Hi, I have one burning question that I would appreciate an answer to.

I realize that it is important to not move at all when inducing sleep paralysis.

Is it ok to swallow though?

I find the main problem I have is that mucus and saliva builds up at the back of my throat, and I have to swallow it.

Is this ok, or is this preventing me from inducing SP?”

My reply:

It depends on how deep in sleep paralysis you are:

1.) If you’re right on the edge and you’re trying to complete paralysis then swallowing will mess it up.

2.) If you’re already deep in paralysis it won’t make much difference.

3.) If you’re several minutes away from paralysis then it won’t make a giant difference but it will make some.

THE SOLUTION

The solution is your body position. Sleeping flat on your back makes the swallow reflex happen. This is one of the reasons why stop drop and roll ends with you sleeping on your side.

I actually sleep with the head of my bed propped up on cinder blocks so that my head is a bit above my feet. I do that because it helps with acid reflux at night but it also probably helps with the swallow reflex.

If you were to sleep sitting upright in a sofa then you would have almost no swallow reflex.

You know when you say I am supposed to stay awake and convince my body to go to sleep. First of all once I roll the whole lead blanket feeling vanishes. And then I will try to keep my mind awake and resist the movement urges but my body just won’t switch off, all I get is headaches.

A lot of people wonder, why does “stop, drop and roll” involve moving your arms and rolling over if the whole trick to getting into waking sleep paralysis is to stay perfectly still?

SDR is really about getting rid of the last bits of muscle tension. If you can relax without SDR then you would be better off just staying still from the start and not moving ever.

So if the final roll stage messes it up then don’t roll. However if you find that you end up laying there and get relax past that last stage that makes your body think it’s OK to fall asleep, then you should use SDR to get rid of the tension.

The second mistake is a huge one that I have to repeat a lot.

Don’t try to keep your mind awake!!!

*****Just fall completely asleep and let the timer make you become lucid.*****

Let me repeat that again.

When you’re using the Lucidology 101 methods, do NOT try to stay awake when you’re relaxing into a wake-induced lucid dream!!

It sounds strange but the easiest way to have a WILD is to fall totally asleep.

This is because you then let the *timer* beep wake you up for a moment and then you’re awake enough to watch your body fall right back to sleep.

That’s how you get deep enough in your subconscious without using visualizations. Because just a few moments ago you were asleep, when the timer beeps and you wake up you’re still mainly focused in your subconscious and can slip right into an OBE or lucid dream.

So click here to download the lucid dream timer and mp3s and use that to become lucid and have OBEs without needing to use any mental trickery.

If you need more details see Lucidology 101, in particular part 7 on The Timer Method: The Complete Method For Having Lots Of O.B.E.s & Lucid Dreams By Tricking Your Body Into Falling Asleep

And when you’re ready to supercharge your progress and start having more OBEs than you ever thought possible, check out Lucidology 102: “The 100 OBE System”

I’m a big fan of your methods, because I have been trying to have an OBE for about two months and in all the books, the only thing that comes up seems to be, “just relax and wait for the vibrations…” and if they don’t come? Nothing. However your sleep paralysis method is something new although I haven’t achieved it yet. What do you think is the best way to bring on the vibrations? Sleep paralysis? If so, out of the methods that you describe, what is the most effective in your opinion? Also, Robert Monroe states that during the first OBE’s you should keep your thoughts in order and stick to being near your body. Do you agree?
Thank you so much in advance, I really did enjoy lucidology 101 :)

First of all, vibrations are not needed at all for OBEs. The lucid dream vibrations video explains why.

Now on to relaxing the mind for lucid dreams…

The common wisdom in OBE and lucid dreaming books is that you need to discipline your mind to have OBEs. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why is that?

It’s because your body actually has no idea what your mind is doing. None! If you get good at sleep commands you can put your body into waking sleep paralysis even when your mind is running full bore and not even in the slightest bit of trance or even the lightest daydream.

It comes down to mind/body communication and the language they use to talk to each other. As long as you correctly use the sleep commands at the right time the body will interpret them as a signal to fall asleep.

In particular, the sleep breathing technique I explain in Lucidology 101 is extremely effective. It’s probably the single most powerful lucid dream body trick I know of. Pause breaths are a very close second and muscle twitching is a respectable third.

When you have success with these tricks you’ll see what I mean. When you consciously and DELIBERATELY put your body into sleep paralysis you’ll see that your mind can be totally awake and not even a little bit asleep. It all comes down to giving your body the right sequence of events.

