How to Have an OBE
Posted by Greg at 12:25, 27 Jul 2011The following is a modified excerpt from Paul and Charla Devereux's book Lucid Dreaming: Accessing Your Inner Virtual Realities (Daily Grail Publishing, 2011). Available from Amazon US or Amazon UK and other online bookstores.
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The techniques used for inducing out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are essentially similar to lucid dream inductions, but with a different emphasis. The power of place (spatial programming) takes on special importance, 
and ways of developing a dual awareness can be helpful. Most OBE practitioners agree that when inducing the experience, physical relaxation is most important. A state of relaxed alertness is the ideal to be sought.
There seems to be no special dietary advice for OBE induction, though pioneering 'astral projector' Sylvan Muldoon recommended fasting and a reduction in the taking of liquids on days when induction is being attempted. On the other hand, dream researcher Patricia Garfield found that she had her strongest (and most frightening) OBE when she had been “inordinately stuffed with food”! As far as posture is concerned, there are likewise no universal rules. Muldoon felt that sleeping on one’s back was best, and failing that, the right side. Garfield felt that lying on one’s back or left side best facilitated OBEs. Robert Monroe, one of the most prominent OBE proponents of the last half century, said that the aspiring OBE practitioner should lie with his or her head towards the north, but Garfield argued that it made no difference what direction one slept in. Perhaps the only golden rule is to simply experiment! You have to find what works for you.
Select from the following methods, which have been laid out in an order with developmental exercises first, then actual induction techniques following. Put these in the context of the skills and approaches you have learned from your dream and lucid dream work where appropriate, so you can devise your own elaborations around the core concepts offered here, if you so wish. These exercises and techniques derive from traditional methods as well as suggestions from workers in OBE and lucid dream research. We have also presented some new ones, based on sound principles. Remember that many of the techniques described as being for use at sleep onset can also be used equally well (and often even better) on re-entering sleep after waking up in the morning. As with the lucid dream methods in Chapter 4 of Lucid Dreaming, some of the techniques described here will work well together, others will not and are alternatives. Pick and choose as you wish, remembering that all such exercises often require the investment of time and effort to bring results.
In the Fall of Gravity
Posted by Greg at 05:51, 14 Jul 2011Ron Cole's In the Fall of Gravity is an award-winning, fantasy stop-motion-animation short film that explores the deeper issues of life, consciousness and free will. Cole, following in the footsteps of the legendary Ray Harryhausen, created every aspect of the 11-minute-long film himself (apart from the score) on a non-existent budget, in his own basement. In the process he had to overcome several technical difficulties (not least, going from 35mm film to digital halfway through the project), but the end result is something wonderful. Anyone who has attempted stop-motion animation will be staggered at what Cole has achieved here - and, rather than aiming for a wide market via 'lowest-common-denominator entertainment', he has instead dedicated all those hours into creating a work of art that contemplates the mysteries of existence:
Upon a journey to the Takakjian Castle, the wizard Isomer and his traveling companion Trevor Verity discuss the nature of Life and the Universe. What Isomer describes is a philosophy that traces all the energies of the world back to one fundamental force, Gravity. But this philosophy is disturbing to Trevor as it also implies that even the workings of the mind are completely logical and predictable, over which we have no real control. The notion of free will is challenged and debated between the two.
The wizard goes on to explain there is more to this philosophy than is commonly understood and that Life is a force of nature that is non-physical and when properly understood, we will find our individual lives are but extensions of the life of the Universe. Trevor struggles to understand this concept as Isomer demonstrates this meaning, through the strings of a marionette whose performance mimics the wizard's words.
A work of 'cinematic poetry', In the Fall of Gravity is a film crafted to entertain the mind and eyes with new concepts for both.
Daily Grail interviewer Greg McQueen spoke to Ron Cole about the creation of his wonderful film and the art of stop-motion animation.
TDG: Ron, I appreciate that you've agreed to an interview for the readers of the Daily Grail website. Some readers may not be aware of who you are or what it is that you do. Would you like to tell the readers a little about yourself and also talk about what you do ? ... Read More »
Ten Amazing Timelapse Videos
Posted by Greg at 05:29, 13 May 2011Running through life at a frantic pace, living in the 'now', we often remain ignorant of those natural phenomena that take place over longer time scales (especially with the majority of our lives now also spent indoors). "The wheels of the cosmos turn too slowly for humans to watch", says José Francisco Salgado in the trailer to his upcoming feature Sidereal Motion. "Until now." With the advent of digital cameras, the art of time-lapse photography has risen to new heights. Through the lens of these artists we can see what the world might look like to a consciousness that perceives things over long time-scales: vehicles and people swarming like ants or insects (perhaps no better example than in the beautiful video "Hajj: A Journey of Purity"), clouds that move like oceans and rivers, and the billions of fixed stars in deep space that sweep into view as our planet revolves throughout the night, a real-life Total Perspective Vortex.
