just a hallucination or reality, being it never has been 100% confirmed because while straight its very rare to have an OBE at a good enough and consistant enough rate to test. To me it would be amazing to know this, either answer it would recieve. If it where real i would be amazed and of course many people would, then science would pay alot more attention and doing more research to try to explain how its possible. If it proved to be simply creative hallucinations it would answer the questions for many, as many are curious of weather it is just hallucination. I wouldn't see it taking millions of dollars in reseach to answer a really important question to many, so it is worth it. Plus if it proved to be false i could stop thinking about weather its real or not, planning to one day start my own research if no one ever does. And of course it would be illegal for me to mess with hallucingens, i'm not a scientist, i just like science. So really, if no scientists ever did this test it would never be proved, i would not risk getting arrested for feeding people illegal hallucingens even if i proved OBE's to be reality, you could possibly get 20 to life.

There is no way of telling how real this is. The simple exlanation is that it's not real and that you can just make the brain temporarily 'forget' the body.

If it's real, then it would still fit the same descriptions as when it's not real. Unless you would have some-one going out of his body and doing something like reading what's written on some hidden card. or something like that. But most of the time OBE's don't take long enough for doing those kind of things.

Good Stuff.

I was once dancing on LSD @ COSM in NYC. Alex Grey and his wife were there painting dressed up as skeletons....it was a magic night...
shpongle was playing (some DJ was spinning on the cdj's)...dorset perception...

I was flinging LED lights (some pulsing, some constant. white, green, blue) around attached to a string to my middle finger. I was spinning a wonderful orb for an hour or two when BAM!

I was up above looking down @ everybody!!! I was on the ceiling? Or above it looking through?? Not sure...
As soon as I realized all of this...I ZOOOOOOOOOMED BACK IN!!!! SO FAST!!!!

I was back on the dance floor, no one had any idea what had happened to me...I just kept on dancing....

What i'm getting at is someone training on hallucingens to get good at having OBE's, if you could make that part happen then from that point it would be very easy to prove it, i've heard(Not known weather reliable sources) lots of people claiming OBEs longer than a few seconds, no one said they can only last a few seconds. All you have to do to prove it is like you stated, something very simple as when you have your OBE enter this next room and explain in detail what object is on this table. I wouldn't see that being hard, the main thing would just be the training a person to OBE on demand, but its easier to have OBEs on hallucingens, i think it has to do with hallucingens making it easy for you to forget about your body, which in return would make it easier to learn to meditate on hallucingens to have OBEs and possibly acheive doing it on demand as long as your on hallucingens.

So really, if you can get someone to do it on demand, than it will be very easy to prove weather they saw reality in that room or creative hallucinations.

I've only had one OBE as people describe. I was lying down after a hard day and suddenly I found myself looking down at my body from the ceiling. Everything started spinning real fast and it startled me causing me to zoom back in as someone else described. I have no idea whether it was just a weird dream or actually this OBE that people talk about. I like the idea of testing OBEs by maybe having something written on paper in another room and you have to see what it is. I have never seen any reports about such experiments.

It's difficult to make many assumptions, especially for someone who's not educated in this area like myself. It's like lucid dreams, some of my friends never remember their dreams at all and never have lucid dreams. I remember them frequently, even childhood dreams...So I try to explain what a lucid dream is like and they don't really relate to it. Most of them can't even recall dreaming within one month periods or more.

The thing is, there's tons of people online that claim to have frequent OBEs, especially on dreaming or paranormal forums. The problem is that these are not reliable sources for assumptions...Assuming they aren't lying however, I often see books and guides dedicated to techniques for having more frequent OBEs. They go on to explain breathing exercises and different vibration fields and yadayadayada $40 later you're back where you left off...No OBEs whereas others will praise the books saying it helps them soar away like happy birds away from their bodies.

On the flip-side, there's also books dedicated to lucid dreaming and methods of having them more frequently. Then again, you have people who wasted money, and other who praise the books saying it helped them out greatly. Are these people lying? Are they just faking it and trying to assume the actual thing is happening when it's not? Why would they do this, surely they realize nobody cares about their false personalities on the internet right?

Then, you have someone like me, who doesn't need any books or guides at all to have lucid dreams. They come to me naturally, often on my days off when I can sleep in during the morning. There's definitely a state of mind at work, usually after I wake up and the sun is visible but then I fall back asleep again. There's no complex methods, there's no scientific analysis of vibrations or fields...It just happens, naturally.

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I try to keep an open mind about OBEs. I acknowledge that certain dreaming phenomenon happen to myself and not others. I realize that maybe they have OBEs like I have lucid dreams, and they don't really try to have them at all. Maybe OBEs actually ARE lucid dreams, who knows. I just give them the benefit of the doubt, even though I can't reproduce the OBE like I would want to.

When you lucid dream, while in the dream are you completely aware that you'er dreaming and can make decisions based upon that fact, or consciously control your dreams in other words? Or do you just feel, when you awake, that you felt as you really experienced the dream, like it was really you in the dream, intense dreams?

I only ask because it just looks to me like you where referring to an intense, memorable dream rather than a lucid dream. Not saying thats what you really mean, just asking. In my understanding of Lucid Dreaming your supposed to be able to consciously control your dreams while dreaming. As in realise your dreaming and go somewhere of choice rather than in theater mode of dreaming. I ask because a friend of mine had this mixed up view of lucid dreaming. I have very intense dreams almost every night and can always remember descent portions, but while i'm dreaming it feels like i'm really in the dream, but i'm not aware of it, i can't say to myself, "hey, i'm dreaming, where do i want to go, what do i want to see?". Thats what i thought lucid dreaming meant, my friend never agreed, so i'm not really sure weather he's wrong or i'm wrong. I know it is decribed as consciously controlling your dreams, or maybe not controlling your dreams but be atleast able be aware just as you are while awake, aware also that your in a dream like you would be aware your hallucinating because you took some acid or something.

