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

In 1965, I was a teenager and had recently decided that parapsychology was going to be my life's work. I was not too interested in developing psychic ability myself, chiefly because I did not believe I possessed any. I was more concerned with conducting investigations, working with people who really were psychic, and running experiments.

But when I started reading about the out-of-body experience, I knew that I just had to experience it. I soon devoured everything I could find on the subject, hoping to find some information on how to induce the experience. Muldoon's The Projection of the Astral Body became a virtual bible to me, since he outlined several of his own techniques in the book.

That summer, my desire to undergo an OBE became particularly intense. After classes were over for the day, I would invariably come home, go to my room, and practice the teachings I had read about. I also experimented nightly. During this period many memories came back to me of a series of OBEs I had undergone as a young child. At night, when I was about four or five years old, I would wake from sleep, float above my bed, travel down the hall of my house, and then return to my room. I also began recalling that some sort of guide, whom I sensed rather than saw, often accompanied me on these trips-as though he was trying to teach me something.

These memories were not confabulations either. I specifically remembered just which playmates and family members I shared my secret with. Today, these memories are just as vivid and clear as my memories of high school and college.

These recollections only fuelled my interest in the OBE since they demonstrated that I had at least the potential for out-of-body travel. Lt was while looking for a sure way to undergo out-of-body travel that I found a summary of the Prescott Hall material in Carrington's introduction to Muldoon's first book…..

My interest was chiefly centered on the dietary regulations he outlined. They were easy to follow, did not demand much time, and did not get boring! I did revise them, however. I kept on eating meat, but limited my intake and avoided meat that was cooked rare.

(l had read somewhere that this was the thing to do if you could not avoid eating meat.) I ate my eggs cooked, not raw, but gorged myself on carrots and avoided nuts like the plague-even to the point of obnoxiously picking them out of bakery products.

The weeks came and went. By August I still had not achieved success with my attempts at astral projection, so I gave up trying. I kept on with the diet plan since it was convenient to do so, but I relinquished any other experimentation. Naturally, I had no conscious expectation of having an OBE from then on.

Then it happened.

It was a blistering hot day in August. I came home as usual in the early afternoon after summer school classes, turned on the radio in my room, and threw myself on my bed. As I listened to an aria from Wagner's Rienzi, I began to doze off. I was in that twilight zone between waking and sleeping when suddenly it felt as if my whole body were sinking right through the mattress. I had never felt anything like it before. I was startled, but merely turned over onto my left side. Then it dawned on me that I might be having an OBE. The sinking sensations continued, so I turned onto my back.

lnstantly I found myself paralyzed. I closed my eyes and concentrated all my attention on intensifying the sensations. My face felt numb. I must have blacked out for a moment, for the next I knew, I felt myself floating above my body and then found myself standing next to the foot of my bed, looking at myself. My vision was fairly clear, but it appeared as though everything in the room was enveloped by a light mist or fog. After looking at myself for a while and wondering just what I should do , I decided to attempt to get out of my bedroom. I floated around almost instantaneously and for the first time noted that I seemed to be an apparitional duplicate of myself. I moved toward the door without actually walking, but my equilibrium was off and I fell to the side. Instantly I became upright again and continued moving toward the closed door. I unfortunately blacked out then and awoke back in my body. My heartbeat seemed abnormally slow.

The entire affair must only have lasted a minute or so, for the same aria was still playing. I was elated by the experience, but despite the vividness of the OBE, I did not resume any conscious experimentations to induce it. I did not have to-for only a few weeks later, it all happened again.