Moving Beyond Mind-Body Communication

Having said that, even though you don’t need to relax your mind to enter waking sleep paralysis and you don’t need to use visualizations, they are incredibly powerful… but if you do the right kind of mental relaxation and visualizations.

This is where Lucidology 102 picks up where Lucidology 101 leaves off. In Lucidology 102 you’ll find out how to magnify your OBE skills 100 fold and literally have 100 OBEs in 100 days using a very specific set of visualizations I developed over the last 3 years.

Supercharging Your OBEs With The Right Visualizations

To find out how to amplify your OBE skills far beyond what you may have thought possible and start having 2, 3 or even a dozen OBEs per OBE session check out Lucidology 102: The 100 OBE System

What Do Lucid Dream Vibrations Feel Like?

The vibrations literally feel like a buzzing sensation, similar to a vibrating cell phone or the feeling of buzzing in your lips when you make a “Vvvvvvvvvv” sound. The usually appear in your head and chest area but can occur throughout your body.

What Do Lucid Dream Rushing Noises Sound Like?

The rushing noises that often come with vibrations sound like a train in the room or a tornado.

Most books on OBEs say that you should induce vibrations to have OBEs. This is anything but true and one of the main reasons people fail with lucid dreams.

Vibrations are simply a side effect of nonphysical friction. The more you practice OBEs the easier you’ll be able to shift into a nonphysical focus without running into nonphysical friction. Your OBE exits will become smoother and smoother until eventually you’ll pass directly from a conscious focus to a waking subconscious focus without any vibrations or rushing noises at all.

This has two effects:

1.) Good: You won’t waste any energy to friction in the vibration stage

2.) Bad: You’ll have fewer “road signs” to tell how close you are to an OBE.

The good part is lucid dream exits that are nice and smooth are also nice and bright and clear because you spend all your nonphysical energy on powering your projection rather than powering wasteful vibrations.

The bad part is that you may actually shift into an OBE and not know it because you didn’t have any obvious cluses about what was going on. To fix that problem, see the Lucidology 101 video on reality checks so you don’t overshoot your target.

How To Use Lucid Dream Vibrations To Have OBEs

The trick to using lucid dream vibrations to have OBEs is to wait for the “Quiet Zone” after vibrations have passed. That is the signal to watch for to know you’re in an OBE. Once you’ve relaxed past them and things calm down and become eerily still, you can use a exit method to turn your deep state of relaxation or even sleep paralysis into an OBE.

Check out the video on Lucidology 101 part 12 on how to turn sleep paralysis into lucid dream

The Next Step

For a much more detailed description of how to lucid dream vibrations to have OBEs and lucid dreams, check out the Lucidology 101 Part 10 video, podcast and illustrated PDF transcript on lucid dream vibrations.

For instance, sleep paralysis paralyzes your arms and legs but not your heart. Your breathing is semi-involuntary and that’s the trick we can use to escape sleep paralysis every time.

The only way your body knows if you’re asleep is if you act like you’re awake. So to send a signal to your body that your mind is really awake, simply change your breathing pattern to something other than the normal sleep breathing pattern you’re already in.

By the way, you can use sleep breathing as a sleep command to trick your body into falling asleep and enter waking sleep paralysis.

When you change your breathing pattern, such as breathing much more deeply and longer, for about 15 seconds your body will notice the change and automatically exit sleep paralysis.

This is much easier than trying to move a digit or limb which most books recommend. Moving a digit or limb isn’t very effective especially in 100% sleep paralysis where your voluntary muscle system is inaccessible.

In the next post we’ll cover why sleep paralysis is ideal for lucid dreaming and OBEs

The reason for this is it’s absolutely an unmistakable feeling when you enter it, unlike most other things in lucid dreams which are fleeting and ephemeral.

So what is sleep paralysis?

Sleep paralysis is a protection mechanism your body uses when you fall asleep. It allows you to dream that you’re doing what ever you want, no matter how chaotic or active, and you won’t accidentally move your arms and legs and awake yourself up.

The way it works is it temporarily disconnects your voluntary muscle system from your mind. When this happens it feels like a heavy lead blanket is being laid on your chest and limbs.

This heavy lead blanket feeling in sleep paralysis is because you have to send a much stronger nerve signal than normal in order to get the same muscle movement. When you reach 100% sleep paralysis you can’t move anything at all, with a few small exceptions, which we’ll go over in the next post on how to break sleep paralysis.