Here's ten* exquisite time-lapse videos that have made my jaw drop to the floor, listed in no particular order. Make sure you select the HD and full-screen options if possible! For more information on the videos and artists who created them - including equipment used, locations, and licensing queries - visit the linked titles.
Grab a beverage, sit back in your seat and enjoy.
10. The Mountain
by TSO Photography
A stunning time-lapse video from Terje Sorgjerd, filmed around Spain's highest mountain, El Teide - one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars, and the home of Teide Observatories. The shots of the Milky Way are breath-taking...indeed, if you break out of the 'twinkling lights in the sky rotating over the Earth' perspective, and instead grasp your viewing position as it really is - on a spinning globe, watching billions of fixed suns in the virtually unending depths of the cosmos sweep into view - the opening sequences to this video can pretty much bring a tear to your eye (well, at least they do for me).
The celestial viewing delights in this time-lapse are also at times framed by an Earthly phenomenon:
A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes.
Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way. So if you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.
9. In The Land Of The Northern Lights
by Ole Christian Salomonsen
Six months and 50,000 images in the making, Ole Christian Salomsen's timelapse video of the Aurora Borealis ('The Northern Lights') is exquisitely beautiful. The time-scales aren't as stretched as in many time-lapse videos, in order to preserve the real-time speed of the aurorae as much as possible, "instead of the northern lights just flashing over the sky in the blink of an eye":
One can only wonder what ancient people made of this spectacular atmospheric phenomenon, in which spirits seem to rise from mountains and dance across the sky.
Introduction to Lucid Dreaming
Posted by Greg at 03:02, 28 Apr 2011The following is a modified excerpt from Paul and Charla Devereux's book Lucid Dreaming: Accessing Your Inner Virtual Realities (Daily Grail Publishing, 2011). Available from Amazon US or Amazon UK now.
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You enter the cinema. The lights dim and you put on your 3D glasses. They look deceptively like simple sunglasses. The film begins. Suddenly you are thrust into another world, a world with three-dimensional vision and sound. You are transported into a virtual reality, usually one of extreme fantasy, like the 2010 pioneer of modern 3D movie technology, Avatar. With the recent flood of 3D movies, and, increasingly, 3D television, this will happen more often to more people. In a similar vein, the dramatically effective virtual realities of computer games take their players out of their actual, physical worlds into cyber otherworlds. But in the way that audio and visual digital technologies are mimics of our natural senses, so too are these movie and cyber otherworlds merely technological versions of natural virtual realities we can access through our own minds. These are not mere pale acts of imagination, but altered states of consciousness, other realities so vivid and seemingly tangible that they make the fanciest digital technology fade in comparison. These inner virtual realities are far beyond simple dreams, but dreaming is the gateway through which they can be accessed.
A third of our life is spent asleep, and it has been calculated that in an average lifetime we experience about half a million dreams. Yet for most of us in modern societies that part of our existence is like a closed book. We might remember an occasional vivid dream, but usually our dreams are just vague, fragmented shadows that evaporate in our minds as soon as we open our eyes, or are extinguished by the raucous sound of our bedside alarm. Some people even believe that they do not dream at all. We take the loss of this part of our lives very calmly, but think how shocked we would be if we were suddenly told that a third of our lifespan was to be taken from us! Yet that is effectively what happens, especially in our modern culture, which does not place a very high value on dreams – not officially at any rate. One of the reasons for this loss is that dreaming represents a discontinuity in our mental lives: when awake we can barely remember any of our dreams, and when we are dreaming, we forget that we are not awake. It is as if a broad, dark river of forgetfulness, a moat of amnesia, separates the waking and dreaming parts of our lives. Yet we can reclaim the night-side of our existence by taking specific actions to increase the vividness of our dreams and make our recall of them much more effective. Our newly-released book Lucid Dreaming will enable anyone to do that, but it will also explain that such actions can be merely the prerequisite for achieving something much more remarkable – namely, how to stay awake while we are having our dreams.
