Consciousness

Chapter

Fifteen

Dreaming and beyond

Overall, OBEs give us insights into how our sense of self is normally constructed
and what happens when the normal mechanisms for anchoring our sense of
self in our bodies temporarily break down. They remind us from another angle
that the sense I have of being in my head looking out through my eyes is not
a truth, but just the result of all the neural and other processes that generally
make ‘in my head’ feel like where ‘I’ am. The switch of that location in an OBE
makes us realise it is always just a construct  – but also shows just how pro-
foundly consciousness changes when it no longer seems to be grounded in
the body.

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

Across many ages and cultures, people coming close to death report a consistent
set of experiences, including the ‘returned from the dead’ writings in Tibetan Bud-
dhism, a description in Plato’s Republic, and myths from ancient Greece, Native
Americans, and contemporary European folklore. Nineteenth-century psychical
researchers collected accounts of ‘death-bed visions’ reported by people just

Participant

Participant

Participant’s

virtual body

Participant’s

virtual body

2m 2m

2m

A) Lenggenhager’s method

B) Ehrsson’s method

FIGURE 15.19 • Two methods for inducing out-of-body illlusions using virtual reality. In both the participants wear a head-
mounted display showing images from cameras two metres behind them. In Lenggenhager’s (2007) method
(a), the participants can see their own back being stroked, and get the sense of moving forwards. In Ehrsson’s
(2007) method (b), they feel their chest being stroked while seeing a stick appearing and disappearing in front
of the camera, and get the sense of moving backwards.