An article that may be of interest;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6960612.stm

Thanx for the article!

Though i think there line of thinking is flawed in my view. There experiment to me dosen't seem as they have made the person have an OBE, but trick them into feeling like they've had an OBE. In an OBE you can actually move around, if in their experiments they actually got someone to have an OBE i would imagine they would be able to move around and get different views rather than seeing through an actual camera, relaxing your body and feeling like your looking at yourself being touched on the back. In that case it dosen't seem to me they have tapped into discovering what an OBE is.

O yea, i missed something you said, i don't know how it is for every case of OBE's, but i know in mine, both times i saw no difference between normal eye sight and OBE eye sight, lights where still on, everything was ther same other than my eye sight seeming to drift, like my eyes floated out of my head.

I'm in rage every time i read something like this:

LOOK THIS IS THE CHEMICAL which causes everything..

You say basically you are no more then your bodies and your brain.

How surrealistic are these people. Just look at it for a moment closely: The moment you are out of your body and you SEE it from above, you are not connected anymore. Therefore maybe a chemical is active in your body, but you are not in it.

Anybody who believes it's sort of a dream should research on the topic a little bit.
And i doubt that anybody who actually experienced it can claim it's just an hallucination!

I think these people just heard about the topic and want to point themselves out as very clever logic person who has it all figured out!

For SWIM, OBE's are more common with 5-MeO-DMT than with DMT.

Actually your assertions are not necessarily true. Many people have experienced such hallucinations and there is no evidence that they weren't merely hallucinating. People like Charles Tart have claimed that they have evidence for OBE's because someone who was under surgery had one and could see a number they had on a desk but it was later found that there was a window in the room which would have allowed the person to see the number. I think since they have done studies showing that people never see the number on the desk. Maybe its a word I don't remember.

They can also trick the mind without anesthetia into having out of body experiences.

Furthermore SWIM has experienced OBE's using anesthetics. Although it seems real there is no reason to believe you have actually left your body.

There is plenty of evidence showing that OBE's are "all in the mind".

Where???

It's usually 50/50 for me. If I had to make a thorough distinction I would say there is three levels of dreaming for myself. Level 1 being total control over the events, level 2 being control of speech and ideas but not the overall plot, and level 3 being like watching a movie.

The vast majority of the dreams are level 2, I am aware it's a dream and I can control myself within the dream, but I can't control the whole dream however I want. Maybe I just never really try, enjoying whatever plot my brain is crunching away at. To give a concrete example, I had a dream where two medieval towns where at war, trying to recover some artifact. My town was losing and I realized that I wasn't actually a part of any of these towns. So I went away from the battlefield and started running through the woods. The further I went, the deeper the dream felt (hard to explain) and it was pretty far away from everything. Now it gets slightly random, a deer shows up out of nowhere and it's my friend, who's running with me. Then I notice an enemy ambush party was following me but they didn't see me. So then I ran another direction....Etc.

It's lucid in the sense that I was aware I was dreaming, but it wasn't 100% lucid I guess because I didn't control any events. I never really had the bright idea to pull out a rocket launcher and blow everything to bits...I probably could have though. On the other hand I have had dreams where I had total control. I realized I could fly and I tried to tell nearby family members that it was just a dream and to try flying. But even then, I never went outside to try and fly, I stayed in the house and I never really thought to try going outside. It's rather difficult to describe lucidity as it's probably (conveniently) different for everybody.

Regardless, my original point stands, I keep an open mind because of these dreams.

http://brain.oxfordjourn...rg/cgi/reprint/127/2/243

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/25/3/550

http://www.soultravel.se/RV/0Blankenature2002.pdf

Get through those and then we can get somewhere.

Ok, i read a little bit in these papers, burnt.
I conclude that these scientists can stimulate the brain in a certain way, so that OBE occurs.
Yeah, maybe that is reasonable.
But i would NOT conclude that therefore the OBE is just a brain dysfunction.
You say basically that you believe that OBE is nothing but a "dream" so to speak.

But how come, that almost anybody on the border to death experiences such phenomenon. And what i totally cannot understand is the fact that you experienced it yourself and still be a non-believer!

Maybe you should watch these:

Pam Reynolds story
blind woman can see
wiki entry

I think it has to do with when parts of the brain start shutting down your consciousness is still active and in appropriate memories and stimuli get mixed all together to make a dream like state. SWIM experienced a number of times with ketamine its fascinating.



SWIM has spoken with dead relatives on psychedelics and SWIM can still question whether or not it was real. In fact those experiences made SWIM really start questioning it. SWIM thinks dmt believe it or not pushed SWIM over the edge into thinking its all in the mind plus scientific data.

I'll check out links later.

I think an easy way to look at the OBE thing is that the brain simulates where you are in the world in the first place, if it's getting the correct data, it will correctly orientate "you" in space, when it goes wrong, the simulator orientates "you" in a different place, and just like it simulates a visual of your body when you look at yourself in a mirror or just look at your hands typing, that's how you can look back at yourself in an OBE... and it also explains why people can't detect new data outside of their body in an OBE... the whole reality is part of the brains simulation... I don't think that undermines anything.. and of course you can still ask questions about the nature of reality, simulation on top of another simulation or anything really, but the OBE thing is pretty obvious to me.. SWIM has only ever had those experiences on K and they are not full on, but rather I often feel "myself" standing 1 foot to the right of my body.. also get a reverse in causality where I say the thing I wanted to say before I thought about what I wanted to say.