You’ve been lying on the couch for 45 minutes. You’re focused on your breathing or some other thing you decided on beforehand. You’re aware of sounds outside, but you are concentrated. You can no longer feel your body. A kind of bliss arises in your mind. Suddenly you hear humming, or feel strange vibrations course through you. As light as air, you drift out of your body, and turn to see your body still on the couch.

Or maybe instead, you kept an image in mind, and you remained perfectly still. The imagine morphs into a new scene, and now you can move around, you feel the bark of a tree, hear a bird overhead, and feel a breeze on your face,  and you know your body is still on the couch, yet  you are in an entirely new place.

I’ve had both of these experiences many times, often intentional, and sometimes not. One is known as astral travel, and the other as Shamanic journey. Both events are induced by being still and relaxing, or going without food and water, or using drugs. The first, simply remaining still, was my preferred technique. And for a few years I believed the books that they were true out of body experiences, where my essence, soul, whatever left my physical body and went into what is called the astral realm. I know better now.

I can hear some of you protesting already, but bear with me. The answer to what’s really happening is fascinating, at least to me, and possibly you if you’re willing to learn about it.

While I was practicing these kinds of experiences, I also continued my never-ending interest in neurobiology and the particularly the biology of sleep and dreams, mixed with the many years of mindfulness meditation.

Something I noticed in meditation immediately was that after 30 minutes, if you remain absolutely still, you will lose body sensation. I found this fascinating, and discovered the reason while researching astral travel. In one of the books I read it said that if you remain stay for 30 minutes or more and don’t move anything, not even an eyelid, you trick the brain into thinking you’re asleep. But because this is not the natural method of going to sleep, awareness remains.

This is also what long time meditators experience, and scientific studies have shown through EKG and MRIs, that indeed meditators are inducing sleep yet remain alert. This led me to research sleep and dreaming more, and what I found was fascinating.

In the normal sleep process when you lie down at night, the brain initiates sleep by doing the following:

• Shutting down consciousness (awareness)
• Shutting down the chemicals that make memories
• Inducing body paralysis
• Creating LOTS of brain activity

Your brain is as active when you are asleep as when you are awake. The reason for shutting down consciousness and memory chemicals is because the activity would probably really confuse and frighten us, and conscious thinking would interfere with all the testing the brain needs to go through while we sleep. The paralysis is to prevent you from walking around while it’s checking the neurons for activities like walking, running, etc. In addition, they suspect the flight and fight responses gets checked through nightmares, and other important reflexes are tested. Lastly, memories are allocated to different areas of the brain depending on importance, and learning is reviewed and perhaps made more or less accessible, depending on many factors.

This made me realize that many dream theories out there are nonsense, because actually we aren’t supposed to remember them. The only reason why we do is because apparently consciousness and memory making go hand in hand. So, if you slowly awaken from the need to urinate in the middle of the night, as you become conscious, you also become aware of the brain activity going on, you mentally “see” what’s it doing. This you see in the form of a dream. So, if your brain is testing a memory of your mother, while simultaneously checking the memory of a women you passed in the store 6 days ago, you may dream about your mom but she looks completely different than your real mom. Instead she has the face of this woman you don’t recall seeing but your brain remembered.

I read about the paralysis part years ago, and knew sometimes we wake before control is given back to us, sometimes causing panic in people. This is a common symptom of sleep paralysis and will disappear as soon as you are fully conscious. But I had one friend who said she often had the nightmare of something horrible happening and not being able to scream. She announced proudly one day that she had successfully screamed in her dream, and she thought that meant she had some kind of psychological breakthrough.  No, actually it only means she had dealt with her dream fear and was able to settle back into the dream enough to continue it.

So, back to out of body experiences. They can only happen after the body has been still for some time,  usually at least 30 minutes, but not always. Some books go as far to say that you must learn to fall asleep while remaining aware. In other words, you are inducing a lucid dream. A lucid dream is where you have fallen asleep, but you have enough awareness that you can move through the dream of your own volition. Some of these books go on to say that all dreaming takes place in the astral, and that all dreamers are out of their body. No, you’re not.

Dreaming takes place in the same place your thinking and imagination take place: in your head. It’s a brain function. So, what happens is that people train themselves to be aware as their body goes to sleep. The brain clicks into testing most, and begins the process of dreaming. But because you have maintained awareness, you force yourself to dream that you are leaving your body. Generally, you won’t have control over other dream characters, the environment, etc just like in dreaming, but that also makes the experience seem more “real.”

The realness is the part that puzzled me until I started paying closer attention to my dreams in regular sleep. Everything is absolutely real, and you have no doubt about where you are or what you’re doing in a dream. It’s not until you wake up, that you might wonder how you could be so easily fooled.

Lastly,  hallucinations seem absolutely real. After I had surgery and was in ICU because of the pain medications, I had a hallucination that seemed so real I almost believed I had slipped into a parallel universe. I knew I wasn’t dreaming, because I could read print repeatedly, was watching the clock and knew I was awake. I puzzled for some time over this, how the room changes could seem so real. The room was pink instead of blue, and I had lace curtains instead of the normal hospital ones.

When I read about the biology of sleep, I realized that I was indeed awake, but I was dreaming while conscious. This is the nature of a hallucination. What you see and experience smells, feels, and appears absolutely real. Dreams seem absolutely real. But in the case of out of body experience, you are dreaming while awake. You have tricked the brain into thinking you are asleep because of the stillness of body, and so it goes on to create a dream, a lucid one in which you have some control.

The process is similar for journeying.  You start out with imagination, and when you’ve tricked your brain into thinking you’re asleep, then the dreamscape takes over your imagination, and it appears as though you’ve stepped into another world.

I know most of you are not going to want to accept the reality of out of body experiences. But you can verify this for yourself by watching how dream images begin to pop up during long meditations, or if you start paying close attention to how real dreams seem, how you fall asleep at night, etc., and the true nature of a lucid dream.

I’ve concluded there is nothing that can leave the body, and all of this is sleep biology and nothing more. To reject the reality of it, to cling to a belief that you are flying around elsewhere is just to delude yourself, to separate yourself even farther from who and what you really are.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 5:31 pm and is filed under beliefs, Dreams, Out-of-Body Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.