Lehal Library

energy and after a big meal the energy body virtually shuts down for a while. For this reason, energy work and other OBE-related exercises are more difficult if undertaken within an hour or so of a heavy meal. If you must eat immediately before practice, a light meal is recommended. Your Dream Journal An essential ingredient of successful astral projection is improving your ability to remember it afterward. Unless OBE recall is sharpened to the point where you remember the experience, it will seem like it never happened even if it did. This is the biggest and most prevalent cause of apparent OBE failure. OBE experiences can be breathtakingly vivid, but memories of them, like dream memories, have the annoying habit of disappearing unless precautions are taken. We call these types of memories shadow memories, as they lie just beneath the surface of conscious recall like vaporous shadows in the mind. Memory storage and recall functions are complex matters, including both short- and long-term memory processes. Shadow memory is related more to the former. How many times have you walked into a room to do something, only to stop and wonder what it was you were planning to do? Then something triggers an association with the memory and you suddenly remember. This is similar to what happens when you first wake up clearly remembering a dream or OBE, only to have it vanish a few moments later. Recalling shadow memories is all about triggering memory associations to make them resurface. Dream journaling is one method that helps trigger fragments of shadow memories to reappear in conscious memory. Once a fragment appears, further efforts are then applied to trigger more memories associated with it. In this way, more complete dream and OBE memories can be recalled. With practice, the mind learns to access shadow memories more efficiently, making dream and OBE memories easier to recall. Some will be recalled immediately upon waking and others will surface when associations trigger them. Anything can trigger shadow memories: radio or TV, a snatch of conversation, thoughts and fantasies, a passing car, and so on. OBEs that take place during sleep are often masked by or blended with dream imagery. The more dream memories that are recalled, the more chances there are to identify OBE-related memories plus OBE symptoms such as flying, vibrations, rapid heartbeat, falling sensations, paralysis, astral sight, and so on. More discussion on shadow memory will be in Week 2.