Robert “Bob” Peterson has been studying out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and other unusual practices since graduating from high school in 1979. While studying at the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology, where he earned a BSc in computer science, he became more proficient in out-of-body research and kept detailed diaries.
In 1987, he collected his experiences and diaries into his first book: Out of Body Experiences: How to Have Them and What to Expect. His second book, Lessons Out of the Body: A Journal of Spiritual Growth and Out-of-Body Travel, was published in 2001.
Peterson has also studied lucid dreaming (LD) and has called Michael Raduga’s book The Phase the best in the history of the subject. However, he considers OBEs and LDs (which we combine under the concept of “phase states”) to be different phenomena. For example, he pointed out that LDs occurs when a person is asleep, and OBEs—while awake. A person can control a LD, while in an OBE, he/she is a passive observer. The surrounding world in a LD is vivid, filled with mystical possibilities, while during an OBE everything is rather ordinary (except for the separation from one’s body). LDs are a product of the dreamer’s mind, while OBE is an objective reality.
At the same time, Peterson lists lucid dreams among the recommended ways of inducing an OBE, as a tool of transition from one state to another. A normal dream is a hallucination without consciousness; LDs require consciousness, but remain a hallucination. An OBE is awareness without hallucination. Since the hallucination in a dream is created by our own subconscious, we can stop it—and enter an OBE.
As Peterson added in one of his articles: “Shifting from a lucid dream to an OBE is easy for me, but I can only describe it as an act of will. I ‘will’ the dream hallucination to disengage, and it feels like I’m waking up, but my body doesn’t make up. There’s just a sudden, complete shift of attention to a different kind of experience.”
Do you consider out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams to be two different phenomena or one and the same?
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