Living Our Dreams
Train ourselves to be awake in our dreams? It sounds an utter paradox. Up until the late seventies, even most scientists studying sleep and dreaming dismissed the notion as nonsense. But as we point out in Lucid Dreaming, two enterprising dream researchers, Keith Hearne in England, and Stephen LaBerge in the United States, devised experiments that scientifically demonstrated that people can be fully conscious in a dream, while monitoring equipment shows them to be physiologically sound asleep. This remarkable mental state, in which a person becomes fully conscious inside a dream, is known as “lucid dreaming”.
Calling Cthulhu
Posted by Greg at 03:43, 15 Mar 2011This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 5, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, 
Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Erik Davis, Martin Shough, David Luke, Robert Schoch and Nick Redfern, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.
You can read more sample articles from the Darklore series at the Darklore website.
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Calling Cthulhu
by Erik Davis
(Images courtesy Dominique Signoret)
Consumed by cancer in 1937 at the age of 46, the last scion of a faded aristocratic New England family, the horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft left one of America’s most curious literary legacies. The bulk of his short stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to the supernatural. But within these modest confines, Lovecraft brought dark fantasy screaming into the 20th century, taking the genre, almost literally, into a new dimension.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the loosely linked cycle of stories known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Named for a tentacled alien monster who waits dreaming beneath the sea in the sunken city of R’lyeh, the Mythos encompasses the cosmic career of a variety of gruesome extraterrestrial entities that include Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the blind idiot god Azathoth, who sprawls at the center of Ultimate Chaos, "encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws.” Lurking on the margins of our space-time continuum, this merry crew of Outer Gods and Great Old Ones are now attempting to invade our world through science and dream and horrid rites.
As a marginally popular writer working in the literary equivalent of the gutter, Lovecraft received no serious attention during his lifetime. But while most 1930s pulp fiction is nearly unreadable today, Lovecraft continues to attract attention. 
In France and Japan, his tales of cosmic fungi, degenerate cults and seriously bad dreams are recognized as works of bent genius, and the celebrated French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari praise his radical embrace of multiplicity in their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus. On Anglo-American turf, Lovecraft has been enshrined in the august Library of America, while a passionate cabal of critics fill journals like Lovecraft Studies and Crypt of Cthulhu with their almost talmudic research. Meanwhile both hacks and gifted disciples continue to craft stories that elaborate the Cthulhu Mythos. There’s even a Lovecraft convention – the NecronomiCon, named for the most famous of his forbidden grimoires. Like the gnostic science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft is the epitome of a cult author.
The word “fan” comes from fanaticus, an ancient term for a temple devotee, and Lovecraft fans exhibit the unflagging devotion, fetishism and sectarian debates that have characterized popular religious cults throughout the ages. But Lovecraft’s "cult" status has a curiously literal dimension. Many magicians and occultists have taken up his Mythos as source material for their practice. Drawn from the darker regions of the esoteric counterculture – Thelema and Satanism and Chaos magic – these Lovecraftian mages actively seek to generate the terrifying and atavistic encounters that Lovecraft’s protagonists stumble into compulsively, blindly or against their will.
Vallee: Author of the Impossible
Posted by Greg at 05:11, 03 Dec 2010The following article is a modified excerpt from Jeffrey Kripal's Authors of the Impossible (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK). In his book, Kripal surveys the history of psychical phenomena, which he contends is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and an important but overlooked field of religious study. Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and UFOlogist Jacques Vallee; and, philosopher Bertrand Meheust.
The in-text reference to IS, FS1 and FS2 are to Vallee's books The Invisible College, and Forbidden Science Volumes 1 and 2 respectively.
Jacques Vallee's The Invisible College
by Jeffrey Kripal
Jacques Vallee’s The Invisible College (1975) represents a development of the ideas and theories first set out six years earlier in his seminal book on the crossovers between UFOs and folklore, Passport to Magonia. 
There would be other developments and ideas, of course, but it is probably not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that these two books constitute the heart and soul of Vallee's thinking on the subject of UFOs. That the first is named after a legendary land in the clouds whose existence was denied by a major representative of the Church and the second after a group of contemporary intellectuals interested in paranormal matters who were meeting secretly in the late 1960s and 70s out of fear that such interests would threaten their academic and professional standing in the universities should alert us to the "impossible" nature of their subject matter from the perspectives of faith or reason. Vallee is perfectly aware of this. He states very clearly that his speculations "will contradict both the ideas of the believers and the assumptions of the skeptics" (IC 28). Again, beyond faith and reason there is gnosis.
