Methodology - Part I - Indirect Techniques

Many people, including myself, have trouble getting the physical body into the relaxed state necessary to phase into a non-physical experience (NPE). Lucky for us, there are a variety of techniques which utilize the relaxation attained from your normal night sleep cycle. 

You may be wondering, “What does relaxation have to do with a NPE?” Essentially, to transition into a NPE you need to get your body sufficiently relaxed where it falls asleep. The “trance state,” as some call it, is marked by your body getting deeply relaxed and asleep while your mind stays awake.

These techniques which are performed during your normal sleep cycle are, usually, much easier for beginners – those looking to have their first NPE. Michael Raduga, author of The Matrix is Real. Hack it!, refers to these techniques as indirect techniques. Raduga’s book, available free online, will greatly expand on a lot of the techniques presented in this blog – I have found it to be one of the best when dealing with the practical “how to” aspects of the NPE.

My favorite indirect technique is known as the “wake back to bed” method. This method is very simple, and has afforded me great success. For this technique, you want to wake up four to six hours into your normal sleep cycle, allowing a few REM periods to pass by. From my experience, the longer and more intricate dreams come in the latter half of my night sleep – during successively longer REM cycles. After waking up, you need to force yourself to stay awake for at least a half hour or so. During this time focus on NPEs – you can read a book about them, meditate on having one, repeat some affirmations such as “I will have an out-of-body experience,” etc. After at least a half hour, you can go back to sleep, holding the intention to have an NPE in mind. Your chances of having a spontaneous NPE have just drastically and dramatically increased. I have had success with this technique even after staying up for several hours.

The other type of indirect technique involves lying still as you wake up from sleep. By falling asleep with the intention to lay still when you wake up, the intention will find its way into your conscious mind as you are waking up. Don't shift in bed, lay still. You will find yourself in what author Robert Moss calls the “twilight zone” between sleep and waking, a state of hypnagogia. Essentially you are waking up into the aforementioned mind-awake body-asleep trance state. From this state of consciousness you can easily phase into remembered dreams or initiate the classic out-of-body experience by using an exit technique.  

To transition into a remembered dream, you need to immerse yourself back into the dream with all of your senses. I had one experience one night where I found myself reentering the same dream four or five time. I kept coming back to my body, lying in bed in the trance state, and I had the opportunity to keep reentering the dream. I did this by imagining myself walking down the stairs in the dream – I felt the stairs beneath my feat, imagined the walls, etc. In fact, as proclaimed in Robert Moss’ books, you can reenter any remembered dream you’ve ever had from the trance state by imagining the dream in its sensual detail.

Exit techniques, to initiate the classic OBE, are very simple. It is about using your focused intent to simply “roll out” of your body, to use one example. Other techniques involve the tactile senses such as feeling yourself pulling yourself out of your body by climbing a rope or ladder. I’ve found you don’t want to think too much into exit techniques. You don't want the left brain to get involved. When you find yourself in the relaxed state, you simply need to “just do it.” You aren’t supposed to be thinking about it, you’re supposed to be being it.

Try each of these techniques for two weeks or so at a time. People have great success with these techniques if they give them a chance. They work for a lot of people within a mere few days. The next installment of this blog will focus on techniques to stabilize the NPE once entered.