Unexplained Mystery #5: The Out of Body Experience

This one falls directly under my personal remit.

Out of body experiences, often cited as a literal "exiting" of the physical body in soul or ethereal form, aka astral projection, is superbly explained by a certain type of lucid dream. I've experienced many vivid OBEs myself while practicing lucid dreaming techniques and the process has even been replicated under laboratory conditions.

So, is this proof of the spirit? The afterlife? Alternate dimensions?

Not quite. As lucid dreamers know, we are entirely capable of creating a perfect replica of the real world inside our dreaming minds. When we are dreaming consciously, this can even look, sound and feel as vivid as waking life. This is the great appeal of lucid dreaming.

An OBE, then, is a lucid dream which is initiated from an awareness of lying in bed. Instead of throwing our awareness right into a fanciful dreamworld, we become absorbed in the process of "falling asleep consciously". We become aware of sleep paralysis (aka REM atonia) which prevents the body from acting out its dreams. And we project our dream-self into the bedroom by rolling or floating out, ghost-like.

The instinctive interpretation is that we have projected out-of-body but this fallacy is overcome when you recreate the experience for yourself in the context of a lucid dream. Indeed, many famous out of body explorers use identical techniques to go out-of-body as we lucid dreamers use to enter the dreamworld.

Out of body explorers have long tried to prove the validity of their experience by trying to obtain data from faraway locations. Unfortunately nothing truly definitive has been recorded under verifiable conditions.