It was Vallee’s mentor, J. Allen Hynek, who suggested that they call themselves "the Invisible College" in order to capture the deeply felt sense that they were pursuing a kind of forbidden knowledge, that they were after a new form of science that was not yet acceptable to the powers that be.1 The same year Vallee's book appeared Hynek explained the history of the expression in, of all places, the FBI Bulletin. The FBI had requested the piece; why, Hynek was never sure (FS 2.251). Vallee provides his readers with the relevant passage in his own Introduction. Here is Hynek writing for the FBI now, as quoted by Vallee at the beginning of The Invisible College:
Way back in the "dark ages" of science, when scientists themselves were suspected of being in league with the Devil, they had to work privately. They often met clandestinely to exchange views and the results of their various experiments. For this reason, they called themselves the Invisible College. And it remained invisible until the scientists of that day gained respectability when the Royal Society was chartered by Charles II in the early 1660s.2
And so Hynek, Vallee, and their confidential colleagues met too, throughout the late 1960s and early 70s, working quietly in the background and refusing to be intimidated by either the conservative attitudes of their professional colleagues or "those three fierce paper dragons, Bizarre, Magic, and Ridicule" (IC 114-115). They also hoped for their own Charles II, who never appeared, and for their own Royal Society, which never materialized. ... Read More »
Skeptical of a Skeptic
Posted by Greg at 11:02, 10 Nov 2010This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 5, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Erik Davis, Martin Shough, David Luke, Robert Schoch and Nick Redfern, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.
If you would prefer to download it as a printable PDF with original formatting, you can do so from the Darklore website (first sample article listed under 'Darklore 5').
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How Martin Gardner Bamboozled the Skeptics
by Greg Taylor
The modern skeptical ‘movement’ has grown and thrived in recent years to the point where the public generally views self-appointed ‘skeptics’ as arbiters of the truth and defenders of rational thought. But how much of what they say can we really trust as being objective truth? Are self-described skeptics championing critical thinking, or are they simply defending one particular worldview? The late Marcello Truzzi came to think so: despite being the co-founding chairman of the influential skeptical group CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), Truzzi soon became disillusioned with the organization, saying they “tend to block honest inquiry, in my opinion… Most of them are not agnostic toward claims of the paranormal; they are out to knock them.” Truzzi claimed that by using the title of ‘skeptic’, biased debunkers had claimed an authority that they were not entitled to, opining that “critics who take the negative rather than an agnostic position but still call themselves ‘skeptics’ are actually pseudo-skeptics and have, I believed, gained a false advantage by usurping that label.” Should we be more skeptical of the skeptics?
The Secret History of Rock
Posted by Greg at 02:46, 03 Nov 2010The following guest article is by Christopher Knowles, whose latest book is The Secret History of Rock'n'Roll (Amazon US and Amazon UK). Chris blogs at his website The Secret Sun.
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Metallic Mysteries and Headbanging Hellenes
by Christopher Knowles
It's not a shocking new revelation to compare rock 'n' roll to ancient pagan rituals. Writers have been throwing the term "Dionysian" around since Elvis first showed that a white man could sing the blues. But as I discovered while writing my new book, The Secret History of Rock 'n Roll, the parallels go much, much deeper than that. 
So much so that if you strip away the surface details (and get past the whole sacred/secular dichotomy), the similarities between the ancient Mystery religions and modern rock 'n' roll can be downright mind-blowing.
Never mind that old pagan place-names like the Apollo, the Orpheum, the Palladium and the Academy are still used for concert halls, or that rock's Olympians (U2, Springsteen, Bon Jovi, etc.) still act out their dramas in "arenas" and "coliseums." The ancient world had its own guitar heroes, its own pop divas, even its own heavy metal bands and headbangers. And while studying the parallels of rock to the Mysteries, I wasn't surprised to see that it's genres like punk, hardcore and metal that seem to inspire something a lot like religion to their fans. Extremism and noise did the very same thing in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Dionysus was not only the god of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, he was also the god of cross-dressing, "frenzy," and hallucination (entheogenic potions were the main course at the Mysteries of Eleusis, among others). Dionysus was also closely identified with various groups of long-haired, armored priests, whose thrashing musical performances were the headline act of Mystery rituals from Phrygia to Samothrace, from Eleusis to the Vatican Hill.
The legendary Greek historian Strabo was a student of the Mysteries and wrote extensively on these ancient headbangers, who went by various names such as the Korybantes, the Kouretes, the Dactyls, the Kabieri and the Telkhines. Strabo described them as "a kind of inspired people," who were "subject to Bakkhic frenzy" and induced "terror at the celebration of the sacred rites by means of war-dances, accompanied by uproar and noise and cymbals and drums and arms, and also by flute and outcry."
