what exactly is an “out of body” experience? Is it really possible? If yes, what causes it?
In: Biology
If you’re asking can you have the experience? Yes, you can hallucinate that you’re floating above yourself… But if you’re asking if you can actually leave your body then I’m afraid the answer is no. Well I guess technically if you were decapitated and then someone like, threw your head over your body then I guess… But no.
Out of body experiences are real. Many people have had them. What causes them is variable, but usually involves some loss of consciousness where the mind is able to wonder without the normal physical senses being active. A sub-catagory of this involves out of body near death experiences. For example, people may feel that they died and came back. They may even have been resuscitated and remember some experience that they credit to the after life. The stories are interesting, but there is no proof I know of that all of these are more than a mental dream like state.
I feel like I had an out of body experience when I got my wisdom teeth removed. I remember having the sensation that I was above the room watching the procedure. Of course it was just a drug fuel hallucination/dream.
Not an expert but I’ve read about that years ago, so maybe wrong information here, also personal experience:
When I was a child I passed out frequently due to the speed I was growing. Once I was like in a dream and saw myself passing out in our livingroom. I loughed about myself and a few moments later I woke up and exactly knew how it happened and how stupid it looked. That was truly an “out of body” experience like many describe.
When you pass out or have a “daydream” or you start to fall asleep your brain produces something like [Dimethyltryptamine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) (not really profen, but something like that). Its some kind of hallucinogenic. That stuff that let you dream.
I once read about a room in a hospital where one of the doctors placed a card on top of a shelf to experiment with that “out of body” experiences. People that had an “out of body” experience due to close death or by passing out, told about how that room looked like in that moment. Some of them was in a view where they should see the card laying on top of the shelf but in the explanations they didn’t see it. So your brain just creates the pictures by your memory and the “out of body” experience is not really out of body. It’s just a dream in your head that is very wierd to explain (like many dreams?).
It really feels awkward to have a dream like that. It happened 20 years ago but I still can remember those pictures. How I passed out, how I loughed about myself. How my mom and my sister run to me to look what happened. Without having my eyes open in that moment it was like a movie scene playing in my head with crystal clear pictures. I can’t even explain how exactly it’s possible but the fact that I wasn’t really in control, fixed view, very dreamlike “what’s happening?” state…it’s just shit my brain come up with together with sound I heared that moment. In fact my sister wasn’t close to me irl but in my “out of body” experience. So maybe my brain just thought she’s close to me and produced those pictures. So my dream was wrong about that.
I think it’s possible everytime your brain is flooded with that Dimethyltryptamine in wrong moments. I’m pretty sure that your brain uses that drug right before your die. Many people that were close to death will tell you that they had a dream. Some of them have an “out of body” experience.
In short: “out of body” experiences is not really an “out of body” experience. Your brain dreams like it is out of your body in the current situation with pictures created from your memory that differs from reality.
It is the idea that some element of yourself can leave your body and float up above it and see around the room that you are in. Does it happen no, it is likely to be drug or delirium created experience in a dreamlike state.
People can hallucinate for many different reasons. Most of the time it is some sort of disease or something they ate.
I’ll give you an example. A group of people 2000 years ago eat some mushrooms. Unbeknownst to them they happen to be the type of mushrooms that make you trip. Two of them have “out of body experiences”. These experiences are very real for them. They talk to each other and decide that they both flew out of their bodies. They then go around and tell everyone. One of them happens to be very eloquent and charming. He is very convincing when he tells his story. Now people believe that they actually had an out of body experience.
Edit: Often people just make that shit up and straight up lie about it. Also if you’ve ever played the telephone game you’d know that a story can change dramatically as it is told over and over again by different people.
It’s like ghosts and UFOs. You can’t prove it, you can’t disprove and everyone claiming to have experienced it will give a wildly different narrative.
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