So I have been experimenting with OOBEs in the last couple of years but with huge gaps in the practice. Obviously I only knew about direct techniques and with those and autogenic training I could most of the time reach the state of heavy vibrations but after that I always got too excited and this excitement was beyond my control and lost the feeling soon after it set in. So after a few weeks of trying I always stopped. I experimented with LDs too but the uncertainty with the methods that maybe you would have them maybe you would not was a bit discouraging for me. I only had a 5 second long LD once and I felt that the level of consciousness in it was below what I had expected so I was mainly focusing on the direct methods.
And with the indirect method I think I had a success on the first try! Well it wasn't a 100% success but I am pretty sure that I was in the phase. I woke up around 5am to have a drink, went back to sleep and woke up later to movement. I wasn't worrying about that and did the 4 cycles anyway but they were not working so I decided to go back to sleep but while trying to fall asleep I was concentrating a bit on the void before my eyes. After a minute or so I heard a sudden roar next to me like when an F1 car drives past you. 5 seconds later the roar came again only much louder this time and I felt sleep atonia set in. I was pretty excited since this was the first time I could intentionally enter sleep paralysis in my life so the indirect method was having a better result on the first try then nearly hundreds of direct attempts, but I managed to stay fairly calm. I couldn't move and I remembered Micheal writing that I should try very hard to separate but what I did not understand then is that I have to have an awareness of the "dream-body" first. So I think I was trying to move with my real muscles but still couldn't, only like a millimeter or so but still tried pretty hard and eventually I could break free. But I moved in the real worlds (at least I thought I did, I didn't do any reality checks) so I went back to sleep. But if I understand the phase correctly then sleep paralysis and consciousness at the same time is already the phase so I made it on the first try!
After that my attempts were not the great, my past weeks were a bit hectic and each time I awoke for an attempt I was very dull and couldn't do a decent cycle. But a few days ago I woke up at night and heard a similar sound to what I heard before but I was only half conscious and had this strange thought that I am not feeling well and shouldn't force the phase now. Still I had decent vibrations and so I tried separating but made the same mistake in moving with my real muscles before I had a sense of movement only induced by imagination. I did not do a reality check though so maybe I was out of my body I just didn't know.
The bottom line is big thank you to Micheal for the method and the effort he puts into spreading the word and that now I have to keep two things in mind at each attempt:
- have a real sense of motion without moving before separating
- do reality checks even if I think I have failed because who knows, maybe I am already out
I did a couple of more cycles in the past days, but no success yet. It seems quite hard to focus on the imagined bodyparts while I am doing the cycles but hopefully that will improve.