The Kouretes - who the historian Nonnus described as being "sane in their madness" - derived their name from their androgynous hair and clothing, much like any number of early heavy metal bands from the late 60s and early 70s. Strabo again:
Fortean Times Uncon 2010
Posted by Perceval at 17:51, 27 Oct 2010My first experience of the Fortean Times Unconvention was sprung on me this last weekend after Greg offered me a press pass out of the blue. Once domestic leave was negotiated, I couldn't possibly refuse it - the central London venue of the University of Westminster being a mere hour's journey from my home counties base.
With simultaneous talks in two lecture theatres (one a little too big and the other a little too small), one was forced to make difficult choices at times. Thankfully though, having heard veteran researcher and Daily Grail blogger Paul Devereux speak earlier in the year, on the topic of 'Magical Mindscapes' - the investing of spiritual meaning in the landscape - a favourite topic of mine, mind you, and the subject of his latest book Sacred Geography: Deciphering Hidden Codes in the Landscape (Amazon US/UK), he was not too offended when I opted to attend Mark Pilkington's talk instead!
With the word 'Rendlesham' in the titles of no less than three of the weekend's talks, and another talk on the Berwyn Mountain UFO case, Mark, with his recently-published Mirage Men: An Adventure into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs (Amazon US/UK) , was hard put, in his talk on The Abuses of Enchantment - looking at the use of weapons of mass deception, to avoid the UFO topic in an effort to maintain some balance.
While it's good to see the results of quality research into UFO cases, and it's arguably not the fault of open-minded researchers (like mythbusting 'Rendlesham botherer' Ian Ridpath) if the ETH turns out to be largely unsupported by the evidence in the cases they study, the dominance of the UFO sceptic theme in this conference was somewhat unfortunate. Having said that, the individual presentations on this theme (that I attended) were all excellent.
Beyond the Ufological, Jan Bondeson's talk on the Bosom Serpent and its parasitic relatives, and Jeremy Harte's investigation into the trope of ghostly 'headlessness' were highly entertaining forays into the pre-scientific mind, both facilitated by the comic delivery of a moustachioed eccentric. I'd personally like to have seen more of an emphasis on how the symbolic significance of serpents and heads might lie at the root of these traditions though.
Charles Foster, speaking on the topic of his latest book Wired for God?: The Biology of Spiritual Experience (Amazon US/UK), gave a survey of attempts to explain away spiritual experience by reference to neurobiological research, before exposing the weakness of such reductionist arguments and concluding that correlations don't imply causes.
Gordon Rutter's talk on A History of Talking to the Dead did what it said on the tin, although largely focusing on the 19th century to the present day.
Feeling a bit under the weather on day 2, Ian Simmons' account of Fantastic (or is that bad taste) Taxidermy left me feeling rather worse for wear. Walter Potter kitten tableaux and Gunther von Hagens' plastinated bodies galore.
My powers of concentration impaired, I paid less attention to the Sunday afternoon offerings, although to be honest, they were of less personal interest to me than many of the other talks. Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham discussed their research into several cases of military and government interference in Hollywood. Authors Mark Chadbourn, Natasha Mostert and Adam Nevill discussed Forteana and Fiction, and Peter Brookesmith, David Clarke, Nick Pope, Ian Ridpath and Paul Devereux looked ahead to Ufology in the 21st Century.
While the Unconvention has not maintained a yearly presence, I look forward to the possibility of next year's event.
Top Ten Afterlife Movies
Posted by Greg at 13:36, 22 Oct 2010Clint Eastwood's Hereafter tells the story of three individuals touched by death in different ways, and how each of them deals with their encounter with 'the other side'. Here's ten other movies which explore what might lie beyond the veil of death:
10. Ghost
This 1990 hit movie may have revolved around the sappy, sentimental story of eternal love between characters Sam and Molly (Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore), but the real star was Whoopi Goldberg and her portrayal of Oda Mae Brown, a fake psychic who suddenly finds that she can hear the dead. Here's the scene in which she first encounters the ghostly Sam (oh, if only such a thing would happen to Sylvia Browne).
9. Enter the Void
Sex, drugs and the NDE: there's nothing sappy and sentimental about this afterlife rendering. In Gaspar Noé's provocative Enter the Void, small-time drug dealer Oscar is shot by police inducing an 'astral journey' around psychedelic Tokyo. Taking inspiration from mushroom trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Raymond Moody's NDE bestseller Life After Life, Noé hits the viewer with sensory overload in order to portray the altered states of consciousness that Oscar encounters (including a 6 minute DMT trip) during the movie. ... Read More »