Is there a place where lucid dreams, out-of-body (OBE) experiences and comas, and maybe even life-after-death overlap? Good question!
A lucid dream is a dream in which you wake up in the dream and realize you are awake and dreaming at the same time. An out-of-body experience is said to occur when you become aware that you have consciousness while being somehow separate from your physical body, which is asleep.
Interestingly, a lot people report that their out-of-body experience began in a lucid dream. And there is also an interesting common factor between the OBEs and a coma. It is widely agreed that most OBEs include a brief condition in which your body is frozen and cannot move – sleep paralysis.
Many comas exhibit the same state of physical paralysis. Some physicians believe that a coma is a natural response to injury that allows the body to slow bodily actions and focus on healing. But here is where it gets interesting – some people emerge from a coma and claim they were in an OBE. So here’s the question: Could such a coma be an extended OBEs?
Doctor Mihai Dimancescu, Chairman of the Traumatic Brain Injury Association, says “sleep, and indeed coma, suggest a state of unawareness of one’s surroundings. But while an individual in a coma may be unresponsive, we have no way of determining what they may be aware of.” “While a person in a coma may be totally unaware of his or her state or environment,” he continues, “others may have some, or even full, awareness. Many recovered patients have related events that occurred when everyone believed they were still in a coma.”
Carl Becker, author of “Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death” and Professor at Kyoto University in Japan, has an especially interesting view of OBEs. “OBEs are indeed important phenomena,” he says, “[and] many report their experiences on the battlefield, in automobile accidents, or during surgery, describing OBEs during such events.”
Becker feels this supports the theory of some scholars that life after death may be thought of as a continuing OBE, since OBEs are often reported by those resuscitated from death or coma.
It’s interesting that more and more of today’s high caliber scientists are open to the possibility of other forms of matter and other dimensions. One widely accepted idea is that other spatiotemporal dimensions may exist which may be impervious to detection, but which nevertheless exist and contain ‘universes’ of their own.
And as university philosopher and author George Kneller says, “We probably do have faculties which science has yet to employ, such as the capacity for travel with the ‘astral body’.”
So this brings us back around to the opening question of whether lucid dreams, out-of-body (OBE) experiences and comas might overlap? How would you now answer this? And how would you now rate the importance of lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences.