Freaky Friday Files: Out of Body Experiences
- Ash
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Hi friends. Happy Friday!! In this week's edition of Freaky Friday Files, I thought we could take a look at "out-of-body experiences!" Some people may call them "astral projection" or "spirit walking," but "out of body" is the more "academic" term.
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Out of Body Experiences
According to Wikipedia, "An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world as if from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy (literally "seeing self"), although this term is more commonly used to refer to the pathological condition of seeing a second self, or doppelgänger."
The term OBE was first introduced in 1943 in a book called "Apparitions" by parapsychologist George Nugent Merle Tyrrell (1879 - 1952). From there, researchers such as Robert Monroe (1915-1995), founder of The Monroe Institute, and Celia Green (1935-), who has done extensive work on lucid dreaming, adopted the term OBE instead of the terms astral projection or spirit walking.
Interestingly, OBEs can be induced by sensory deprivation, NDEs, psychedelics, dehydration, sleep disorders, dreaming, traumatic brain injuries, and electrical stimulation. I believe it is possible to be deliberately caused, and they are quite common, with at least 1 in 10 people having experienced an OBE once in their life, including me! Although I don't know for sure if it was really considered an OBE - I was meditating for the first time ever, and it felt like I was out of my body, floating on a soft, fluffy cloud, but it felt like a soft blanket. It only lasted about 5 minutes, and I've never really been able to replicate it - even with the guided meditations. I do really want to get a soft, white, fluffy cloud bubble blanket, though.
People who experience such out-of-body experiences say that it's a sensation where they are floating above their bodies, can see themselves (sometimes), and are observing the world from a sort of detached perspective.
So why do OBEs happen? I think there is still speculation as to why, but there are some psychological and neurological factors at play:
Disruptions in the brain's temporoparietal junction - one area involved in integrating sensory information + spatial awareness
Many psychologists believe it's like a dream state, without being related to anything paranormal, aka a byproduct of the imagination
Distortion of body image, hysteria, and psychosis
Hallucinatory fantasy - where one wants to see oneself
Psychological disorders - like depersonalisation/derealisation and schizophrenia (in some cases)
Sleep paralysis/sleep disorders
Minor brain malfunctions
Some researchers do link it to the paranormal + astral projection meditation
There can be spontaneous OBEs and induced OBEs. Spontaneous OBEs can be caused during/near sleep, with subjects often citing sleep paralysis as the main cause, or right before lucid dreaming, NDEs - if a subject has some sort of big near-death trauma like almost drowning, that's when they report having an OBE, and extreme physical effort - a person is so tired, they have an OBE. Induced OBEs can be caused by hallucinogens, falling asleep without losing awareness, meditation, and things like binaural beats.
I kind of wonder if those stories where people are in serious car crashes and they start imagining an angel coming to help them - if that's part of this (but I'm not sure). You can read more about that "here".
Here are some real-life examples from subjects in studies!
"A 36-year-old American police officer from California wrote the following in reply to a question in one of my studies. On her first night on patrol, she pursued an armed suspect. “When I and three other officers stopped the vehicle and started getting [to] the suspect . . . I was afraid. I promptly went out of my body and up into the air maybe 20 feet above the scene. I remained there, extremely calm, while I watched the entire procedure-including watching myself do exactly what I had been trained to do.” Suddenly, she found herself back in her body after the suspect had been subdued." - (Alvarado, 2000).
"A Scottish woman wrote that, when she was 32 years old, she had an OBE while training for a marathon. “After running approximately 12- 13 miles . . . I started to feel as if I wasn’t looking through my eyes but from somewhere else. . . . I felt as if something was leaving my body, and although I was still running along looking at the scenery, I was looking at myself running as well. My ‘soul’ or whatever, was floating somewhere above my body high enough up to see the tops of the trees and the small hills." - (Alvarado, 2000).
"I was in bed and about to fall asleep when I had the distinct impression that I was at the ceiling level looking down at my body in the bed. I was very startled and frightened; immediately (afterwards) I felt that I was consciously back in the (body on the) bed again." - (Blank, 2004)
“There was one experience in which I felt much more distanced from my physical body (...) I felt that my consciousness and my physical body really took more distance and that if I opened my eyes, I would see my body. At that moment I was scared, so I turned back to my physical body.” - (Moix et al., 2025).
“I have only had one experience and it was taking drugs. (...) And when I took it it made me feel dizzy and I started walking and I saw myself walking. (...) I saw my head and my body ahead and I was a little confused. “It disappeared after five minutes, more or less.” - (Moix et al., 2025).
Have you ever had an out-of-body experience? Let me know in the comments.
Ash x
References
Alvarado, C. S. (2000). Out-of-body experiences.
Blanke, O. (2004). Out of body experiences and their neural basis. Bmj, 329(7480), 1414-1415.
Blanke, O., & Mohr, C. (2005). Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and autoscopic hallucination of neurological origin: Implications for neurocognitive mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self-consciousness. Brain research reviews, 50(1), 184-199.
Moix, J., Nieto, I., & De la Rua, A. Y. (2025). Out-of-body experiences: interpretations through the eyes of those who live them. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1566679.
https://listverse.com/2024/09/22/10-human-capabilities-that-scientists-dont-understand/
https://www.upbeatandpositive.com/post/out-of-body-experience-my-story
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