After we cover how to break sleep paralysis, I’ll show you why sleep paralysis is the best way to have OBEs without using visualizations.

Then we’ll go over ways to convert sleep paralysis into an OBE or lucid dream

(Although I’ve since found techniques that I could have used to have an OBE at that point which I’ve included in Lucidology 102.)

On a whim I decided to very lightly twitch my forearm. To my surprise my entire arm entered sleep paralysis. I then twitched my other arm and body legs. Eventually I put my entire body in sleep paralysis and completed the OBE separation.

I’ve experimented with this trick since and found that you can even put just one finger in sleep paralysis by twitching it once you’ve reached partial paralysis. This is a handy little sleep command that can get you past little stumbling blocks on your way to lucid dreams and out of body experiences.

Hypnotic Fractionation

Hypnotic fractionation means that when you enter trance, leave trance and the enter into it again, then the second time you enter trance you enter it more deeply than before.

That means that if you can enter even the slightest trance then you can enter a very deep trance just by going in and out of that trance over and over.

To do this, use a timer that beeps every few minutes. You simply fall asleep for a few minutes, let the timer beep to wake you up and then you fall asleep again. This works best when you don’t try to stay aware for the OBE. Just fall asleep and let the timer do all the work to make you become aware.

The Awake/Asleep Threshold

When you do that 4 or 5 times in an hour without moving your body in any way or opening your eyes or even moving your eyes, two things happen:

1.) Your body becomes confused about what’s going on and decides to put itself to sleep even though your mind is still awake

2.) Your mind enters a theta brain wave which puts you in a subconscious focus. A theta brain wave is just a slower version around 3-7 hz of your usual waking brain wave which is around 10-14 hz.

Waking Sleep Paralysis

These two effects together give you ‘waking sleep paralysis’. Sleep paralysis is a protection mechanism your body uses when your fall asleep. If you were to dream you were doing something very active such as running and you weren’t in sleep paralysis you would make the motion of running and wake yourself up.

To avoid that your body disconnects your voluntary muscle system from your mind and this creates sleep paralysis. Usually you’re not aware of that because your mind is asleep. But when you keep your mind awake during this process you get “waking sleep paralysis.”

In light paralysis it feels like you have a heavy lead blanket laid on you. In full paralysis you simply can’t move at all. It feels like it’s harder to breathe in sleep paralysis because you have to send a stronger nerve signal to your muscles to get the same movement. However it’s very safe since it’s something the body does every night.

How To Break Sleep Paralysis Every Time

You can easily break sleep paralysis using deep breathing. When you deep breathe for about 10 or 15 seconds your body notices the change from your usual sleep breathing and brings you out of sleep paralysis. This is a much more reliable method of breaking paralysis than trying to move your arms because your breathing is only semi-involuntary so it isn’t fully paralyzed.

Waking sleep paralysis is a fantastic jumping point to have OBEs and lucid dreams because it’s so stable. OBEs can be hard because everything is so subtle and fleeting. However once you’re in sleep paralysis you can just hang out there and feel what it’s like. In almost all of my OBEs I enter waking sleep paralysis. (Although it’s also possible to do OBEs when the body is fully awake which is something we cover in Lucidology 102)

Exit Methods

There are many ways to convert sleep paralysis into an OBE. These are called ‘exit methods’. In Lucidology 101 we’ll cover visualization-free exit techniques which are simple to learn but require very deep sleep paralysis to work.

In Lucidology 102 we’ll cover visualization-powered exit techniques which require little to no sleep paralysis and really shave off a lot of time from your inductions. If you’re serious about OBEs, check out Lucidology 102

Here is very simple exit method by a forum poster named tsunaH which works surprisingly well. Once you’re in 100% stone cold sleep paralysis you’ll find that you can control:
1.) Your breathing
2.) Your eyes
3.) Your face

When you reach 100% sleep paralysis your breathing is physical but your eyes and face have shifted into nonphysical focus.

What you do is shift your focus in to your face which draws you in to nonphysical focus completely. To do that, simply open your mouth and continue breathing in the slow sleep-breathing rhythm your body will already be in.

This will initiate the separation process and you’ll probably begin to hear rushing noises and vibrations which are both effects we’ll talk about more in Lucidology 101. Once things have quieted down again you’ll be in an OBE and can just get up out of your body in the nonphysical version of your bedroom.

