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From NIGHTLIGHT 3(2-3), 1991 from TheLucidityInstitute Website
At least 5 and perhaps as many as 35 of every 100 people have had an OBE at least once in their lives (Blackmore, 1982). OBEs are highly arousing; they can be either deeply disturbing or profoundly moving.
Understanding the nature of this widespread and potent experience would no doubt help us better understand the experience of being alive and human.
Another idea is that they are hallucinations, but this requires an explanation of why so many people have the same delusion. Some of our experiments have led us to consider the OBE as a natural phenomenon arising out of normal brain processes.
Thus, we believe that the OBE is a mental event that happens to healthy people. In support of this, psychologists Gabbard and Twemlow (1984) have concluded from surveys and psychological tests that the typical OBE experient is,
Our conception, also proposed by the English psychologist Susan Blackmore, is that an OBE begins when a person loses contact with sensory input from the body while remaining conscious (Blackmore, 1988; LaBerge - Lucidity Letter; Levitan - Lucidity Letter).
The person retains the feeling of having a body, but that feeling is no longer derived from data provided by the senses. The "out-of-body" person also perceives a world that resembles the world he or she generally inhabits while awake, but this perception does not come from the senses either.
The vivid body and world of the OBE is made possible by our brain's marvelous ability to create fully convincing images of the world, even in the absence of sensory information. This process is witnessed by each of us every night in our dreams.
Indeed, all dreams could be called OBEs in that in them
we experience events and places quite apart from the real location
and activity of our bodies.
The great majority of people who have had OBEs say they are more real than dreams. Common aspects of the experience include being in an "out-of-body" body much like the physical one, feeling a sense of energy, feeling vibrations, and hearing strange loud noises (Gabbard & Twemlow, 1984).
Sometimes a sensation of bodily paralysis precedes the OBE (Salley, 1982; Irwin, 1988; Muldoon & Carrington, 1974; Fox, 1962).
During REM sleep, the muscles of the body, excluding the eye muscles and those responsible for circulation and respiration, are immobilized by orders from a nerve center in the lower brain. This prevents us from acting out our dreams. Occasionally, this paralysis turns on or remains active while the person's mind is fully awake and aware of the world.
These events appear to be much like the OBE sensations of vibrations, strange noises, and drifting away from the physical body (Everett, 1983).
Fear has also been
described as a common component of sleep paralysis (see the
"Question and Answer" in NightLight, Vol. 2, No. 1 for a discussion
of overcoming fear in sleep paralysis.)
As a first test of this idea, we should ask how many OBEs actually occur at times when people are likely to experience sleep paralysis - that is, do OBEs happen when people are lying down, asleep, resting, or while awake and active?
Other surveys also show that the majority of OBEs occur when people are in bed, ill, or resting, with a smaller percentage coming while the person is drugged or medicated. (Green, 1968; Poynton, 1975; Blackmore, 1983 )
Furthermore, OBEs are quite plainly different from lucid dreams in that during a typical OBE the experient is convinced that the OBE is a real event happening in the physical world and not a dream, unlike a lucid dream, in which by definition the dreamer is certain that the event is a dream. There is an exception that connects the two experiences - when we feel ourselves leaving the body, but also know that we are dreaming.
DILDs occur when dreamers are right in the middle of REM sleep, showing lots of the characteristic rapid eye movements. We know this is true because our dreamers give a deliberate prearranged eye-movement signal when they realize they are dreaming.
These signals show up on our physiology record, so that we can pinpoint the times when lucidity begins and see what kind of brain state the dreamers were in at those times.
DILDs account for about four out of every five lucid dreams that our dreamers have had in the laboratory. In the other 20 percent, the dreamers report awakening from a dream and then returning to the dream state with unbroken awareness - one moment they are aware that they are awake in bed in the sleep laboratory, and the next moment, they are aware that they have entered a dream and are no longer perceiving the room around them. We call these "wake initiated lucid dreams" (WILDs).
So, we analyzed the data scientifically in the experiment
described below.
The physiological information that we collected in conjunction with each lucid dream always included brain waves, eye-movements, and chin muscle activity.
These measurements are necessary for determining if a person in awake, asleep, and in REM sleep or not. In all cases, the dreamer signaled the beginning of the lucid dream by making a distinct pattern of eye movements that was identifiable by someone not involved with the experiment.
Alongside the physiological analysis we
scored each dream report for the presence of various events that are
typical of OBEs, such as feelings of body distortion (including
paralysis and vibrations), floating or flying, references to being
aware of being in bed, being asleep or lying down, and the sensation
of leaving the body (for instance, "I was floating out-of-body").
