[Explorations In Consciousness: A New Approach To Out-of-Body Experiences Free Download
Saija Grzegorek
The experience can be terrifying. Trapped in your paralysed body, you might sense the presence of a malevolent intruder in the room or a pressure on your chest, squeezing the breath out of your lungs. Hallucinations can jangle the senses: there are ominous voices, supernatural entities, strange lights. You feel as if you are being touched or dragged, bed covers seem to be snatched from you, and you are helpless to grab them back.
One of the most probing explorations of this state, and the one that helped free me from the terror, comes from Jorge Conesa-Sevilla, a neurocognitive psychologist and shamanic artist based in Oregon who regularly experiences sleep paralysis himself. In his book Wrestling with Ghosts (2004), he takes a refreshing approach to the subject, couching sleep paralysis in scientific terms, without denying his personal, exploratory approach.
Explorations In Consciousness: A New Approach To Out-of-Body Experiences Free Download
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Conesa-Sevilla has developed specific, highly honed techniques to help us move from one blended state to the other. Like many others who regularly experience sleep paralysis, I had naturally slipped into lucid dreams on occasion, but I did not understand what they were, or that I could initiate this switch. Wrestling with Ghosts explained how to do this, but most importantly, it made me understand that sleep paralysis was not a curse; it could be a gift.
To switch from sleep paralysis into lucid dreaming is no mean feat; it is hard to keep a cool head with a ghost sitting on top of you. I can rarely pinpoint the moment that terror becomes lucidity but, when it does, I am launched into the vast landscapes and vivid colours of my lucid dreams.
I often return to the same places, worlds that I have created. There is a city with a complex network of streets, elaborate houses, an underground system, a harbour and swimming pools. The whites, blues, yellows and greens are far more intense than any I have seen in waking life. And there are great natural landscapes: a coastline with high cliffs and forests. I know my way around. I could draw a map of these worlds. I can choose where to go and I can walk or fly. I populate these landscapes with people; be they familiar or fantastical, living or departed, I talk to them. I am fully conscious during these dreams.
At first there were loud noises, buzzing and whooshing. At times it felt as if my brain was being sucked out of the top of my head, or that my whole body was being pulled backwards at high speed. I would panic and fight it, but each time I became a little braver. I would ride out the scary sounds and sensations, and find that they gave way to a pleasant feeling of being completely separate from my body.
I could see my bedroom, but in altered form. The plain wooden door had beautiful paintings on it; the trees in the garden were a different species or larger than normal. At times I seemed to be dragging myself around; at others I was light and moved with ease.
During these OBEs, I wondered what would happen if I tried to push my body through my closed bedroom door, and I found that I could. I started to play with these sensations, to float up to my bedroom ceiling or into the living room or out through the solid front door. I enjoyed the feeling of spinning around my house and garden.
If you ever wake up unable to move, try not to panic. Remind yourself that you stand at the threshold of a fantastical world, a strange hinterland, an exhilarating space in which you are awake, but have a REM toy box at your disposal.
An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world 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 doppelgnger.