Movement-Free Reality Checks

How will you know you’re nonphysical rather than physical? You’ll use “reality checks” to tell what’s going on. In particular we’ll cover movement-free reality checks so that you can tell if you’re nonphysical without having to move and wreck your trance.

Most reality checks you find in books require you to get up and move around. If you’re just laying there and you’re not sure what’s going on and you move to do your check and it fails… then you just ruined your trance and have to start all over. So in Lucidology 101 I’ll show you how to do reality checks without that risk.

Timers

For timers to use, check out www.lucidology.com/timer where you can get:
1. The free customizable Lucidology Flash Timer
2. Links to digital cooking timers
3. Free MP3 downloads of timer setups you can use in an iPod or CD player

Tricking Your Body Into Falling Asleep Using Sleep Commands

To do this method you need to be able to fall asleep quickly. In Lucidology 101 we’ll cover sleep commands that you can use to make your body ask for permission to fall asleep. You then use a sleep trigger to tell it “yes” it’s time to fall asleep. This is how you trick your body into falling asleep while keeping your mind awake

When you combine the timer method with sleep commands you’ll be able to trick your body info falling asleep while you keep your mind awake. The way it works is you wake up and fall asleep a couple times. Then on one of the beeps your mind and body wake up. Your body waits to see if your mind tells it to move.

If you don’t tell your body to move then after about 10 seconds the body assumes the mind really is asleep and shuts itself down. You feel a wave of sleep paralysis come over you that feels like a heavy lead blanket. You’ve just tricked your body into falling asleep while keeping your mind awake.

The 8 Steps

1.) Awake
2.) Sleep Commands
3.) Asleep
4.) Beep

Steps 1-4 loop until you’re hovering on the awake/asleep threshold

5.) Waking Sleep Paralysis
6.) Movement-Free Reality Check
7.) Exit Method
8.) OBE/Lucid Dream

Now You’re Dangerous

With the information we’ve covered so far, you know more about OBE induction than 99% of the rest of the planet. However doing a complete OBE separation does come down to getting the details right. For the details on how to do this, download the OBE Quickstart to get all the free tools you need to have your first OBE tonight!

The main advantage of a wake induced lucid dream over a lucid dream in which you first fall asleep is that you have no problems with dream memory loss.

For example if you get up in the morning and think back to the dreams you had you may find that some of them were actually lucid dreams because you had full awareness of your normal waking personality and you knew you were dreaming.

However, by the time you woke up again you’d lost a lot of the memories of what you did.

With a wake induced lucid dream it’s as easy to remember what you did as it is to remember the last 15 minutes or so of waking awareness. This is because you slip in out out of the WILD with no unconscious phase.

So how do you have waking induced lucid dreams?

The simplest way is the lucid dream timer method. The basic idea is you fall totally asleep and let the timer beep to wake you up.

This brings you back to waking awareness which prevents memory loss. You then relax without moving at all in any way back into waking sleep paralysis and then you use an OBE exit method to turn sleep paralysis into an OBE.

So by using the timer to create a focus in waking awareness before slipping into waking sleep paralysis you can have a wake induced lucid dream without any memory loss. When you combine this with the specialized lucid dream visualizations in Lucidology 102 you can have boat loads of OBEs one right after another! In fact I’ve literally had sessions in which I did about 20 OBEs back to back using the Lucidology 102 tricks.

So even though wake induced lucid dreams may sound advanced, they’re actually a very attainable goal when you know the right tricks. Check out the Lucidology 101 video on the timer method for the specific timer setup to use to have lots and lots of WILDs.

This is a method that works based on Dr Albert Taylor’s wake back to bed method. Dr Taylor is a former NASA engineer who wrote A Guide to Out-of-Body Experiences and the Wonders Beyond

The lucid dream timer method also uses research by Dr. Stephen LaBerge of The Lucidity Institute which says that staying up for an hour before bed increases lucidity. I’ve found that for myself and the people I’ve helped have lucid dreams that 45 minutes works a bit better than an hour because it makes it easier to fall asleep again and not fall too deeply asleep that you don’t become lucid.

The the way the lucid dream timer method works is you wake up in the early morning, stay up for about 45 minutes and then go back to sleep. You set the timer to beep every few minutes so that you wake up, fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep over and over again.

This causes you to hover more and more closely on the awake asleep threshold so that eventually your mind is above the thresold and your body is below it. This cause you to enter “mind awake/body asleep” or waking sleep paralysis

Once you’ve done that you can turn sleep paralysis into an OBE using a OBE exit method