What is an Altered State of Consciousness?
Well, it is a state of consciousness that is NOT our normal waking state of consciousness. There is one altered state with which we are all very, very familiar and that is the dreams we experience when we sleep at night. Dreaming itself is an altered state of consciousness. And, as we will see as we progress, dreaming and astral projection are very closely related states of consciousness. Now, astral projection goes under a variety of names. Some other names for the astral projection experience are the following: 1. lucid dreaming, and 2. out-of-body experiences (OOBEs). Some people will debate that astral projections, lucid dreams and OOBEs are different things. We will discuss these distinctions below. However, I want to stress that such distinctions amount to splitting hairs, and are not that important. For our purposes, I will use these 3 terms interchangeably. That is, whether I say “astral projection”, “lucid dream” or “OOBE”, I am refering to the same thing. Actually, I will pro
When most people who are healthy are conscious the brain produces a variety of measurable and fairly predictable brain wave types. These change when people do things like sleeping, if they take certain medications or illegal drugs, when they meditate or pursue a variety of other activities that change consciousness. The above activities and many others create what is known as an altered state of consciousness. Definitions for an altered state of consciousness can vary depending on the source. Essentially, there is dissociation between the mind and body connection. Or alternately, the self as perceived psychologically, is not dually perceived as necessarily connected to the body. Perception of the self may be very different and some of the normal restrictions of the self, what Sigmund Freud might call ego and superego may be lifted. Most people enter an altered state of consciousness in dreaming. In dreams, people can do many things they either could not or would not do in ordinary life
“Altered State of Consciousness” (ASC) has been defined as a changed overall pattern of conscious experience, or as the subjective feeling and explicit recognition that one’s own subjective experience has changed. We argue that these traditional definitions fail to draw a clear line between altered and normal states of consciousness (NSC). We outline a new definition of ASC and argue that the proper way to understand the concept of ASC is to regard it as a representational notion: the alteration that has happened is not an alteration of consciousness (or subjective experience) per se, but an alteration in the informational or representational relationships between consciousness and the world. An altered state of consciousness is defined as a state in which the neurocognitive background mechanisms of consciousness have an increased tendency to produce misrepresentations such as hallucinations, delusions, and memory distortions. Paradigm examples of such generally misrepresentational, te
