Yet another Halloween-based column, from Oct. 31, 2011.
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New research making the rounds on the Internet claims that people can be “trained” to meet extraterrestrials while in a lucid dreaming state. How much credence you give such information depends on how long you’re able to suppress a giggle when you learn this study comes from the OOBE Research Center in Los Angeles.
OOBE, which sounds like a term a kid might use for something he fished out his nose or the chorus of a really bad ’80s rap song (Oo, Bebe Bebe), really means “out-of body experience.” As in, “I drank a bottle of tequila and had an OOBE.”
You know your crackpot scientific theory has really arrived when it has its own research center in L.A. I can only hope it’s not federally funded, like all those studies where researchers spend years watching kids sit on couches and stuff their mouths with potato chips before announcing that, wonder of wonders, inactivity and junk food make children fat.
Out-of-body experiences, according to the OOBEs at the OOBE Research Center, are just one part of a larger phenomenon called “the phase,” which includes lucid dreaming and astral projection. The OOBE prefers “phase” because the term has not been corrupted by, in the words of its website, “strange people with strange views on life.”
This might also explain why trash collectors prefer to be known as “sanitation engineers.”
Anyway, the OOBEs put volunteers into “lucid dream” training to show them how they can control the contents of their dreams. After only three days, volunteers were able to insert themselves into vivid situations where they met and traveled with aliens.
The bottom line, then, is that those stories of humans cruising along the Milky Way (not to mention the Snickers) with aliens in their late-model flying saucers are products of human imagination. I, for one, am glad they cleared that up.
Just for kicks, I decided to try a lucid dreaming/out-of-body/phase experiment for myself. So before bed one night, I drank some warm milk, watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” listened to Holst’s “The Planets,” and re-read my well-thumbed copy of “Alien Visitors and the Humans Who Love Them” until my eyes grew heavy.
Before I knew it, I was looking down at my slumbering body, passed out there on the couch. (Memo to self: Cut toenails.) I floated through the wall and checked out the kitchen, where I harassed the cats for a few minutes -- they can’t see astral projections, but they can smell them (evidence suggests APs smell like a mix of dead rats and KFC original recipe) -- and then drifted into the back yard. I thought it was safest there, as I was shielded from the prying eyes of any psychic neighbors who might wonder why my astral projection was naked. (Second memo to self: Be sure to wear clothes when travelling between states of consciousness.)
Despite the fact that it was nighttime, no aliens made themselves known, even when I drifted over to the new Chipotle, where half the city’s been hanging out. Depressed, I returned home to my body.
The next morning, I noticed a handful of political ads stuck to the front door that hadn’t been there the day before. Apparently, my subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between “politician” and “alien.”
Or maybe they’re more alike than we think. Nobody believes what most people say about aliens, and nobody believes what most politicians say. One is a wild figment of the imagination, and the other says things that are. Furthermore, they both tend to disappear at approximately the same time: aliens right after Halloween, and politicians one week later.
Maybe they travel in the same mother ship, after all.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
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