Fear in lucid dreaming is a very common occurrence. The practitioner may experience fear at any stage, although it is expressed much more clearly during initial practice. The causes of fear are very diverse: a feeling that returning to the body is impossible; a fear of death; worrying that something bad is going to happen to the body; encountering something scary and terrible in lucid dreaming; painful sensations; overly sharp, hyper-realistic sensations.

Interesting Fact!

Fear is often specific in lucid dreaming and depends on the practitioner’s current life situation. For example, young mothers often begin to fear entering lucid dreaming just as they’re entering it out of a sense that they would risk leaving their children behind. It often worry that they simply might not return or undergo an unsafe situation.

One fear dominates all others: the instinct of self-preservation, which, without any apparent reason, can induce a feeling of absolute horror – a feeling that cannot be explained or controlled.

For a novice stricken by insurmountable fear that causes paralysis, there is only one way to gradually overcome it. Each time a novice enters lucid dreaming, an attempt should be made to go a step further than the previous time. For example, in spite of feeling terrified, the practitioner should try to raise the hands and then move them back to the initial position. The second time, the practitioner should attempt to sit down. The third time, standing up should be attempted. The fourth time, walking around in lucid dreaming is advised. Then, after incremental steps toward experiencing the harmlessness of lucid dreaming state, productive, calm action may ensue.

Interesting Fact!

Fear itself can be used to enter lucid dreaming and remain there for a long time. Once lucid dreaming is entered, fear should be allayed if it begins to cause problems for the practitioner.

For a practitioner who faces periodical fears, realizing that there is no real danger encourages progress in practice. Urges to rapidly return to the body are then made baseless. Sooner or later, calmer thought dominates events in lucid dreaming, and fear happens less often.

When dealing with momentary fear caused by events in lucid dreaming, the simplest solution is to tackle it head-on and follow through to the end in order to avoid a fear-driven precedent. If a practitioner always runs away from undesirable events, the events will occur more and more frequently. If a practitioner is incapable of facing fear in lucid dreaming, it is best to use the translocation technique to travel elsewhere, although this solution only produces temporary relief.

If a practitioner is unable to enter lucid dreaming after performing cycles and attempts to separate, or even if everything worked out, it is still better to go back to sleep to facilitate subsequent attempts. Again, it is very important to go to sleep with a clearly defined intention of actually performing the cycles upon awakening. Such intention vastly increases the probability that the next attempt will occur soon. That is, one should not fall asleep with an empty head and the desire to simply get a good night’s sleep. When using the deferred method, clear intention is mandatory, as several attempts are possible over the course of a sleep cycle.

Even if only a few attempts are made accompanied by decided and concentrated effort, then the four steps described in the algorithm will undoubtedly produce entrance into lucid dreaming.

It must always be kept in mind that one of the most common mistakes novices make is simply lying in bed while in lucid dreaming. Generally speaking, for each successful attempt novices have, there are 2 to 3 attempts where lucid dreaming had also occurred, but they didn’t take advantage of the moment and missed separating by the skin of their teeth. For example, any technique working extremely well immediately after awakening is a sure sign of lucid dreaming. Instead of continuing to lie down in lucid dreaming and play with one technique or alternate through other ones, try as hard as you can to get out of your body. Any possible evidence of a technique working should be tested in the same way.

It is also important to immediately take advantage of a technique working. When something starts working, a novice will often, for some reason, fail to take immediate advantage of the moment. lucid dreaming is then already over within several seconds, and the techniques no longer work. If an opportunity to enter lucid dreaming isn’t taken advantage of as soon as occurs, the window of time for leaving the body will simply close within several seconds. That’s why it is necessary to try to leave your body immediately upon any technique working substantially well. Otherwise, the moment will be lost.

In order to more effectively use the system of indirect cycles, it is necessary to discuss what to do if one technique starts working, but progress then ceases during the cycle and lucid dreaming entry does not occur.

First, understand that if a technique has begun to work, only lack of experience and skill will prevent lucid dreaming.

Second, barriers are overcome by temporarily switching to other techniques. Let us suppose that noise arising when listening in grows louder and louder and then peaks in volume. It would surely be beneficial to switch to forced falling asleep or observing images for several seconds, and then return to listening in. The sound may then become much louder and provide an opportunity to proceed with the technique. Sometimes, it makes sense to break off several times into various techniques and then return to the primary technique that yielded some results.

The most important thing is to never give up on a technique that has begun working ever so slightly. In essence, it is a road sign to the shortest path to lucid dreaming, and should always be followed.

