Consciousness

• seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
  frequent OBEs, especially during child-
  hood, and even fewer learn to control
  them.
  People have had OBEs when walking
  down the street, sitting quietly, or even
  driving a car, and apparently carried
  on with what they were doing, but the
  vast majority happen when people
  are relaxed and lying down. OBEs usu-
  ally last only a few seconds or minutes, but in rare cases last for many hours. In
  ‘parasomatic’ OBEs, people seem to inhabit a second duplicate body outside the
  physical one; in ‘asomatic’ OBEs, they are just a disembodied awareness or a point
  of consciousness (Green, 1968b; Alvarado and Zingrone, 2015).
  OBErs (people who have OBEs) report more psychic experiences and greater belief
  in the paranormal than others, as well as better dream recall and more frequent
  lucid dreams (Irwin, 1985; Gackenbach and LaBerge, 1988; Blackmore, 2017).
  There is no correlation with age, sex, educational level, or religion, nor with stan-
  dard personality measures, but OBErs do score higher on measures of hypnotis-
  ability, capacity for absorption, and positive schizotypy. The concept of schizotypy
  is based on the idea that schizophrenia lies at one end of a continuum running
  from normal dissociative and imaginative tendencies to extremely pathological
  ones. High schizotypes have lots of unusual experiences, disorganised thoughts,
  flat emotion, and unstable mood and behaviour, but more positively they are also
  more creative, and there is evidence that OBErs are often ‘healthy schizotypes’
  (McCreery and Claridge, 2002), reporting more dissociative experiences and more
  hallucinations (De Foe, van Doorn, and Symmons, 2012; Parra, 2010).
  OBEs have often been dismissed as pathological dissociation, but although in rare
  cases epilepsy and brain damage can lead to OBEs, the majority are not asso-
  ciated with any pathology. In one study a group of hospitalised schizophrenics
  reported the same frequency of OBEs as a control group (Blackmore, 1996b),
  and after studying a very large group of American OBErs, researchers concluded
  that their ‘psychological health is generally excellent, ranking with the healthiest
  groups in the population’ (Gabbard and Twemlow, 1984, p. 40).
  Precipitating factors include relaxation, reduced sensory input, and vestibular
  disturbances, as occurs on the verge of sleep. So are OBEs just a special kind of
  dream? In surveys, OBErs often say that the world looks as real as or even ‘more
  real’ than usual. Some describe OB vision as brighter and clearer than normal,
  even claiming a kind of 360 degree vision, but others say it is dim or confusing.
  In rare cases, time and space seem to disappear as in mystical experiences. OBEs
  can feel somewhat like lucid dreams in that one feels fully conscious and able to
  fly around at will, but physiological studies using EEG, heart rate, and other mea-
  sures show that OBEs induced in the lab occur in a relaxed waking state similar
  to drowsiness, but not in deep sleep and certainly not in REM sleep (Tart, 1968).
  OBEs are not easy to induce, although there are lots of popular books describing
  how to do it. In the early days of psychical research, hypnosis was used to induce
  ‘travelling clairvoyance’ or ‘astral projection’, while later experiments tended to
  use relaxation and imagery exercises. Some drugs can induce OBEs, especially
  the psychedelics LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and mescaline, but none of these provides

Feeling of a

presence

Autoscopy Heautoscopy Out-of-body

experience

FIGURE 15.12 • Four types of autoscopic
phenomenon. Blue shows
the position of the physical
body and yellow the phantom
or imagined second body. In
heautoscopy the experiencer
cannot tell which is which.