Out of Body Experience

Part 1 | Part 2

It's worth repeating that even those (perhaps especially those) who describe the experience as something fantastic that occurs during sleep, and who describe the end of the experience by saying "and then I woke up", are very specific in describing the experience as one which was clearly not a dream; many described their sense of feeling more awake than they felt when they were normally awake. One compared the experience to that of lucid dreaming, but said that it was "more real".

On the other hand, the basis for the belief that the experience was real was not primarily external evidence. Very few from this set of 66 considered it needful to verify for themselves that they were physically out of body by, for example, checking on events at other locations. This type of verification was not what caused them to believe that the experience was "real" in the first place. Instead, it was the quality of the experience that drove their perception of its reality, and made it different from a dreaming or illusory experience. Some quotes:

I can say one thing I remember vividly, I felt no different than in body form. This is what was so unbelievable.
I could see the details in my room and the ceiling from up close exactly as if I was seeing it in real life.
The room was bright and I was looking at a dress that was hung on my bedroom wall. My gaze was fixed on this dress taking in all its details. I knew it was not possible to see this dress from the position I was laid in bed, this frightened me again.
I knew I was asleep on the living room floor when I was floating on the ceiling because, I was in shock in the "dream" how I could feel my breast dangle downward. I was completely aware.

Only 2 of the 66 cases involved attempts to verify the experience as being "really" out of body by checking people's or objects' positions in another room.

The quality of the experiences which were strictly part of the OBE had no direct bearing on the remainder of the rest of the experience. For example, some described vivid spiritual experiences following the OBE, which continue to influence their lives. On the other hand, others describe a kind of fading into what are self-reported as dreams of no consequence. Conversely, many people report spiritual experiences during sleep or otherwise which are not preceded by an OBE.

A small minority of the OBEs were not accompanied by sleep:

I can remember walking home from junior school with my friend, and then, I saw myself in the distance walking and talking to her.
The next thing I knew, I looked straight out in the woods, and I had an OBE. I saw the lights from the back porch, I was about 100-150 feet away from the house looking at me and my friend.
The doctors did not use any anesthetic at the time because I was too young [two years old]. When they cut me open, I felt severe and intense pain and I left my body because it was too much for me to bear.

Interestingly, there appears to be two common related forms of such lucid experiences. The first involves lucid dreaming, where the subject is often immersed into unrealistic worlds, or in a modified form of the reality with impossible or inconsistent, fluid features. These features can seem solid enough in some experiences to be considered actual "astral" experiences occurring in another parallel reality, often closely related to some form of collective memory of archetypal type. A third experience clearly seems more of a physical nature and the environment is consistent with reality (often called etheric or ethereal). This type of experience is often the most frightening because extremely realistic physical sensations occur, often including magnetic and vibrating phenomena and loss of balance, confusion. The person firmly believes to have awaken physically and can panic realizing that limbs are penetrating the surrounding objects instead of allowing the individual to stand up. There seems to be a link between this astral-like experience and the etheric one, although being two distinct states. One that attempts to awake very fast from an astral experience can often find itself awakening into the more physical etheric-like body instead of the actual body, and have to awake one more time to really wake up. As strange as this may seem, the individual can awake multiple times slipping from lucid dreaming, to astral and then to etheric, finally to really being awake. Each of these "awakenings" seem real and involve the sensation of the common numbness one feels when awaking.

Techniques

Although the above experiences were "spontaneous", some people have attempted to develop techniques to induce an OBE. Methods vary:

Attempting to fall asleep without losing 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. A known related technique is for the subject to remind himself of his current position in time and space with daily conscious effort, every now and then. This can then occur during sleep and cause the subject to "awaken" in lucid states required to cause the experience.
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. This technique is considered hard to use for people who cannot properly relax. Common sensations can arise such as deep vibrations, impressions of very high heart rate (when it actually is in a relaxed state) and these sensations are likely to cause anxieties.
Audio/visual stimulation intended to bring the subject into the appropriate state. An example of this consists of binaural sound technology, in which a constant sound frequency is played in each ear individually, to cause the brain to naturally respond to the rithm caused by the slight frequency difference between the two. The theta brainwave pattern (4Hz) was observed as effective.
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.
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, the right angular gyrus located in the parietal lobe, 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. Many experiencers have made detailed observations they reportedly could not have made by any other means, but these have not yet been studied to the satisfaction of the scientific community itself.