It is often possible to simultaneously perform two or even three techniques and experience no negative effect on results. It is also normal and natural to skip around from technique to technique, deviating from a specific plan of action. For example, sounds often arise during phantom wiggling. In this case, a practitioner may just simply switch over to listening in. Other oft-encountered results pairings are: images from sound, sound from rotation, sound from straining the brain, a strain on the brain from listening in, vibrations from rotation, vibrations from phantom wiggling, and so forth.

During initial attempts at using cycles of indirect techniques, the problem of confusion during a critical moment may arise, when a novice practitioner suddenly forgets exactly what to do and how to do it. This is normal, and the solution is to immediately do whatever comes to mind. Results can be achieved in this manner. When a practitioner is more relaxed about the practice, such problems will no longer occur.

Near-death experiences are indeed the only more or less straightforward glimpse of life after death. Unfortunately, we will now be discussing just that phenomenon. “Unfortunately” because you will have to examine its nature from a completely different point of view. Simply put, it is clear that both out-of-body travel and lucid dreaming are of the same nature as near-death experiences at clinical death. However, the first two somehow fail to prove the existence of an afterlife. They even refute some commonly advanced claims. Before examining the issue, I would like to start by saying upfront that I am not trying to prove that there is no afterlife. I would only like to demonstrate that one of the phenomena associated with the life-after-death issue may possibly be of a wholly other essence and significance.

Perhaps we could start by saying that from a purely logical point of view, it would be incorrect to consider “near-death” experiences to happen near the moment of actual death, as accounts of them are always related by living people… Maybe this all has more to do with life than death. I would also like to note that Raymond Moody, whose book we will be citing, did not go so far as to state that the accounts he gathered were unambiguously conclusive evidence of the survival of the soul and life after death. He merely made a hypothesis and backed it up using the excellent testimonies he collected.

You’ll have to admit that if you hadn’t known beforehand that the following accounts belonged to people who were at the edge of death, it would have been easy to assume that they were written by alive-and-well practitioners of out-of-body travel:

(Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody)

…I could feel myself moving out of my body and sliding down between the mattress and the rail on the side of the bed-actually it seemed as if I went through the rail-on down to the floor. Then, I started rising upward, slowly…

(Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody)

… At that point, I kind of lost my sense of time, and I lost my physical reality as far as my body is concerned-I lost touch with my body. My being or my self or my spirit, or whatever you would like to label it-I could sort of feel it rise out of me, out through my head. And it wasn’t anything that hurt, it was just sort of like a lifting and it being above me…

(Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody)

… I was above the table, and I could see everything they were doing. I knew that I was dying, that this would be it. Yet, I was concerned about my children, about who would take care of them. So, I was not ready to go…

Conversely, when reading the experiences of out-of-body practitioners, one might simply assume that they are descriptions of situations experienced at the moment of death, especially considering the fact that the feeling of imminent death is one of the most common sensations experienced while out-of-body.

During an uncontrolled exit from the body, that which you fear or expect the most is exactly what will happen to you. And that’s where reports of gods, flights of the soul, and UFOs come from. To put it simply, exit from the body occurs when the conscious mind is “on”, but the body is “off”. Apparently, the same thing can happen while under anesthesia or dying, and often does. That is, people fall into the same state that practitioners of out-of-body travel do. If you happened to find yourself in such a situation while on the operating table or during a serious illness, in the overwhelming majority of cases your thoughts would turn to God, angels, and a tunnel with a bright light at the end – which is exactly what you would get.

There is no trait characteristic of near-death experiences that is not also characteristic of out-of-body travel. For example, seeing one’s own body on the bed:

(Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody)

…He were "able to see everything around me – including my whole body as it lay on the bed without occupying any space"…

(Mister SIGMA)

…I felt like my body was going through the ceiling, and even so I was pulled up higher and higher. I was afraid that this was already death, and was afraid not so much of death as of the unknown. Everything was happening so rapidly, and I wasn’t ready for such changes… I flew about my room and saw myself lying in my bed…

Flying orbs radiating light:

(Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody)

…When I woke up in severe pain, turned over and tried to get in a more comfortable position, but just at that moment a light appeared in the corner of the room, just below the ceiling. It was just a ball of light, almost like a globe, and it was not very large, I would say no more than twelve to fifteen inches in diameter… I had the feeling of being drawn up and of leaving my body, and I looked back and saw it lying there on the bed while I was going up towards the ceiling of the room…

(Ruklinok)

…I was levitating about one foot over the bed… I couldn’t figure out why everything was lit underneath my back. I looked over my left shoulder and saw a small, bright, white orb about six inches from my shoulder blade – that’s what was illuminating the room…

Periodic lack of bodily perception:

(Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody)

…Dying persons whose souls, minds,consciousnesses (or whatever” you want to label them) were released from their bodies say that they didn’t feel that, after release they were in any kind of "body" at all….

(Tolik)

…It was incomprehensible, there was no feeling, I couldn’t see my own hands. I was like an orb, transparent and hanging on the wall over the bed…

Meanwhile, even the vaunted tunnel of light is not the exclusive domain of near-death experiences:

(Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody)

…I was moving through this-you’re going to think this is weird-through this long dark place. It seemed like a sewer or something. I just can’t describe it to you. I was moving, beating all the time with this noise, this ringing noise…

(Igor.L)

…When flying through the tunnel, I noticed that it had a lot of spurs and paths. There was a bright light at the end. I became interested in what was going on, and fell into another reality…

The similarity between the two experiences is inescapable. It is obvious even to someone who has experienced neither firsthand. As the number of out-of-body practitioners continues to increase, I have been meeting more and more people who have had both types of experience. And do you know what they say? That the experiences are one and the same! There is no fundamental difference between them, except that there is no risk of death when one practices on one’s own.

There is another strong argument in favor of near-death experiences and out-of-body travel being the same thing: false near-death experiences. There is no difference whatsoever between them and their bona-fide near-death counterparts. For example, once a person came up to me and started telling me about how he had experienced clinical death, an exit from the body, travel through a tunnel, etc. But after asking him some questions, it became clear that no clinical death had occurred, and that the rest of the experience had happened during a standard, spontaneous exit from the body. This is because clinical death is when doctors establish the fact of cardiac arrest, which is different than dozing off after a sumptuous breakfast of jam doughnuts.

What’s more, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that you’re dying when having an out-of-body experience. Such thoughts occur in about a fifth of all exits from the body. Even after having had thousands of OBEs, I still fall into such terror myself from time to time. That’s to say nothing of novices, who often cower back into the body after having just left it:

(Budushee)

…I actually fell onto the floor, but felt no physical sensation from it, just a panicky fear and omen of looming death…

(Yuri)

…Upon becoming fully aware of my nature, I clearly understood that I didn’t have a body, it was simply gone! My first thought was, “so this is what death’s like!”

(Lilia)

…That’s when it hit me that I was dying. I ran to the living room and saw myself lying on the bed. And I jumped back into myself…

However, you might argue that with all of the above I have just proved that there is life after death. Actually, the correct deduction is that we can have near-death experiences without the threat of dying. Meanwhile, there is one more kicker here. During my first years of practicing out-of-body travel, I was sure that my soul was actually leaving my body and that I was therefore immortal. But after undertaking endless experiments, it turned out that my “soul” was not travelling through the physical world at all, but throughout something else entirely. It’s possible that this is all just a mental projection, albeit a more realistic one than the physical world. Many believe that it’s a parallel world. But that’s not important here. What’s important is that this is a very complicated question and that many answers are possible.

Conclusion: it’s possible that near-death experiences are important not as proof of life after death, but as evidence that we all have a great many more abilities in the physical world than we are aware of, even if we only realize this in critical situations. This is reinforced by the fact that any person can experience such a “near death” by following special technique-based procedures, and without any threat to life or limb.

Moscow, Russia

I woke up. It was still dark, I answered "nature’s call", and I looked at my watch: 4:15 am. I got into bed and lay on my left side, closed my eyes, and… It felt like something was shining into my eyes. I realized that that was impossible: it was 4:15 am, and I was the only one awake. There was no-one else in the room besides my wife. Meanwhile, the light steadily intensified. I experienced some slight fear, mixed together with curiosity – what would happen next? And then the light became brighter and brighter, I felt I was in danger (M.R.: no separation). But at the same time, an instinct to investigate took the upper hand. I knew that something unusual was happening, but knew that all this was impossible – a bright light of an unknown nature piercing my eyes through closed eyelids! Then, the idea occurred on its own that they were coming to check on me. And after that – I’LL GO ALL THE WAY!

The next moment, I found myself in a small, rectangular room with subdued light. There were ledges along the wall that you could sit on (I figured they were benches). One wall had round portholes of about three feet wide. I looked through them and realized that I was in deep outer-space (M.R.: no deepening and no plan of action). There was an impressive construction outside the room that I was in. What I saw there could not exist in even the most fantastic environments on Earth. It was a lattice construction, but the elements had no logical structure and gave the appearance of a beehive. It seemed to be a dual tube construction of such colossal proportions that the diameter of only one of those tubes could be compared to the diameter of a stadium. Bustling and scurrying around the structure were small spacecraft, which appeared to be doing some kind of work.