The term out-of-body experience was introduced in 1943 by G. N. M. Tyrrell in his book Apparitions,[1] and was adopted by researchers such as Celia Green,[2] and Robert Monroe,[3] as an alternative to belief-centric labels such as "astral projection" or "spirit walking". OBEs can be induced by traumatic brain injuries, sensory deprivation, near-death experiences, dissociative and psychedelic drugs, dehydration, sleep disorders, dreaming, and electrical stimulation of the brain,[4] among other causes. It can also be deliberately induced by some.[5] One in ten people has an OBE once, or more commonly, several times in their life.[6][7]
Those experiencing OBEs sometimes report (among other types of immediate and spontaneous experience) a preceding and initiating lucid-dream state. In many cases, people who claim to have had an OBE report being on the verge of sleep, or being already asleep shortly before the experience. A large percentage of these cases refer to situations where the sleep was not particularly deep (due to illness, noises in other rooms, emotional stress, exhaustion from overworking, frequent re-awakening, etc.). In most of these cases subjects perceive themselves as being awake; about half of them note a feeling of sleep paralysis.[15]
Another form of spontaneous OBE is the near-death experience (NDE). Some subjects report having had an OBE at times of severe physical trauma such as near-drownings or major surgery. Near-death experiences may include subjective impressions of being outside the physical body, sometimes visions of deceased relatives and religious figures, and transcendence of ego and spatiotemporal boundaries.[16] The experience typically includes such factors as: a sense of being dead; a feeling of peace and painlessness; hearing of various non-physical sounds, an out-of-body experience; a tunnel experience (the sense of moving up or through a narrow passageway); encountering "beings of light" and a God-like figure or similar entities; being given a "life review", and a reluctance to return to life.[17]
Along the same lines as an NDE, extreme physical effort during activities such as high-altitude climbing and marathon running can induce OBEs. A sense of bilocation may be experienced, with both ground and air-based perspectives being experienced simultaneously.[18]
In the fields of cognitive science and psychology OBEs are considered dissociative experiences arising from different psychological and neurological factors.[5][8][9][10][12][13][14] Scientists consider the OBE to be an experience from a mental state, like a dream or an altered state of consciousness without recourse to the paranormal.[41]
Charles Richet (1887) held that OBEs are created by the subject's memory and imagination processes and are no different from dreams.[42][43] James H. Hyslop (1912) wrote that OBEs occur when the activity of the subconscious mind dramatizes certain images to give the impression the subject is in a different physical location.[44] Eugne Osty (1930) considered OBEs to be nothing more than the product of imagination.[45] Other early researchers (such as Schmeing, 1938) supported psychophysiological theories.[46] G. N. M. Tyrrell interpreted OBEs as hallucinatory constructs relating to subconscious levels of personality.[47]
Donovan Rawcliffe (1959) connected the OBE experience with psychosis and hysteria.[48] Other researchers have discussed the phenomena of the OBE in terms of a distortion of the body image (Horowitz, 1970) and depersonalization (Whitlock, 1978).[49][50] The psychologists Nandor Fodor (1959) and Jan Ehrenwald (1974) proposed that an OBE is a defense mechanism designed to deal with the threat of death.[51][52] According to (Irin and Watt, 2007) Jan Ehrenwald had described the out-of-body experience (OBE) "as an imaginal confirmation of the quest for immortality, a delusory attempt to assure ourselves that we possess a soul that exists independently of the physical body".[53] The psychologists Donald Hebb (1960) and Cyril Burt (1968) wrote on the psychological interpretation of the OBE involving body image and visual imagery.[54][55] Graham Reed (1974) suggested that the OBE is a stress reaction to a painful situation, such as the loss of love.[56] John Palmer (1978) wrote that the OBE is a response to a body image change causing a threat to personal identity.[57]
Carl Sagan (1977) and Barbara Honegger (1983) wrote that the OBE experience may be based on a rebirth fantasy or reliving of the birth process based on reports of tunnel-like passageways and a cord-like connection by some OBErs which they compared to an umbilical cord.[58][59] Susan Blackmore (1978) came to the conclusion that the OBE is a hallucinatory fantasy as it has the characteristics of imaginary perceptions, perceptual distortions and fantasy-like perceptions of the self (such as having no body).[60][61] Ronald Siegel (1980) also wrote that OBEs are hallucinatory fantasies.[62]
Harvey Irwin (1985) presented a theory of the OBE involving attentional cognitive processes and somatic sensory activity. His theory involved a cognitive personality construct known as psychological absorption and gave instances of the classification of an OBE as examples of autoscopy, depersonalization and mental dissociation.[38] The psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge (1985) has written that the explanation for OBEs can be found in lucid dreaming.[63] David Hufford (1989) linked the OBE experience with a phenomenon he described as a nightmare waking experience, a type of sleep paralysis.[64] Other scientists have also linked OBEs to cases of hypnagogia and sleep paralysis (cataplexy).[65][66]
In case studies fantasy proneness has been shown to be higher among OBErs than those who have not had an OBE.[67] The data has shown a link between the OBE experience in some cases to fantasy prone personality (FPP).[68] In a case study involving 167 participants the findings revealed that those who claimed to have experienced the OBE were "more fantasy prone, higher in their belief in the paranormal and displayed greater somatoform dissociation."[69] Research from studies has also suggested that OBEs are related to cognitive-perceptual schizotypy.[70]
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