Chapter
Fifteen
Dreaming and beyond
anything like a magic OBE pill. The closest any drug comes to
that is probably the dissociative anaesthetic ketamine, which,
in sub-anaesthetic doses, paralyses the muscles before induc-
ing unconsciousness. This leads to feelings of body separation
and floating but not often to full OBEs. The increased chance
of experiencing an OBE after taking drugs of this kind suggests
an underlying role for neurotransmitters like dopamine in out-
of-body experiences as well as drug-induced ‘altered states’
and near-death experiences. As well as being a crucial part of
the reward system in the brain, dopamine is known to help
regulate interpretive tendencies. Dopamine receptors are
affected by drugs like LSD (Vollenweider and Kometer, 2010),
and dopamine is associated with hallucinatory experiences in
diseases like Parkinson’s (Fénelon et al., 2000), so there are connections at the level
of brain mechanisms between many of these phenomena.
What do OBEs tell us about consciousness? While some people take them as proof
that consciousness is independent of the body, there are many other possible
explanations.
THEORIES OF THE OBE
OBEs are often so compelling that people become convinced that their con-
sciousness left their body and can survive death, even though neither of these
conclusions follows logically from the experience. Nineteenth-century psychical
researchers thought that the soul or consciousness could be ‘exteriorised’ during
‘travelling clairvoyance’, before separating permanently at death. At the same
time the new religion of Theosophy, based loosely on a combination of Hindu and
Buddhist teachings, taught that we each have multiple bodies: physical, etheric,
astral, and several higher bodies. When consciousness leaves the physical as an
astral body, sometimes remaining connected by a silver cord, the experience is
known as ‘astral projection’ – a concept that remains popular.
Such theories are forms of dualism and face the same problems (Chapter 1).
For example, if the soul or astral body really sees the physical world during pro-
jection, then it must be interacting with it and hence it must be a detectable
physical entity, yet it is supposed to be non-physical. Many attempts to detect it
have been made, including photographing astral bodies, catching them in cloud
chambers, or trying to detect them with people, animals, and many types of
physical instrument, all to no avail (Morris et al., 1978). On the other hand, if the
astral body is non-physical, then it cannot interact with the physical world so as
to see it. There are other problems, too. If we can see and hear and remember so
clearly with our conscious astral body, why should we need physical eyes, ears,
and brain at all?
It is perfectly understandable that OBEs encourage dualist conclusions; they may
even explain the origin of the concept of the soul. As Metzinger puts it, ‘For anyone
who actually had that type of experience it is almost impossible not to become
an ontological dualist afterwards’ (Metzinger, 2005, p. 78). This is precisely what
happened to Sue after an OBE in 1970, and it was only after years of research that
she began to change her mind.
FIGURE 15.13 • In the nineteenth century,
psychical researchers (almost
all male) hypnotised mediums
(usually female) to test for
‘travelling clairvoyance’. The
medium’s spirit was supposedly
able to travel great distances
and report on what it saw there
(Carrington, 1919, p. 152).