Floating Method
Mirrored from Ballabene's OBE and Astral Pages
OBE Methods Based on Relaxation With Inner Body Awareness
This is a passive, spontaneous way of body separation. Nevertheless it has to be induced by deep relaxation. Falling deeper and deeper into autohypnosis, the procedure is accompanied and triggered by body awareness (muscle relaxation, feeling your limbs becomming heavy, feeling warmth and at last cutting off physical body awareness).
These experiences of floating out of the body often are reported to occurre spontaneously in trance, sleep, near-sleep (hypnagogic state) and in NDE's (near-death-experiences). Some OB-professionals favour floating out by trance methods like:
Bob Peterson: http://www.isl.net/users/puser/peterson/obebook.html
Steve Ritter: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/or/oran/oobe.html.
I find this method much more difficult as technique to induce OBE's than the "stepping-out" technique. In my past experiments I only could perform "floating-out" in daytime and in trance. I mostly did this on Sunday morning. Currently, having a profession and a family there is neither space nor time for undisturbed exercises at such time. Therefore I have to make my OBE exercises during the night and then "stepping-out" methods seemed to me to be significantly better.
Position: lying on the back on the floor.
Method: I used to stretch down on the floor, to relax and to intensify the imagination, that all blood was leaving my head, like fainting. (This method "all blood out of my head" I had trained many years before, when I suffered from frequent nose-bleed.) Some trance inducing methods for "floating out" procedure are a special category of imaginations belonging to the field of autohypnosis, in which you imagine to feel more and more light and to float up into the air, swaying there. Some examples:
"Water skiing method of projecting" (Matt Holmes in the "Astral Projection Home Page", tips may 1995).
Flying in an airplane or balloon
Lying in a boat and relax
Being carried away on a cloud
Sitting in a ski-lift or going upwards in a lift
Being a leaf and being carried away by the wind
Sliding up or down an escalator
If you had already some OBE's, the best way to induce new ones is to reimagine the experienced stages step by step.
Sensations: In the state of deep relaxation I first heard a rushing sound, then it vanished and I saw colours or mosaics or landscapes. This was very delightful for me and helped to stay alert. Then colours and pictures disappeared and it became dark.Now the body started to swing, as if lying in a boat. No sound, no picture, no thoughts - it was a very peaceful feeling. After a while I suddenly could see the room and move by will.
As a second possibility the experiment could convert to astral travelling. Following the swinging sensation described above, I felt a wind or even storm blowing and carrying me away. There was darkness around me as before, except the fact, that sometimes I could see a sun, as a shining disc in the darkness. After a while, all of a sudden, my sight cleared up and I found myself flying or sliding in an unknown, very real seeming landscape, as if , after passing space, I had landed in another world. My feelings mostly were very euphoric.