From: janice@mailinator.com   
      
   I haven't had any OBEs to speak of recently, so I thought I'd post this   
   one which someone found in a book and emailed to me.  If you tease out   
   the author's interpretations from his experience a bit it sounds like he   
   underwent sleep paralysis with strong vibrations and sensations of   
   partial separation:   
      
   "At one point in my Calcutta researches, shortly after the autumn   
   festival of Kali-puja, that which I studied even entered a waking dream   
   state in a strange and striking way.  The safe, comfortable lines between   
   the researcher and the researched dissolved in an encounter that looked   
   -- and, so I imagined, felt -- much like the mystico-erotic states I was   
   then uncovering in the Bengali texts.  Although my body was asleep,   
   resting almost anesthetized on its back, not unlike a corpse,   
   consciousness was lucid and clear, fully awake.  Suddenly, without   
   warning, a powerful electric-like energy flooded the body with wave after   
   wave of an unusually deep and uniform arousal.  I tried to hold the   
   energies in as lingams spontaneously emerged and disappeared in a fluid   
   dream space.  At some point, the energies gathered together, as if they   
   themselves were conscious, and erupted 'in' in a kind of psychic   
   implosion.  As I felt my 'I' being sucked up into an ecstasy that felt   
   entirely too much like a death, I watched my legs and torso float   
   uncontrollably towards the ceiling.  While unaccustomed to death or   
   weightlessness (be they physical or symbolic), I desperately grabbed the   
   bed frame and, in a scene that seemed as bizarre then as it sounds now,   
   instinctively tried to embody the energies in order to bring them 'back   
   down' into my physical frame.  After much gymnastic twisting and turning   
   and holding on, I finally awoke.  Actually, it wasn't a waking up at all,   
   for the 'I' had never been asleep, but it was at least 'sitting up,' and   
   this with a buzzing body that, thank goodness, was no longer an   
   anesthetized corpse or a floating balloon."   
      
   --from Kripal, Jeffrey J. _Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism   
   and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism_, p. 201   
      
   --   
      
   For the alt.out-of-body group website and my other sites, visit:   
   http://www.hopkinsfan.net   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)