Kevin's Watch

What It Is Like to "Be Out"

The sensation of seeming to travel out of body is virtually impossible to explain to those who have not experienced it, believers feel, because it is so unlike normal conscious existence. Nonetheless, a sampling of comments from a few of the respondents in a study conducted by Celia Green, a British parapsychologist, provides some sense of what "being out" has meant to different people:
"I am disembodied, but in a small place which has a definite size and location."
"Reality was my 'floating self' and the objects below seemed as shadows against the reality of my floating self."
"What seemed to have escaped was whatever made the physical body of me; i.e. whatever gave me personality or character."
"The part of me that was out of body was the real me, as I knew it, the part that sees, thinks, and feels emotionally."
"I feel in an extraordinarily light colourful body, buoyant, joyful and somehow 4 dimensional, as if I could, if I wanted to see the inside as well as out."
"I have found that the eyesight black outs, and something else seems to start."
"I 'saw' with whole consciousness."
"I was quite calm and unworried and thought, 'So that's what I look like. The sensation is nothing like looking in a mirror."
"It wasn't weird or frightening: in fact if there is a reaction, it is one of feeling superior."
"I have never been so wide awake or experienced such a wonderful sense of freedom before."
"I suddenly felt filled with the utmost joy and happiness. I felt such great freedom."
"All movement was instantaneous. To think was to have acted."
"And then a feeling . . . of terrible fear came to me. I knew I HAD to return to my body before it was touched. There was a dreadful sense of urgency, or it would be too late."
"The thought came to myself--if I drift away from here how am I going to find my way back?"
"The escaped me felt absolutely wonderful, very light and full of the most wonderful vitality, in fact more well than I have ever felt before or since."
"I had no further interest in my physical body, or indeed my physical life. I only wanted to pursue and prolong this happy state of being where everything was more bright, vivid, and real than anything I had previously known."