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David Scott Rogo - Leaving the Body: A Complete Guide to Astral Projection

When I induced my own first OBEs, I could never understand why some of them seemed so "unreal." On one hand, I was sure that I was genuinely out-of-body, yet many incidents had a sort of dreamlike quality to them. During one nocturnal OBE, for instance, I found myself out of my physical body and walking toward the door of my bedroom. I left the room and approached the living room. I saw my two dogs and then realized that a brilliant light was shining. Since it was the middle of the night, the room should have been totally dark; this did not make sense to me. I stopped to figure out the situation, but the distraction caused me to return to the body and awaken.

I got up and checked the living room and, indeed, found it pitch black. My first thought was that maybe I had been dreaming. Later I theorized that, during a nocturnal OBE, one's perceptions may be colored or influenced by the brain's normal dream consciousness.

I had to give up this theory when I met Blue Harary, who has had this same type of anomalous experience during his consciously induced experiences. Rather reluctantly I had to accept the theory that during the OBE, we contact only a parallel of the real world-a plastic interactional world that may alter when we physically alter our own.

If I place a picture on a wall, for instance, the same object may well appear in the parallel world. But this plane is more tenuous and less stable than the physical world of the five senses, and it wavers and drifts away from a perfect semblance of it. This explains why Blue could sometimes succeed but also occasionally fail to make contact with the physical world during his experimentally induced OBEs. His level of success depended on his ability to maintain an affinity with our world while being drawn simultaneously into a new dimension.