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I started reading a new book on OBEs, titled Out-of-Body Exploring : A Beginner's Approach, by Preston Dennett.

It's pretty interesting! It could be considered a second- or third-generation book on OBEs, because Dennett takes a lot of quotes from Monroe, Peterson, and Bruce's previous books. He gets ideas from the "old classics", and then applies these ideas to his practice, to see what results he gets. It's cool to read about.

It's nice to see another person actually trying what other authors have suggested - and reporting on how well it worked, or what happened. For example, Dennett read that if you call your name out while out of body, that weird things will happen. So he tried it out. In a lot of cases, he tried calling his name out, but nothing happened at all. On one occasion, some crazy stuff did happen. Here's a quote:

Time to experiment! I remember that something amazing is supposed to happen if you say your name while out of body. I say out loud, "My name is Preston Dennett."

There's a shift. Suddenly, I'm outside in a field in the country. It's nighttime and the sky is filled with stars. I examine the night sky and am shocked to see the most dramatic astronomical display I've ever seen. Huge fireballs are crisscrossing the night sky. It's a fantastic meteor shower. The effect is incredible, and I am totally awestruck.

I fly upwards and into the sky. I keep going up until suddenly there's a shift and I'm in another dimension. I'm surrounded by millions of tiny, shiny, golden flakes. It's like being inside a ball filled with gold glitter. It is indecribably beautiful. I feel absolutely fantastic.

There's a shift and I end up in another place, which I can't quite remember. (Marth 19, 1997)

The only downside of the book is that it's not organized very well. It's basically just a list of random experiments he tried, and the journal entries of the results. Dennett tries to break them into logical sections, but it doesn't really work. (For example, Chapter 3 is "Experiments on the Astral Plane", and Chapter 4 is "Further Astral Experiments"). Overall, the information is useful, and it's worth the read for those searching for consistency between OBE researchers.

~Sean