Services and OBE/Lucid Frequency:
The next set of analysis on type of religious services is computed on the entire diary while the student's analysis are on the segment mentioned earlier and further illuminates their findings. It can be seen on this bar graph that of the 309 experiences from the total diary, 52% had no reference to religious service, 31% referred to the office of Vigil, 11% referred to mass, and the remaining 6% to the office of Lauds (X2 (3) = 164.08, p<.0001).
Sequence number and lines per paragraph also differed as a function of religious service. It can be seen in this next graph that experiences following mass occurred later in the diary than those following vigils (F(3,308) = 6.86,p<.0001), with the other two categories falling in between. Even though there were more experiences following no religious service reports and following Vigils it can be seen in this next bar graph that there was more elaboration of experiences following mass and lauds (F(3,308) = 5.29, p<.001). In an analysis of type of sleep experience versus type of service, the percentage of lucid dreams did not substantially vary across service category (X2(9)=15.92, p<.0685). In contrast OBE's were considerably less frequently experienced by this monk after mass while the lucid/obe mix was most often reported by him following mass. There were so few nonlucid dreams that very little variability as a function of type of service could be identified.
Blackmore (1988) and others have argued that OBE's are attempts to reconstruct reality under hyper and/or hypo arousal conditions. For instance, under conditions of extreme physical or emotional pain (hyper) or at or near sleep or near death (hypo), it is more adaptive for the system to reconstruct the mental model of self in world with self as located outside of the physical body. Thus when Father X has experienced one or more nights of partial sleep deprivation due to the practice of vigils he approaches sleep/early morning nap in a hypo condition thus primed for reconstruction of self in the world in the form of an OBE. After sufficient sleep deprivation the REM model building mechanism will kick in while awake. Typically this takes at least 72 hours but may happen with prolonged short nights of sleep. Also the fact that he was an alcoholic and it is a natural REM suppressant would leave this monk primed for mental model reconstruction.
The Vigils occur at varying lengths over several nights so that by the time Father X was experiencing an OBE he may have been quite sleep deprived. Additionally, when in the hypnogogic or presleep state one is especially susceptible to auditory and visual hallucinations. Finally, there may be some form of sleep paralysis going on. This illustration from his diary from Jan. 21, 1982 illustrates several of these potential causal elements:
A short out-of-body experience after the office of Vigils. After the paralysis and vibrations came over me I had some difficulty in pushing myself out, but finally I managed it and found myself standing in the middle of a room similar to my own. I didn't have the presence of mind to see if there was a bed with a body in it as I just walked over to the door and opened it. I was confronted by a young man wearing extremely bizarre clothes who was trying to push his way into the room; I tried to push the door closed on him but he was too quick for me, and he just pushed me back into the room, knocking me into a chair; and I could feel some pain from his push. As he walked toward me I found that I couldn't move out of the chair; I was just about glued to it. As he got closer to me I started spitting at him, and he began spitting right back at me; then his face began changing into one big eye; then it ended.
I have argued elsewhere (Gackenbach, 1992) that OBE's, Near-death experiences and UFO Abduction experiences are generally inaccurate, if powerful, attributions of the state of the organism. Most, but not all, occur in states of either sensory underload (at or near sleep) or overload (physical or emotional stress). Even the UFO abductions from a car typically occur while the driver is in an deserted stretch of road, with many at night. Such low or constant stimulus driving conditions certainly induce hypnagogic or trance like states which are highly susceptible to fluid mental modeling processes. At these two extremes of the arousal continuum it is easier to reconstruct the mental model of lived world. Thus we see the face valid attribution by the experients of their apparent reality status ("I am out of my body", " I am dead", or "I am being abducted by aliens"). So too in nonlucid dreams there is an inaccurate attribution, "This is real and I am awake." However, in the case of the lucid dream the attribution process is accurate ("I am dreaming.").
These three experiences, OBE, NDE and UFOE, are some of the few imaginal realms that are more "real" than dreams (as are lucid dreams) but like nonlucid dreams they carry the same inaccurate attribution. For most of us dreams are our strongest experiences which regularly appear to occur "outside" of consensus reality. When we are dreaming, while in the dream, it feels real. Even if we know it to be a dream while still in the dream, it still feels real or even hyper-real. But in the vast majority of dreams we suffer a peculiar "single-mindedness" (Rechtschaffen, 1978) in that we are sure we are awake. Typically we have no idea that we are dreaming while we dream. So too in the "dream-like" experiences (while awake, asleep or somewhere in between) of OBE's, NDE's, and UFOE's, we are certain that what is occurring is "real" in the same sense of waking consensus reality. In lucid dreams we "wake up" to the dream reality without loosing its felt sense of reality. And so too rarely might an experient of these other experiences accurately attribute the true nature of his or her state. But as with dreams these accurate attributions are the exception, not the rule.
This experience from Worsley (1988), the first lucid dreamer to signal in a sleep laboratory from sleep that he knew he was dreaming, illustrates this point. In speaking about lucid dreaming, which he directly enters from the waking state by lying for up to 2 hours on his back and not moving, Worsley comments:
I am not given to superstition or believing in 'unnecessary entities' but perhaps the term "dream" is a little too bland to do justice to the ultra-realism of these experiences. For instance, if one "dreams," as I have, in rich tactile and auditory imagery of being examined in the dark by robots or operated upon by small beings whose good will and competence may be in doubt, or abused in various ways by life-forms not known to terrestrial biology, it can be very difficult to keep still. I have found that if I do not keep still this peculiar state of consciousness usually evaporates in a moment. That can be very useful as an escape route but it can be annoying to lose it when the success rate is not high and each attempt takes two hours or more. I like to regard myself as at least a moderately intrepid investigator, but I have to admit that in spite of being intellectually of the opinion that what was happening was only internally generated imagery, I have flinched during these episodes on more than one occasion . . . I suspect that many "UFO abduction" experiences, as well as out-of-body-experiences are examples of the same kind of thing. (p. 51).
I want to stress that the felt reality of these experiences, be they OBE, NDE, or UFOE, is profound and should not be understated. But a sense of hyper-reality has also been reported in lucid dreams (Gackenbach & Bosveld, 1989). Because of it the relatively unsophisticated observer, which is probably most of us, often concludes that such experiences are "real" in the sense of consensual waking reality. Only in the case of the lucid dream does the experience feel real while we experience it even though we are fully aware at the time that it is not "real". Thus lucid dreaming represents a breakthrough of sorts for these types of experiences, in the sense of the "waking up" called for in the meditative traditions.