subject: Lucidology Review [print this page] If you've ever woken up in the morning and found that you couldn't move or make a sound for a few minutes, you've had sleep paralysis. This used to happen to me and I had no idea why or what it was. But as it turns out, this was the trick that opened the door to frequent O.B.E.s for me after having insomnia for years.
The question is "what is sleep paralysis and how can you use it?" Sleep paralysis is a protection mechanism your body uses when you fall asleep. If you were to dream you're doing something very active, such as running, and you weren't in sleep paralysis then you would move your limbs when you're asleep and you'd wake yourself up. To prevent that from happening, your body disconnects your voluntary muscle system from your mind so that you can dream all you like without waking yourself up.
Normally you're not aware that of this happening because by the time your body shuts itself down in sleep paralysis, your mind is already asleep and unaware of what's happening. In other words you enter a state of body awake/mind asleep' before entering body asleep, mind asleep'.
The whole trick to lucid dreaming is to enter a subconscious focus without losing awareness. Here's how sleep paralysis does this for you.
When you're awake your brain is in what's called a beta' state. Beta means your dominant electrical brain waves are oscillating at around 14 to 30 cycles per second.
When you enter sleep paralysis, your brain automatically puts itself in "dream mode" which is called a theta' state. Theta is slower than beta and is around 4 to 7 cycles per second.
Knowing this secret allows you to avoid one of the major mistakes most people make when first starting out in O.B.E.s.
Instead, you'll progress much faster by making it a two step process. You first use the sleep commands we'll cover later to trick your body into falling asleep and enter sleep paralysis.
You then use exit techniques we'll cover later to convert sleep paralysis into an O.B.E and separate from your physical body.
