Re: A bit scary phase experience.

[WheresRaven]

Why would you be scared of relatives?... unless you have watched too many horror movies?
Those fears are just implanted habbits... you are more powerful than them.  Take over! 

Sleep paralysis.
I've had that many times.  I used to get really scared and anxious.  For me, it was usually a feeling of someone molesting me....
Now, I'm like.... hey... that's the spot!.... and it goes away.... 
Now I know I can roll out if I feel like it too.

It's all what you tell yourself.

It could have been that it WAS your Dad, he knew who you were, but he was asking you 'who are you' at a more deeper level than simply 'the name you call yourself'.  Not wanting an answer of words, but one of action.... of evolution... growing. 
Keep it positive.

Sometimes intensity looks like anger.  And the pupils can draw one in to infinity. 

Don't be scared of any-thing....  it's all you.

[Michael Raduga]

You know, nobody has a right to say you what it is. You should figure it out by yourself. We only can help you to get into it.

[Summerlander]

I'll give you my two cents here, Boghart.  I think it is all dreams.  If we are not dreaming, we are lucid dreaming.  When practitioners perceive themselves to be exiting their physical body, they are basically having a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD) where such dissociative sensation can be and is experienced. 

The bedroom replica they encounter is likely to be an illusion constructed from memory and/or expectation as the brain attempts to make sense of what the self experienced.  What I'm saying here is that there is no exiting the physical body for real.  When you separate from the body and you perceive yourself to move through space, you are not really moving through actual space...you are moving through mental space.

So far, my experiences seem to tell me that everything one experiences in that state is a thought form.  So, the distance between your bed and the windows, for example, is imagined.

You may be wondering how can this be when it all seems so real.  Well, it is an altered state of consciousness after all.  The mental world is no longer vague and thought-like as is experienced from the waking standpoint.  What was barely perceptible in wakefulness becomes alive and emulates reality in the phase space.  After all, we also become who we lucid dream ourselves to be.

Brain scans show that you are either awake, dreaming, or in the phase.  The phase is equivalent to lucid dreaming (however you enter it and whether or not you perceive vibrations or sleep paralysis).

So far I have not seen concrete evidence that we really leave our bodies or that the deceased people we meet in the phase are really the spirits of the dead.  You can also face your fears in the phase and it will make things easier.  I'm planning to do this at some point as I had a terrifying experience with aliens recently.  I do not believe that I was really taken aboard a UFO though.

Anyway, this is all just a perspective that you might want to consider.  You don't have to take it as gospel.  Michael raised a good point...you should draw your own conclusions from the experiences you have.  It is very much a subjective phenomenon.  People will always have a different opinion on what the elephant really is.  The elephant can be many things depending on how it is approached when you are blindfolded.

The phase state has been around for aeons and theories about it are more numerous than the ones we find at the quantum zoo of physics.

If you believe that you are truly out-of-body next time you enter the phase, have a look around...try to read a digital clock twice by looking at it, looking away, and then back at the object.  Try to read something in a book and re-read it to see if it is the same.  There lies your answer.

I usually think that James Randi can be too much of a sceptic but, when it comes to so-called OOBEs, he is on the money:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NwKkbd2e-c