First time poster to this forum...though I lurk among others on this site. This forum is said to address things such as night dreams and their meaning. I find that over my 50 plus years on this planet, there are a handful of dreams that have stayed with me through the years. One in particular happened when i was around sixteen. It seemed so real...

I was standing in a room, behind me were people seated around a large meeting table. My back was to the table and I was looking at a reflection of myself in a large mirror. A voice behind me was laughing and saying, you are on Candid Camera. The surface of the mirror was dusty, so I reached up to wipe it off when suddenly everything went black, I heard a strange buzzing combined with the loud beating of my heart, I felt pressure all around me and I could not breathe. I felt panic. This lasted for five to ten seconds, then I awoke in my bed quite shaken by it all.

Now what I haven't told you yet is before this event, I was contemplating joining a fellow student in some "not nice" activities. This dream convinced me to follow a more honorable path.

So my question to any of you who are willing to contribute is, was this my own subconscious scaring me out of doing something I shouldn't, or was this something different altogether?

I attached the out of body experience OOBE tag to this because to me the event seemed so real that it could have been just that. I later read something related to Edgar Cayce in which the room, table and mirror were discussed. But that was many years ago and I cannot find the reference now. Though I will continue to search for it. If I find it, I will add it as supplemental data. What I do remember is that Cayce described it as the place where our life's events are reviewed as we pass into the spiritual plane.

So, dream or true OOBE? I don't know. All I know is that it scared the heck out of me and helped keep me out of trouble.

Whether we're conscious/unconscious in the dream state, its all an OBE. Regular dreams when you get caught up in the act and believe it is real is really the ego at play, limiting beliefs down to where you're fooled into believing it was just a dream aka involuntary conscious/unconscious. Overcoming this ego problem is when one can become lucid within the "dream" aka voluntary. So you sir have been astral projecting this whole time, you just have a hard time keeping memory of it all.