The following is a reply I gave to a person asking about OBE, and I think it may help you:
OBE, in a broad sense, describes the experience during which you seem to rise from your physical body and move about in a non-physical form. There are many kinds of OBE though, and some people tend to recognize only a subset of these as the “genuine” OBE. For example, some disregard “dreams of OBE” as real OBE. This usually happens in combination with false awakenings – you have an FA, then you perform some WILD technique within it. Of course you will right away experience vibrations, HIs, and etc., and you then exit your body. You believe you are having an OBE, but it’s actually an OBE within a dream! You are lunching yourself from a platform of fake realities, and as a result when you do wake up the whole experience will feel unreal. In this case, it is not much different from a LD.
Let’s look at another example. You experience SP while being fully awake, and then you manage to make the exit. This, when it happens, will feel like genuine “soul leaving the body”. You may even see your physical body lying on the bed. However, no matter how awake you are, the moment you make the exit, you step into a different reality. It is very common for people to rise from a different location such as their old houses, school dormitories, or a room that’s pieced together from the various places where they previous lived at. Just like in a dream, the moment you step into this non-physical world your IQ is reduced by half, and thus you won’t be able to recognize the anomalies. You then go on with your adventure but when you wake up you will hardly remember much detail… again, just like a lucid dream. Would you call this OBE or WILD? There is hardly any real distinction.
Some people like to describe OBE with these attributes: environment almost identical with reality; sharp mind, clear as day-time and 100% functional; solid objects that are hard if not impossible to manipulate; no memory loss upon returning to physical body, etc. In other word, they are describing “soul travel in reality or near-reality”. These kinds of experiences, IMO, are extremely rare and most people who report them are probably bluffing, at least to some degree. I personally have had a few thousand OBEs, yet very few of them fit all the above descriptions. In our China-based forum, we have collected many thousands of OBE cases, and again not a single one fits all the descriptions, minus a few which are quite obviously from less credible sources.
I know technically there are differences between some special-case OBEs and LD. For example, some OBEs can occur during NREM. However, the majority of OBEs are not much different from LDs. You can essentially treat them as LDs which uses your bed as the starting point. Let me make it clear – what I’m saying here is based on my own experiences and researches. They are my personal opinions only.