I'm new to this board (and also to OBE for that matter). I just found this website, and I'd like to say thanks for the great effort that has been put into the Practical Guide book. Really amazing work.
I had some previous tries with astral projection a couple of years ago, using Richard Webster's direct techniques with little success (mild vibrations throughout my body and a couple of lucid dreams during that period) but no actual OBE experience.
I read that indirect methods are the sure way to go, and according to the advice I'm trying to follow the book to the word. So I read Part I and II.
Part III in only for advanced practitioners, so I intentionally didn't read it because I have a tendency to skip the first steps of building proper foundation and instead just jump in to the deep water and start with all the advanced methods right from the beginning. I wouldn't want to make that mistake.
It was my first morning trying these techniques. I had no trouble waking up multiple times in the morning. On my first occasion I was slow to realize that I had a purpose of waking up, and it took a 5-10 seconds to start cycling the indirect techniques. On the subsequent wake ups I was instantly aware, but never could immediately separate.
What I found was that it's almost impossible for me to do the phantom movements without any actual physical (muscle) movement. I was very focused on not to move my physical body, but in exchange i could not produce any kind of moving sensation. Neither with the rolling, or swimming, or phantom wiggling. When I got even more aggressive with my movements, I always got twitches in physical body and I actually ended up moving my real body. I really tried hard and after about 4 complete cycles trying really hard I was very aware in each case, also making it very difficult to fall back to sleep - I had to meditate myself back to sleep state in every case.
After one of my tries I became especially awake, and I tried playing with other techniques like brain straining, that created some kind of vibration in my body, but I couldn't amplify it, no matter how hard I tried and any attempt to separate was unsuccessful. It was like good 5-10 minutes after my cycling anyway and I rather stopped it and focused on pushing myself back to sleep so I can try with further cycles.
So my question is - how to actually make phantom movement sensations happen without moving real physical muscles? With my attempts I tried really hard to visualize (imagine) very active movement, but all I could feel was my totally still and static body on the bed. The book says on page 16:
But never gets into actual details on how to practice these.If you take 20 to 30 minutes out of your day to simply train the techniques and the procedure, the method will be remembered and work better. This will substantially increase the success of attempts upon awakening.
- Should I just relax/meditate during the day and try to do the same techniques? (Won't that go against the purpose if doing these techniques indirectly?)
- Or get a midday nap and try again on waking up? (But then what's the difference from making it after my night sleep?)
- Or should I just keep doing this same routine and expect to have a breakthrough one day?
Also is it a good idea to try any different (eg. direct) techniques in my awake periods (after making aggressive cycling and before being able to sleep again) or better stay away from those for any reason?
