Out of Body Experience
near-death experiences, hypnopompic or hypnagogic dreams, mystical trances or occult phenomena, and psychoactive drugs, mainly dissociative hallucinogens such as ketamine, DXM and PCP.
An OBE may be contrasted with astral projection, which does not require the perception of one's own body from the outside, and which does not typically posit that one's consciousness or soul is actually travelling through our day-to-day physical reality.
An OBE may also be contrasted with dreaming, consciousness. This method is generally believed to be what causes involuntary OBEs. Some who use it consider dreams to be a form of OBE in which the conscious mind is suppressed; alternatively, others believe that an OBE is a form of dream in which the conscious mind is not suppressed.
- Deep trance and visualization. The types of visualizations vary; some common imageries used include climbing a rope to "pull out" of one's body, floating out of one's body, getting shot out of a cannon, and other similar approaches.
- Audio/visual stimulation intended to bring the subject into the appropriate state.
- Chemically induced experiences. OBEs induced with drugs are generally considered to be hallucinations (i.e., purely subjective), even by those who believe the phenomenon to be objective in general. In any event, these chemicals are often illegal and, in some cases, known to be damaging to one's health.
- Electrical stimulation of the brain (see below).
Possible Explanations
Opinions regarding the objective reality of OBEs are mixed. An appreciable number of people believe the phenomenon is exactly what it feels like, and that the soul is leaving the body and exploring. Many OBE accounts are positive that the usual explanation, that the experience was a dream, is insufficient; and often cite the experience as having a spiritual effect:
- If it was [a dream] why am I still so affected by it?
- I just don't understand this - how can this happen?
- I realized at that instant my body was just a vehicle, a work horse so to speak.
- The experience changed my life, and was profound
- It has made me want to explore and learn as much as I can.
- This experience is as vivid to me today, as it was the night it actually happened. I will always remember it.
Despite claims of some "projectors" who aver that they can initiate the experience at will, there is to date no reliable evidence that any imagery or information acquired during the experience could not have come from normal sources (see near-death experience for some inconclusive attempts to test the hypothesis).
While the subjective experience may be very compelling, most skeptics discount the idea that the phenomenon is somehow linked to an actual physical relocation of consciousness. They note that, in the absence of the typical conviction that the experience is real, these experiences would simply be considered dreams; and that lacking hard evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation would be that the experiencer's sense of heightened reality, however powerful, is a subjective one.
In support of this idea, some neurologists point to experiments in the context of treatment of epilepsy involving electrical stimulus of a particular part of the brain, which produce subjective experiences having all of the hallmarks of an OBE, including the sense of enhanced reality and extreme disembodiment. This evidence, as well as similar results involving use of the drug ketamine, support the hypothesis that at least some OBEs are caused by an unusual but natural brain state in which one's body perception and sense of reality are altered.
Skeptics also point to the increasing body of evidence which ties mental functions such as perception and memory to exclusively physical processes which occur in the brain; and note that no known mechanism would account for how these processes could occur at a distance (the mind-body problem).
OBE's cannot be disproved, but there is no solid evidence that anyone has actually left their body.
