Sleep paralysis and astral projection question?!?

I am not aware of any difference between an OBE and astral projection. I would consider them the same thing. The term "astral projection" just seems to view the OBE as something you experience in your astral body.

It's not easy to control what happens when you are "out of body," so this is not a wholesome practice, though I agree it is interesting to read about. There are dangers to it. For example, someone else, a disembodied deceased person, could take over your body because they have low desires and they need a physical body in order to satisfy them.

Since they have no body of their own anymore, if you leave yours for a moment, they might decide to take over. This is no good! I have had OBE's spontaneously, without trying, either just before falling asleep or between sleeping and waking up.

The first time it happened I was about 14-15 and my stepsister and I were sleeping in the living room since our room was being painted. Just as I was falling asleep, I suddenly felt myself up near the corner of the ceiling, looking down and seeing the two of us in our beds. Then I was back in bed and it was over.

Many years later I came to believe that the reason this happened is that something traumatic occurred to me in that room when I was a younger child. That was the first and only time I slept in that room, and it may have triggered a memory of being scared that caused me to leave my body. I have not found it possible to induce them or make myself have the experience whenever I might want to.

Also, it is difficult to learn to control your actions or where you will go and what you will do. Once I found myself (I felt like a weightless, bodiless center of consciousness) soaring high in the air and then speeding over the treetops. It was late at night.

I tried to will myself to go to a friend's house, as I had read some Robert Monroe books and I wanted to try to experiment. But I couldn't do it; the experience just happened on its own, and I remained in the countryside setting at night until I woke up. Another time, I became lucid in a dream and tried to astrally travel to see someone I was in love with, but it didn't work at all.

I did see some city buildings and doorways, but I saw no people and did not enter any buildings. Some of my experiences were like bad dreams associated with childhood. I would actually feel as if I were in the body of a child (myself as a child, that is).

It was as if I were trying frantically to escape something frightening, and I flew out my childhood bedroom window. I remember looking down over the courtyard of our apartment building and seeing the backyards of the other buildings. At the time, I was living in New England, but the childhood home had been in New York City.

I have had some enjoyable OBEs--the sensation of flying is itself pleasant. But I have never had an OBE that caused me to re-experience a pleasant experience of childhood; the childhood OBEs have always been scary and unpleasant, or if there was anything good about them it was that "flying away" in my astral body saved me from some danger. A number of years ago I discovered something that I have never been able to verify with anyone else--any other person experienced in OBEs.

I was using the amino acid supplement l-tryptophan as a sleep aid, and I believe that it caused me to have OBEs. I think the normal does for this use as a sleep aid is 500 mg. If you want to try it, take it for several nights before bed.

But be careful and don't take a much larger dose if you are not used to it. When I tried taking twice as much, 1000 mg, I had some awful sleep-paralysis type nightmares. But at the lower dose, numerous times I had OBEs.

I tried writing to a number of experts to ask if there was a known connection between tryptophan and OBE, but I never got an answer. However, my experience suggested that there is a connection. It's worth a try, just don't overdo the dose; follow the instructions on the bottle.

The only way to trigger the "experience" on demand is through the use of anesthetic ketamine. Other ways are sleep deprivation, extreme prolonged vertigo or a very traumatic episode such as repeated rape. In depth studies into astral projection was conducted by the CIA and KGB during the Cold War but ultimately discontinued from its unreliability.

The DoD reinstated its astral projection program before the Iraq conflict to assess if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction but again resulted in an unreliable solution. Many people who have such experiences describe things that they have already been exposed to. Christians experience Jesus - not Muhammad but muslims experience Muhammad and not Jesus.

Aboriginees do not experience either. They experience tall buildings, serpents and other animal dieties. Projection, lucid dreaming and OOBE/NDE are now known to be internal imagery events that take place in the brain and it can be easily terminated by administering naloxone - an opiate antagonist that inhibits certain endorphines from binding to areas in the brain.

It is not a transcendental flight to another place, time or realm.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.