Comments on the OBE/Lucid Dream Controversy

Abstract

The lucid dream experience and the out-of-body ex-perience are currently being interpreted in quite different ways. The two positions I would like to focus on are the most extreme positions taken by the lucid dream and OBE camps. The OBEers, who describe their experiences as actual separation from the physical body, tend to relegate lucid dreaming to a lesser state of awareness or a state from which one can catapult oneself out-of-body. The extreme lucid dreamer position claims that OBEers are simplistically naive and are “just” dreaming lucidly confusing a hallucinated dream world for a supposed spiritual world or “real” physical world (LaBerge, 1985).