I've noticed that there are things about such mental experiences (i.e. beyond the physical body, no matter whether it is thought as OBE, dream, lucid dreaming, remote viewing or anything) that are hard to definitively categorize. This is not because of the nature of the experience itself - but due to the NOT understanding the reality. I hope that Robert won't take any offence, not intended, but it's clear to me that almost none of reknown OBE travellers understands truly what (s)he experienced.

I'm not expert either by no means. However, some experiences that I have had quite recently (let's say during the epidemic break) suggest me that - actually as Robert indirectly suggested as well in his "Astral Dynamics" - the boundary between various experiences beyond body, whether it is OBE or dream, is blurred. All of them are mental experiences - they take "place" in your mind.

Compare these experiences (I had all of those experiences in my life):
- you can see remotely (have a vision of) a distant place, but are aware that you are physically in your room
- you are out of the body, feeling like you were non-physically in a place - but not in th presesnt but in the past, although it seems like you were there at the very moment
- you have a very realistic dream e.g. about waking up or moving in the physical reality

What is the difference between them?

It is easier to point out what they have in common: your mind being the observer. Of...? What? I.e. the "reality" that you can see during your ASC state is only the image (is this reflection? is it filtered? or you are totally making ut up?) that you can see. What is the idea of "being" somewhere non-physically? Is this possible to view things in different places, or from many places at the same time?

Do you understand what I mean? The mind does not need to occupy a place (being "local"). Your interpretation of the reality - what you expect - is to "be" in "some" place. But it is nothing more than your expectation - you are accustomed to be somewhere, i.e. your body being somewhere.

What is the nature of the reality? It's really hard to tell. This is mainly because your mind is the ultimate - and actually the only one, in the end - tool which you have to determine (categorize) what you are experiencing. Sorry for the philosophical sound of what I'm speaking about, but the idea is that your mind - the consciousness - is what you can use to "travel" the reality, whether it's purely mental, energetic, or other; the bodies (physical, ethereal...) are just vehicles.

It would be really good to thoroughly explain the nature of the dreams, which IMO is the essential thing to understanding the reality - not just OBE. Therefore I'm interested in the topic of dreams and the experiences that I had in such states for many years, and I'm still astonished how many different kind of dreaming experiences (or should I say ASCs) one can have.

There is a concept of non-locality (as pointed out by some ESP researchers and many scientists) - being quite good reference, although to me quantum physics is more like an encyclopedia of what is "unknown" vs. classic physics being more encyclopedia of what is "known". The non-locality concept suggests that the nature of reality beyond physical is non-local, i.e. there is no place you can refer to when in ASC state. This may help you answer your question about nature of the out-of-body (the physical body, of course) experiences. There are certain in-between states from the totally mental experiences to actual physical experience (which Robert briefly has also enlisted in his book), which could all be categorized as experiencing your energy in different than physical form such as ethereal body.

People typically ignore their dreams as being "usual", expecting to happen something that is unusual, and they often think (in big part because of the new modern scientific propaganda in such fields as psychology) that OBE is real and the dreaming is unreal. This is very different to the native people who considered dreaming to be true nature of the reality. So as you see, people are looking probably for the answers not where they really are... And that's why they do not realize where to find the keys to understanding the reality - the mental experiences beyond the physical.

IMO you had a special dreaming experience, but depending on how you define the beyond-physical experiences, anything of the mental state is out-of-(the physical) body experience. If you had a clear feeling of your energy, then it was probably your ethereal body that you had experienced. Your mind however may use a number of tricks to simulate certain experiences, and we at the moment havetoo little data about any ASC states to ultimately tell what is going really on.