Twenty of the lucid dreams were WILDs, and 87 were DILDs. Five of the OBEs were WILDs (28%) and five were DILDs (6%). Thus, OBEs were more than four times more likely in WILDs than in DILDs.
However, it is possible that these people could have momentarily become aware of their environments (and hence been "awake") while continuing to show the brainwaves normally associated with REM sleep.
The science of the EEG is not sufficiently advanced that we can tell what people are experiencing by looking at their brainwaves.
Anecdotes from dream reports
indicate that people sometimes become aware of sensations from their
sleeping bodies while dreaming - for example, the dream in which you
are trying to run while your legs become heavier and heavier,
perhaps because you are feeling their true immobile condition.
However, we wondered if this relationship would apply to OBEs and lucid dreams that people experience at home, in the "real world."
For example, of the 452 people claiming to have had lucid dreams, 39 percent also reported OBEs, whereas only 15 percent of those who did not claim lucid dreams said they had had OBEs. The group with the most people reporting OBEs (51%) were those who said they had experienced lucid dreams, dream return, and sleep paralysis.
Thus, we believe that the fact that dream return frequency was
linked with OBE frequency in this study gives further support to our
laboratory research finding that WILDs were associated with OBEs.
We have thereby learned that when OBEs happen during lucid dreams, they generally happen in lucid dreams that arise from brief awakenings in REM sleep, and that people who have certain special dream experiences are more likely to have OBEs that people who do not. These dream experiences include returning to the dream state after an awakening, lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis.
This model includes a body. When dreaming, we generally experience ourselves in a body much like the "real" one, because that is what we are used to. However, our internal senses in the physical body, which when we are awake inform us about our position in space and the movement of our limbs. This information is cut off in REM sleep.
Therefore, we can dream of doing all kinds of things with our dream bodies - flying, dancing, running from monsters, being dismembered - all while our physical bodies lie safely in bed.
The room around us looks about the same, because that is our brain's best guess about where we are. If we did not know that we had just fallen asleep, we might well think that we were awake, still in touch with the physical world, and that something mighty strange was happening - a departure of the mind from the physical body!
But waking life is also like that - our memory for a typical, mundane day is flat and lacking in detail. It is only the novel, exciting, or frightening events that leave vivid impressions. If we stop what we are doing, we can look around and say, "Yes, this world looks solid and real." But, if you look back and try to recall, for instance, brushing your teeth this morning, your memory is likely to be vague and not very life-like. Contrast this to a past event that excited or alarmed you, which is likely to seem much more "real" in retrospect.
All this goes to show that the feeling that an event is real does not mean that it is happening in the physical world that we all share when we are awake.
This is not to deny that that inner experiences are real, in that they have deeply profound effects on our lives. However, as lucid dreaming so amply demonstrates, we can learn to distinguish between our personal dreams and events in the consensus dream we call physical reality. When we do, we find that what we thought was one thing - the waking world - is actually another - a dream.
Another point to consider is that a dream doesn't always have to happen in REM sleep.
Most do, but there are probably quite a few other conditions in which people can lose touch with sensory experience and enter a mental world. Some such states that we know of are hypnotic trance, anesthesia, and sensory isolation. OBEs have been reported from these states (Nash et al., 1984; Olson, 1988).
Thus, the argument that an OBE cannot be a dream because the
experient wasn't asleep doesn't hold water.
What does it mean to be in a body? Saying that one is in a body implies that the self is an object with definite borders capable of being contained by the boundaries of another object - the physical body. However, we do not have any evidence that the self is such a concrete thing. What we think of as "out-of-body" in an OBE is the experience of the self.
This experience of being "in" a body is normally based on perceptual input from the senses of both the world external to the body and the processes within the body. These give us a sense of localization of the self in space. However, it is the body, and its sense organs, that occupy a specific locus, not the self.
The self is not the body or the brain. If we think that the self is a product of brain function, even this does not make it reasonable to state that the self is in the brain - is the meaning contained in these words in this page? It may not make any sense on an objective level to say that the self is anywhere. Rather, the self is where it feels itself to be. Its location is purely subjective and derived from input from the sensory organs.
Therefore, although no amount of contradictory evidence can rule out the possibility of a real "out of body experience," in which an individual exists in some form entirely independent of the body, it is highly unlikely that such a form would utilize perceptual systems identical to those of the physical human form.
The worlds we create in dreams and OBEs are as real as this one, and yet hold infinitely more variety. How much more exhilarating to be "out-of-body" in a world where the only limit is the imagination than to be in the physical world in a powerless body of ether!
Freed of the
constraints imposed by physical life, expanded by awareness that
limits can be transcended, who knows what we could be, or become?
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