Robert Monroe - Journeys out of the body, Practical Guidebook

I walked around my apartment thinking about what I should do.

Realizing that I did not have that much time, I decided to talk to an elderly man who would answer my questions. I decided that there would be an omniscient elderly man behind the apartment's front door, which I was about to open. And there he was, half-bald, about 60 years old, in a grey coat waiting for me. I asked him the question,

“What should I do to get into the phase more often?” But he started to tell me about how he was raped as a child. And to be more precise, this was already not an elderly man, but an elderly woman. I was not very interested in hearing her story, thus I tried to move away from her, suggesting that we could talk later. But the elderly woman was persistent, and I did not want to offend her, because I thought that this was an unusual dream with its own set of rules, and namely that once you have asked an old woman a question, you are supposed to be courteous and listen to the entire answer.

I went with her to the kitchen of my apartment. The telephone suddenly rang. I got scared that the telephone was ringing in my apartment and would wake me up, which is why I immediately started to look at my hand in order to maintain. But the sensations were quite stable, and I stopped doing that. Then, me and this lady wanted to cook something in my kitchen. She said that I could heat a frying pan without gas. But I instead decided to try the technique of putting the hands together and blowing on them, and returned back into my body.

Questions:Which type of the entry into the phase did Alexander describe? Was the cueing program of any help? Which type of anchor was the leaping? Why was the onset of consciousness immediately followed by a transition into the stencil, i.e., the real body, though not completely? Which separation technique helped him to get out of his body again? Which technique was used for deepening? Which technique for materializing an object was used correctly? What should the procedure for obtaining information have been started with? What importance does a polite attitude towards elderly women in the phase have? Why was the return to body possible? What did Alexander either forget to do or forget to record right after the foul?

Answers and Comments:Alexander described an entry into the phase through dream consciousness. By and large, the onset of consciousness was facilitated by prior work with the cueing program, which, though it failed to yield results, strengthened the necessary intention to enter the phase. The leaping that accompanied the onset of consciousness may be compared with the sensations of levitation that often lead to practitioners achieving dream consciousness. Since the techniques for deepening and maintaining were not used at the moment of dream consciousness, a return to the body, though partial, naturally occurred.

Furthermore, Alexander managed to apply a separation technique that most resembled climbing out. He then managed to deepen correctly by means of touching and immediately felt a result. Despite the lack of a plan of action, the practitioner competently decided to do something useful and employed the technique of finding through a door in order to locate an animate source of information. He should have first tried to test the subject by asking special questions to determine if the object would be able to provide information (see Chapter 10).

Being polite to animate objects in the phase is the prerogative of each person on an individual basis, but it hardly has any real basis.

Most likely, the return to the body was triggered by a failure to maintain, excessive thinking, or temporary passivity. Upon exiting the phase, Alexander should have tried to immediately return.

However, he failed to do so, even though he had returned to the phase after exiting dream consciousness. Such a step should have been obvious due to an incomplete connection to the body.

No. 12

Boris Bender

Movie Technician, Experienced Practitioner of the Phase.

Moscow, Russia

I became conscious in my dream almost immediately after falling asleep. I was in my apartment standing in the corridor. Being surprised by having so suddenly found myself in the phase, I started to touch the walls with my hands to test their firmness or, "realness,"

as well as to intensify the phase by touching. I entered the room.

There was a bed standing next to the wall, with my mother sleeping on it. I could not see her face, only her body under the blanket. The room and corridor were exact replicas of their real-life counterparts.

While thinking about my sleeping mother, I suddenly started to feel somewhat uneasy. When I approached the window, I saw a grotesque landscape behind it that was similar to pictures from movies about catastrophes: a wasteland, houses in ruins, odd pileups of building materials, slabs of concrete, garbage, craters from explosions here and there, and I noticed human figures in some places.

Fearing a foul caused by the fact that I was taking in a panoramic view (the view from the window spanned 180 degrees and cut off at the horizon, which is in fact almost exactly as the view from my apartment is in real life), I turned back into the room and started to touch the wardrobe, and then knelt down to touch the floor. All the while, my fear had been growing stronger and stronger: both out of thinking about my sleeping mother and due to the view from the window. Anxiety turned into real fear within a matter of several seconds, and then graduated into terror and panic. I lost the ability to think critically. I had only one thought: I had to go back to my body. I darted back to my bed and suddenly found myself lying on it.

I closed my eyes, but could not understand if I were in my real body or still in the phase. My terror grew even stronger when I half-opened my eyes and saw that my mother was getting up from her bed.

She looked like a character from a horror movie and apparently was hostile to me.

I wanted to disappear, dissolve, and wake up! I hectically tried to recall the techniques for an emergency exit from the phase, but with poor results: I tried to freeze, relax and touch my fingers to my toes in order to feel a connection with my real body. At some moments I felt like I had it, thinking, “The connection had been restored!” I opened my eyes, but realized that I was still in the phase when I saw that the room had changed, and was now awash with garbage.

The fact that the attempts kept ending with false awakenings was driving me crazy. I was especially shocked when I got up after one of the false awakenings and saw my mother standing at my bed, still looking threateningly at me, like a vampire or a zombie from a horror movie. Plus, she started to reach out toward me with her hands!

I nevertheless kept on and tried to freeze and wiggle my toes, this time without opening my eyes, and not checking where I was. I started to calm down after some time, but I was unable to feel my real body, which was confirmed by the fact that sounds were coming in from the phase: I heard sparrows chirping outside the window, though it reality it was too late for sparrows to be out. However, the chirping and the associations that it brought (i.e. day, warmth, sparrows, and sun), probably helped me a lot and calmed me down, as I finally managed to sense my real body and found myself in reality. Nevertheless, after I got up, I immediately started to verify for about half a minute that I was no longer in the phase by touching objects, making sure that they were hard, and feeling all of my bodily sensations.