Your thoughts on Astral Projection.

Sasha said:
Amy, before you site Edgar Cayce (and so-called psychic was an apt description), do a little more reading about him. Here's a good starting point:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mcayce.html
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A better starting point would be the Wikipedia article on Cayce or the recent thread here titled "Edgar Cayce - for real, or a lucky guesser?" The problem with the Straight Dope material is that it uncritically accepts superficial debunking of Cayce. For example, the chapter in Randi's book "Flim Flam" cited by the Straight Dope is based almost entirely on a book titled "The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce's Power" written by Cayce's two sons. A true skeptic would first ask why the sons of a fraudulent psychic would write a book about instances where their father was in error. Second, the Straight Dope doesn't bother to inform its readers that the sons also performed a random sample of Cayce's health readings and found an 85% accuracy rate in Cayce's treatments. Randi struggles to discredit this percentage in Flim Flam, but he never bothered to do any original research. Most tellingly, neither Randi nor anyone else has debunked the many cases where Cayce's treatments resulted in cures where conventional medicine had failed.
 
SirPhilip said:
During my highschool years, I had insomnia (mostly from drinking nearly a gallon of caffinated iced tea daily), and I was briefly prescribed Ambien. It's action is not a very pleasant experience. Ambien's effect falls directly into the "hypnotic sedative" catagory, an effective dose is somewhat similer to being drunk, with your vision and sense of time slowing, but what was unsettling was the cognitive impairment, much stronger than alcohol. I didn't notice any strange dreams though, and I fell into a dreamless sleep each time. Regardless, I threw that vile crap out and instead used off the shelf melatonin, which was just as effective, yet completely safe.
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Hi Philip, your post is a perfect example of why individual, annecdotal experiences cannot be used as proof of something. My experience with Ambien is vastly different from yours. I've been taking it every night for the past 5 years. It doesn't knock me out but makes me mildly sleepy and then allows me to drift off to sleep when I choose. The only time I had an experience like yours was after surgery and extreme weight loss and then I found that halfing my dosage corrected the problem. I suspect you may have been perscribed too high a dose. Before taking Ambien, I tried Melatonin and had no success with that. It just goes to show that people are very different and one person's experience is not sufficient to draw general conclusions. That's why controlled, repeatable experiments are so important.

Oh well, back on the subject of the OP, even though I take Ambien, I still dream.
 
Interesting to read how much people have to say about lucid dreams, which per definition is the state you reach to after you have concluded that "I am actually dreaming" while dreaming. I don't doubt that people know the definition of lucid dreaming or what it is/is like, but I have no clue why you keep conencting lucid dreams and OBE/autoscopy. It isn't really that hard to differentiate between someone sleeping and awake from just reading eeg/meg results. Saying that an OBE/autoscopy is a lucid dream seems just silly to me, considering that it's been show quite a while ago that direct electrode stimulation of the (right) angular gyrus can cause an OBE/autoscopy and that is while the "patient" is very much awake. Other phenomena occuring due to the same stimulation is micropsia/macropsia, ie. objects seem to be closer/further away than they really are.

The results are not that surprising really, since the angular gyrus is part of the dorsal visual pathway (roughly going from V1 to the caudal part of the parietal cortex) which is also called the "where-pathway" since it processes the location of objets within the visual field. Hence, knowing that it's easy to see how a distortion in that would cause autoscopy or any of the other phenomena.
THere has also been more reasearch done in which they talk about the TPJ (temporoparietal junction) instead of the angular gyrus, but anyone with a little knowledge of the gross anatomy of the NS or just cortex would know that it's about the same area they are referring to.


When it comes to a naturally occuring obe/autoscopy one theory of the cause states that it is a discrepancy between the processing of vestibular and somatosensory information. This could be caused by a whole array of things, like drugs, sleep disorders, relaxation/meditation (think of classic litterature covering "astral projetion") etc.

I see that there have been some links provided to sleep paralysis, so I'll just add that it's mechanisms are kinda related to cataplexy, not that it matters really, just want to clarify that it doesn't really have anything to do with sleep, it's just that voluntary bodily movements are disabled once you hit rem sleep, to avoid acting out dreams (like you would if you had rem sleep behavior disorder, that is, your muscles are never disabled and you act out your dreams).

Linking sleep paralysis to obe might not be all that easy, since all that is disabled (I think) during cataplexy/sleep paralysis is your motor functions and that shouldn't really affect somatosensory/vestibular information integration. It could however be so that a change in motor functions would affect vestibular/proprioceptive processing.

Something else I want to mention is that if you have actually experienced an obe/autoscopy, a lucid dream and sleep paralysis, you will know that the phenomenal quality of each of them are quite different, but that shows nothing! it's just your opinion/feelings about it, you might say.
Well it's true, there is an epicstemic assymetry when it comes to consciousness studies, if you have an idea of how to unifiy, please feel free to write me and elaborate.

There's is some research taking place as of now, trying to find correlations between false awakenings and obes, but I have not taken part of any information regarding those studies, so there's not much more to say, just thought I'd share it and maybe someone more knowledgable can elaborate.

It would also be nice to get some feedback on what I just wrote since it's just stuff retrieved from memory and as such it might be very susceptible to error.
 
;1510560 said:
Originally Posted by Correa Neto :
Uh... Wait untill Interesting Ian finds this thread...

Bodhi Dharma Zen
Oh, please. NOO!
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I'm afraid, yes. Time for this thread to be ianised.
 
Totally random bit of information, that always boggled me.
In high school, I was a total, drug abusing nut. LSD, Shrooms, coke, reefer(still lol) alcohol, opium, and pain pills...lots. I have had so many bizare occurences on these things...Anyway to get to the point. The only hallucinogen I was terrified to try after hearing what it dad was Dramamean. (Spelling). It's sold in stores, at your local wal green and such as something to help you sleep, I believe. A lot of my friends abused this...and all of them had the same reports. After ingesting it, a friend of theirs, or celebrity, or something would appear infront of them. They all said it seemed real. As real as could be. They would sit and have hour long conversation with this friend, and suddenly in the blink of an eye they'd be gone. Even after doing this, they'd take it again and have the EXACT same experience and EVERYTIME truly believe whoever it was was right their, hanging out...It wasn't until the next day, sobered up that they could realize how nutty what they were saying was.
I even knew someone who went to re-hab because he woke up his family and neighbors screaming out his window telling his friend "Go home! It's to late! I can't hang out!!!!"
No one was there.
 
I think we scared Amy away. :(

It's entirely possible that Amy's experience was not a lucid dream but rather what 3b1 is calling autoscopy. I don't know beans about autoscopy, but I gather it falls under the general heading of hallucination.

In my first post I tried to emphasize that the first question is whether this was a mental phenomenom or an actual astral projection. If it's actual astral projection it has real potential as Amy might be able to steal all sorts of important and lucrative information. But even if it is not astral projection it's still of interest, and maybe Amy needs to see a neurologist.

Amy's description does sound like a lucid dream to me. Last night I had a remarkably similar experience when a noise half-woke me up in the middle of the night. I got out of bed, went in the bathroom, and put my hand on the wall near the light switch. I feel the wall, even the texture of the paint, when the wall started melting and my hand passed through it. But I don't think we should rule out the possibility that it is some sort of mental phenomenom that is not a lucid dream.
 
I wish I had crazy dreams like this...
All my dreams last 4 seconds, or not at all.

Lucid dream, banging a nicole kidman or jenna jameson would be nice!
 
AmyWilson said:
Are you nuts? When we're dreaming it feels like an hour can go by... then when we wake up in the morning sometimes only two minutes went by on the physical clock.

You know it's true. :) :D You're just searching for a reason to disprove anything now.
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Your own language trips you up. It "feels" like an hour can go by, yet it doesn't. This isn't time changing its pace, its merely your perception of time. If I'm working while awake, and I swear that I've only been typing for 10 minutes, yet 40 minutes has passed...did time accelerate, or was I merely in a state in which I had a limited perception of time? Or quite simply unaware of how much time had passed.

Being asleep doesn't change this at all. If anything, these types of experiences should show you just how easily conscious experiences can be deceiving and misleading.

AmyWilson said:
I'm skeptical of anything until I've experienced it/done it.
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As already mentioned, you should be skeptical of your own experience. You make the mistake that so many people do. You take your own experiences as infallible, or somehow of greater veracity or quality than other observations. If anything, you should be most critical of you're own experiences, simply because all you think you have experience is filtered through them. The more I learn about conscious experience, the more suspect I often am of my own recollections and experiences, especially when not fully awake.

People really need to stop thinking of personal experience as a safe house, for paranormal experiences. The only reason for doing so is to try and pull an idea with which there seems to be no readily discernable evidence, or even a framework for which to test with, and to keep it tucked away and supposedly unassailable by uttering the words, "Well I KNOW what I experienced." To which we must ask the question, "Do you really?".

Now, several people here have gone on to view the websites you've listed for us. I'm wondering if you could as a sign of good will go look at some of the sites listed for you to look into. This should be a two-street after-all. Although I suspect you've already taken your leave.
 
voidx said:
Your own language trips you up. It "feels" like an hour can go by, yet it doesn't. This isn't time changing its pace, its merely your perception of time. If I'm working while awake, and I swear that I've only been typing for 10 minutes, yet 40 minutes has passed...did time accelerate, or was I merely in a state in which I had a limited perception of time? Or quite simply unaware of how much time had passed.
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I'm becoming increasingly suspicious that she's just pulling everyone's chain here for s-its and giggles.
 
Plastictowel said:
Totally random bit of information, that always boggled me.
In high school, I was a total, drug abusing nut. LSD, Shrooms, coke, reefer(still lol) alcohol, opium, and pain pills...lots. I have had so many bizare occurences on these things...Anyway to get to the point. The only hallucinogen I was terrified to try after hearing what it dad was Dramamean. (Spelling). It's sold in stores, at your local wal green and such as something to help you sleep, I believe. A lot of my friends abused this...and all of them had the same reports. After ingesting it, a friend of theirs, or celebrity, or something would appear infront of them. They all said it seemed real. As real as could be. They would sit and have hour long conversation with this friend, and suddenly in the blink of an eye they'd be gone. Even after doing this, they'd take it again and have the EXACT same experience and EVERYTIME truly believe whoever it was was right their, hanging out...It wasn't until the next day, sobered up that they could realize how nutty what they were saying was.
I even knew someone who went to re-hab because he woke up his family and neighbors screaming out his window telling his friend "Go home! It's to late! I can't hang out!!!!"
No one was there.
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You'll throughly enjoy this, then. If you already aren't aware of it's existence. The Datura and Belladonna vaults, which have a similer anti-cholinergic effect as Dramamine, are even crazier.
 
Interesting Ian said:
But probably not. I've never done so after 4 years and 15,000 posts.
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Which, it would seem to me, is either an indication that you think you know everything or a sad reflection on your ability to learn.

I have been here a relatively short time and learned quite a lot, especially in the area of critical thinking skills. I like to think that I can learn something from all my experiences, both good and bad.

There are some VERY intelligent and well educated people here, I can't imagine why anyone can't learn something from them. Sure, there are a few idiots and trolls but they're just the comedy relief, easily ignored.
 
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