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David Scott Rogo - Leaving the Body: A Complete Guide to Astral Projection

One result of my initial OBEs was that for the first time in my life, I suddenly became very aware of my hypnagogic state. I had never before paid any attention to this pre-sleep imagery phase, but now I found myself immersed in it. Each night as I dropped off to sleep, I would see a panorama of scenes before my eyes-sometimes brief, sometimes so elaborate that it seemed as if I were actually dreaming. The more attention I paid to these images, the more I developed the capacity to prolong the hypnagogic state.

One night I was lying in bed very near sleep, well into the hypnagogic state and immersed in a "half-dream" in which I was driving wildly down a freeway. I was quite aware that I was dreaming, but the experience was very realistic and I fought to keep control of the car.

Then it dawned on me that nothing would happen if I crashed. At that moment I had an intuitive feeling that if I crashed the car, I would leave the body. I deliberately swerved off the road and began to plunge down an embankment. I felt an instant and wonderful sense of relief as l found myself floating above my body.

Over the next few months I had several of these driving "dreams, and hypnagogic reveries. I could usually leave the body by manipulating them. My theory is that these very special dreams were messages produced by my unconscious when I had entered a pre-projection state. Crashing the car was a method of releasing control of my consciousness so that the OBE could manifest. I did not ever experiment with trying to induce this particular imagery, however. The driving dreams always manifested spontaneously.