Can We Travel Out of Our Bodies When We Sleep?

“I felt myself settling into the bed, feeling very comfortable. After some time, I noticed that I was still awake and a strange lightness flowed through my body. Gradually I became aware that I was drifting above my body. With a bit of effort, I was able to turn over and was somewhat shocked to see myself asleep on the bed. I seemed to simply drift up and up with little control over what was happening. I eventually rose above my house and began to glide over the city and countryside. It was both alarming and exhilarating. I noticed that there seemed to be some umbilical cord type of energy or substance that continued to trail out behind me and kept me connected to my distant body no matter how far I traveled from it. At some point, I seemed to simply slip back into my physical self and later awoke surprised and a bit frightened by what had happened. I started to read up on this topic and spoke to others who have had similar experiences. As a result, I felt that I could take greater control of when I left my body and where I went when I had left. Often these are good experiences and others times, well, let me just say I have met things out there, where ever that is, that no one would want to encounter. That’s all I can say.”

“I remember being in the hospital bed when I began to feel as if the room were somehow moving and then I realized that I was moving — up and away from the bed. As I looked around the room, I could clearly hear the sound of the alarm going off and the nurses, I think it was a nurse, that came running into the room first. Then another and then, I believe, it was the resident or the attending physician or maybe it was both. I felt safe, comfortable, and warm even though this was a very unusual thing happening to me. I remember just seeming to float in the corner of the hospital room and watched, almost with amusement, the medical team pounding and roughly handling my body. I could hear what they were saying and how frantic their work was to save my physical being. I didn’t seem that invested in the outcome, however it might turn out. Then I heard the alarm stop and a regular sound started up, maybe a beeping sound or something like that. Then I was drifting down and took a big breath and was back in my body, hurting and, for a moment, sad that my comfortable state had ended and now I was feeling pain and discomfort and my chest felt heavy. I lost consciousness again but this time it was just black until sometime later I awoke and saw my husband and daughter standing above me. I thought for a moment I might be at my funeral, but I was relieved that I was again in the hospital bed.”

These are examples of actual descriptions that have been related to me by patients about their out of body experiences (OBE). The first was a spontaneous experience that occurred around the onset of sleep. The individual was able to later learn to control and use the experience, to some extent, for a kind of spiritual exploration. The second occurred during a near-death experience. The term that some of my patients used for the first type of experience was “astral projection." OBE has become the standard way of referring to it in psychology as it is not related to any particular belief system and is descriptive of the phenomenology of the experience.

When I first heard starting hearing these stories from patients, I remembered that I actually had such an experience myself. It didn’t occur during sleep or as part of a near-death experience, however, but immediately prior to a relatively minor motor vehicle accident I was involved in some years before.

It occurred when I was driving down a long straight street and saw a car suddenly come out of a parking lot and cut quickly in front of me. Instantly, I knew that an impact was inevitable. As I thought back to this experience I remember having the unusual feeling of sitting beside myself in the car watching myself driving and hopelessly putting on the brake. I simultaneously had the experience of driving and being extremely alarmed at what was about to occur and yet at the very same time was watching the scene from the passenger’s seat and feeling detached and analytical about it.

The impact came and fortunately no one was injured, although the same cannot be said for the front of my vehicle. While less dramatic than those described by the patients, this was an example of an OBE. It was an unusual experience that in some way seemed to help me cope with what was an extremely frightening, nearly overwhelming, situation. While mine was a brief experience and did not involve traveling far away from my body, being “beside myself” while waiting for and during a car accident certainly allowed me to see things from a different perspective!

The core feature of an OBE is that of having one’s center of awareness appear to be located outside of the physical body (Cardena & Alvarado, 2014). There are feelings of floating, viewing the body from a distance, and traveling to sometimes distant locations. Other kinds of experiences also occur during OBEs including feeling energy, seeing a bright light, and feeling a connection to the physical body.

OBEs can occur in a number of different situations including near-death experiences as described above and during stressful situations such as being tortured, undergoing surgery, or being in a natural disaster. OBEs can also occur during altered states of consciousness such as extreme relaxation, hypnosis, meditation, as a part of the alien abduction phenomenon, and during migraine headaches and epileptic seizures. Frequently we hear reports of these events when people are using psychedelic and dissociative drugs. It appears that lying down and being passive help to promote their occurrence as well. Cardena & Alvarado, (2014) reviewed several surveys of random samples of the general population and found that the mean prevalence rate for these experiences was 9% with higher rates reported by college students and people interested in paranormal phenomena.

The boundary hypothesis has to do with the degree to which individuals maintain separate areas of psychological experience (Cardena & Alvarado, 2014). There are, for example, individual differences in the degree to which people experience themselves as being different from others and the degree to which their states of consciousness are kept apart. For some people, there may be less distinction between unusual sleep experiences and various waking experiences. Research has indicated that unusual sleep experiences and dissociative states are weakly or moderately correlated. Out of body experiences have been found to positively correlate with such factors as imaginative involvement and fantasy proneness as well as dissociation and depersonalization.

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Some work has been done to identify the neurological basis of OBEs. For example, cortical areas that are involved in sensory integration appear to have altered activity during OBEs. Research on EEG correlates of OBEs has centered on individuals who are able to bring them on essentially at will (Cardena & Alvarado, 2014). Although studies have been small, they indicate that OBEs are related to slow brain wave activity, similar to that seen in stage I light sleep. The type of brainwave activity that has been most observed is in the theta band. These studies suggest that a disruption of brain wave activity may occur in the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain during OBEs. These are areas involved with emotional processing and the integration of information and experience.

I must emphasize that the studies reviewed by Cardena & Alvarado (2014) regarding this are very small, often have only a single subject, and are in need of extensive replication with larger samples to have full confidence in the findings. Some additional information on the possible neurological basis of OBEs as well as their relationship to sleep can be found in the online edition of Medical News Today.

Another theory about the mechanism underlying OBE has been put forth that doesn’t relate to sleep at all. It emerged from the observation in a study by Marseille & Elziere (2017) that a significantly greater proportion of patients with vestibular disorders with dizziness reported having OBEs (14%) than did healthy patients (5%). It is notable, however, that the rate for the healthy patients in this study was lower than the nearly 10% reported in the general population studies cited above. They hypothesize that vestibular disorders cause perceptual incoherence and thus uncertainty about the location of the body in space. This alone was not enough to cause the OBEs and the majority of patients with vestibular disorders did not report having OBEs. They found that when the psychological factors of depersonalization-derealization, depression, and anxiety and neurological factors such as migraine headache were present, OBEs were more likely to be reported. They suggest that it is the combination of disturbed perception and psychological and neurological factors that combine to, at least for some patients, create the OBE.

For those who are interested, you can find online directions for attempting to self-induce an OBE. There are organizations such as the OBERF that are devoted to greater understanding of these experiences. I don’t have enough experience with either inducing OBEs or with this particular organization to recommend these instructions or this organization so proceed with caution. It is interesting, however, that there are many resources available to those who want to learn more.

I find the idea, found in the philosophy of panpsychism, that consciousness may not be limited to the physical enclosure of our own skull and may extend beyond it, to be very interesting and worthy of further investigation. it is not currently possible to know if there is any validity to these ideas. At present, the information we have available strongly suggests that unusual experiences such as OBEs are generated by neurological and psychological processes, some of which are involved in sleep. To emphasize that we are still at a relatively primitive level of understanding regarding these issues, I close with a quote from William James. While over 100 years old, these words remain true to this day:

“Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” — William James, 1902