Results/Discussion:
Although the diary covers a ten year period (1981 through 1990) there were only six years of dreams sent, 1985 - 1988 are not included. These experiences actually began in 1974 which was about a year after Father X entered the monastery. He didn't begin recording them until 1975 but only sent me dreams from two sections; twelve months each from 1981 to 1984 and shorter periods from the other two years (March 27, 1989 through August 21, 1990). This was the material which was analyzed by the class members.
He included the entries from the diary after August of 1990 in his letter to me which he sent in response to his reading the original version of this paper. So the frequency analysis of types of experiences includes this new information while the student analyses do not.
Although he said in his correspondence that the only experiences he recorded were OBE's, lucid dreams and comments relative to them, there were eight clearly nonlucid dreams which he so identified in the manuscript. His demarcations between dreams/experiences/comments on any one date are not always completely clear but the number of experiences for the diary can be gotten from the paragraph markers. The start of the each paragraph indicates if it was a lucid dream, OBE or other type of experience/comment. There were 318 paragraphs in the section of the diary analyzed by the students with 92% representing distinct experiences/comments and remaining 8% representing transitions from previous experiences. This was obvious in the manuscript because Father X said at the end of each paragraph things like, "the experience ended" or "then I found myself back in my bed". The few transition paragraphs were major scene shifts in the dream/obe.
For the purposes of creating distinct experiences each of the transition paragraphs were reread and identified as a distinct experience or as the beginning of an experience. In the latter case the adjoining paragraph was collapsed into the experience to create one total and distinct experience. Also all comments were reread and either eliminated from the data to be analyzed or reclassified as an attempted/micro OBE or lucid dream. After these adjustments, 310 of the 350 paragraphs in the entire diary sent to the first author were retained as distinct experiences. Of these 282 were those analyzed by the class members.
Go to: Lucid/OBE Descriptive Analyses