Out of body experience is the experience of leaving your body and perceiving from a point outside it. It can include feeling the vibrations, floating, or seeing the room you’re in. This is something you’d experience before you get to astral projection. So you can totally skip the whole out of body experience part and go straight to astral projection.
Pathworking is more of a guided journey, often through visualization or meditation where you “travel” through symbolic landscapes like temples, tunnels, etc. It’s more about gaining insight, or doing ritual work. Since it’s guided, somebody helps you to astral project to where you needed to go, even if you can’t astral project by yourself.
Astral projection is the experience when you travel on astral plane. Many people treat astral projection with a specific goal like travel, explore, contact someone, etc. Out of body experience and pathworking are all parts of astral projection. One part is you experiencing separation from your body before you project onto another plane, another part is being guided or helped to get to the place you’re trying to reach. And obviously, once you’re experienced with pathworking, you don’t need help to be guided anymore, but it’s different with astral projection.
Is lucid dreaming a prerequisite? No. It’s an ability you gain through practice after you’re already working with astral projection. Many people mistake a very vivid dream for lucid dreaming, but lucid dreaming is having full control of your body while you know you’re in the dream. Control over your actions and choices, like moving your hands, your legs, walking, deciding what to do, interacting with things, and even exiting the dream on purpose whenever you want it.
This is why when something happens to you in a normal dream, you usually just wake up. No matter how vivid it was, it still wasn’t lucid because you’re not in control. In a lucid dream, the dream doesn’t automatically end just because something happens. You continue to stay in it, respond to what’s happening, and change how the situation plays out. You choose how and when to exit.
The biggest difference between a lucid dream and a normal dream is that you know you are dreaming while in the dream. Whereas in a normal dream, you only realize it was a dream after you wake up. And when something happens in that normal dream, you wake up, you have zero control of your body or any elements in it.
