Out Of Body Experience Essay

An ‘Out Of Body Experience’ also known as ‘Astral Projection’ is exactly what the name suggests; it is the separation of one’s conscious from one’s body. In an Out of Body (OBE) experience a person feels like they have left their body and are floating above it. During an OBE the person is said to hear things and see things happening around them even though the person unconscious in a very liberal sense of the word. People who have out of body experiences also tend to have lucid dreams and the ability to control their dreams.

There is little to no controversy about OBEs in the neurological world.It may be a bit hard to believe but out of body experiences are quite common. About 1 in 20 people will have an OBE in their lifetime. They happen commonly

People who have experienced OBEs say that they are more real than dreams. There is also considerable evidence that people who tend to have OBEs also tend to have lucid dreams, flying and falling dreams, and the ability to control their dreams (Blackmore, 1983, 1984; Glicksohn, 1989; Irwin, 1988).

Because of the similarity between lucid dreaming and out of body experience some researchers say that an out of body experience is a type of lucid dream (Faraday, 1976; Honegger, 1979; Salley, 1982). One major problem with this theory is that even though people who have had OBEs are more likely to have lucid dreams, people who have never had lucid dreams do as well sometimes undergo out of body experiences, and also out of body experiences are far less frequent than lucid dreams where one feels like one is falling from a building or flying.

Furthermore OBEs and lucid dreams are very different in the sense that a person undergoing an OBE is convinced that the experience is a real event taking place in a physical world and is definitely not a dream. Whereas in a lucid dream the person knows that it is a dream and not an actual or real life event. But then there is an exception to this difference where sometimes one feels as if one is leaving the body and also knows that it is a