I found chapter 5 of the Lilenfeld textbook to be quite intriguing. One part that really stood out for me was when they talked about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when a person is dreaming while being aware of the fact that he/she is dreaming, thus giving them some to total control of their dreams as well as an improved dream recall due to its realness and vividness. The reason for my giddiness is that I have recently been trying to practice lucid dreaming. And yes, you heard me right! One may actually practice it. Turns out that lucid dreaming is actually a skill and not an inherent trait or disorder. The link below has instructions and tips to help one practice lucid dreaming.
Despite it being considered a skill, there are also some that have a "knack" for it. In other words, they don't need practice in order to achieve the ability to dream lucidly. Because many of these people do not even know what lucid dreaming is, some psychologists have theorized that lucid dreaming could be the cause of people's claims of an out-of-body-experience. For out-of-body-experiences, it may be possible that that person had a lucid dream instead of actually having their soul leave their body. Since lucid dreams are very vivid, the person may have been confused and thought that it was a real out-of-body-experience, and when their "soul" returns to their body, that is when they awake from the dream.
The only problem for these claims is that they can't be proved, neither the claims nor the explanations. With the current technologies, scientists are unable to tell whether or not the person is having a lucid dream. Therefore, there is no way to tell if the person who claimed to be abducted by aliens actually had a lucid dream or not.
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