"It’s a docking portal" – sounded the answer in my head. I turned around, and in the far corner of the room sat a beautiful young woman dressed completely in Earthling fashion, wearing a skirt and jacket. Strange as it may be, she looked like a famous pop singer, although the similarity was incomplete. This woman was much more interesting than that artist.

I shall formulate the one question dogging me at the time as follows: “What is the emptiness that the Buddhist masters speak of?” I framed that question to the good-looking person in the room with me. For some reason, I didn’t come up with the idea of doing something else… Besides, I’m married. But my question was heard, and the answer followed …

What I then experienced has no parallels in everyday life. Moreover, those feelings cannot be expressed in words – human language simply lacks the ability to communicate such concepts, but I’ll try. It was as if I were turned inside-out. Everything outside of me turned out to be inside of me, including the stars, galaxies, and other worlds – in short, the entire material Universe. And this ALL was collapsed to such small proportions that it all could have fit into the eye of a needle. And I, being outside this material universe, was looking at it simultaneously from all sides, even though I do not have hundreds of millions of eyes. I was one large field encompassing the space around this compressed universe, and able to take it all in at once visually! I myself was endless, I had no boundaries in space or time. All around was stillness, and I myself was this stillness. Contemplating this universe brought the realization that through effort, I could turn into NOTHINGNESS. Next thought – but then there would be nothing to do the contemplating?

Then, I became like a funnel collecting in from the perimeters of my universe, whirling inside it, pulling all in deeper and deeper, until I lay on the bed as I had been after having "answered nature’s call" (M.R.: no re-entering). This vision moved me so much that I already couldn’t sleep, I just wanted to run outside and jump for joy and delight. I wanted to tell everyone about my experience, and simply share it – but I realized I would be taken for a schizophrenic.

And that’s more or less how I lived from that point on, often recalling that vivid experience, and treasuring it in the depths of my soul. I dreamt nearly every day about having a similar experience again – until I discovered the indirect techniques.

Moscow, Russia

Actually, I was not planning to travel that night, but when I woke up around midnight I decided to try to enter lucid dreaming nevertheless. I started to perform phantom movements with my arms, but then a strong sleepy lethargy overcame me and I suddenly wanted to give up my attempts to enter lucid dreaming and simply fall asleep. However, I was persistent and continued to perform phantom movements with my arms. Instead of feeling the usual vibrations that occur when this technique is performed, I simply fell asleep and continued the phantom movements while dreaming. Because of that, my consciousness apparently did not fall asleep completely, and I became aware that I was dreaming.

I immediately climbed out of my body. There was no vision, conscious awareness was no more than 50%, so lucid dreaming was not that deep. In order to maintain lucid dreaming, I immediately started chaotically touching everything around me. It helped. Vision came, though it was murky. I then found myself in my apartment. I decided to strive to deepen. After I had achieved a stable lucid dreaming, I decided that it would be good to grab a snack and headed for the fridge (M.R.: no plan of action).

I should add that I was on a strict diet at the time and was craving something sweet or fried. However, when I opened the fridge, I was quite disappointed. There was a lot of food in the fridge, but all of it required preparation (raw meat, fish, dill, etc.). However, there was a bottle of sparkling mineral water on a special lower shelf in the fridge. Without giving it any thought, I took the bottle and started to chug it.

All of the sensations were just as in real life: I felt the bubbles from the carbonation, that peculiar taste that mineral water has, and also how the water went down my throat. In general, everything was quite realistic, though there was no sensation of my stomach filling up with water and, moreover, the water felt somewhat dry. It sounds funny, but that very feeling of water’s dryness spoiled my overall impression somewhat. After a foul, I realized that a possible reason for this might have been dryness in the mouth of my real body.

Usually, if there are, for example, candies in the kitchen or in the fridge, I actually take a handful of them and consume them while traveling through lucid dreaming.

After going to the fridge, I wanted to see something interesting. I decided to employ the technique for creating objects and people, and so I closed my eyes and focused on the image of a girl whom I wanted to see at that very moment. I affirmed my desire, and I then opened my eyes, concentrating on the area to my side. The air grew misty at first, and then the person I was expecting materialized out of the air, and came to life, seemingly fully autonomous and with free will – she had the same manner of speaking as in real life, and acted in the same way…