Monroe Institute Research Files: Out-of-Body Experience

what a classic OBE feels like. The OBE also seems as real or "realer" than ordinary experience. Reality is more complex than this, but this distinction between "pure" OBEs and typical NDEs will be useful for our discussion. Out-of-Body Experiences: First Study I conducted my first parapsychological experiment in 1957 while I was still a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of 'Ichnology, studying electrical engineering. It was an attempt to produce OBEs with the aid of hypnosis, inspired by several old articles, especially one by Hornell Hart (1953), a sociologist turned parapsychologist. I trained several fellow students to be moderately good hypnotic sub jects and then guided them in individual hypnotic sessions, in which 78 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES I suggested that the participant's mind would leave his body and go to the basement of a house several miles away, a place in a suburb of Boston he had never physically been to, and then describe what he saw in that basement. The target house was the home of two parapsychologists, Fraser Nicol and Betty Humphrey, who had deliberately arranged a very unusual collection of objects in a corner of the basement. I reasoned that if any one of the subjects gave a good description of these un usual objects, I would know his mind had been there while out-of body. Note the implicit model I had of OBEs, that it was equivalent to moving your sense organs, especially your eyes, to a distant physi cal location; I will question this simple model below. I had also placed a capacitance relay beside the target location to detect and record any disturbance in the electrical properties of the space around the targets, hoping that my hypnotized OBE participants might physi cally perturb the properties of space while they traveled to the tar gets, providing further evidence that the mind could actually leave the body. I installed the capacitance relay before Nicol and Humphrey placed any target materials on the table: I did not want to know what the targets were, so that I could not inadvertently give away any cues about them. While I would not call the experiment a failure-I learned a lot from it-it did not work out as planned. The capacitance relay device had to be abandoned, as it went on and off every time the house furnace did. My participants' descriptions of the target had occasional resemblances to the target materials, but the similarities were much too vague for me to put any reliance upon them. A "side trip" by one of the participants who was asked to describe my home in New Jer sey, which he had never been to, was similarly suggestive, but not sufficiently so to convince me his mind had indeed left his body and traveled south. I had not yet learned how essential objective ways of evaluating results in parapsychology were. Out-of-Body Experiences: Second Study My next study of OBEs in the mid-1960s happened synchronisti cally (Tart, 1981). While chatting about various things with a young woman who babysat for us, I found out that, ever since early child hood, it was an ordinary part of her sleep experience occasionally to feel she had awakened from sleep mentally, but was floating near CHARLES T. TART 79 the ceiling, looking down on her physical body. This experience was clearly different from her dreams and usually only lasted a few sec onds. As a child, not knowing better, she thought this was a normal part of sleeping. After mentioning it once or twice as a teenager she found it was not normal and she ceased talking about it! She had never read anything about OBEs, as this was long before Raymond Moody's Life After Life (1975), and had no idea what to make of it. I was quite interested, as she said she still had the experience oc casionally. I told her there were two theories about OBEs, one that they were what they seemed to be, namely, the mind temporarily leaving the physical body, and the other that OBEs were just some sort of hal lucination. I suggested she could tell the difference by writing the numbers one to ten on slips of paper, putting them in a box on a bedside table, randomly selecting one to turn up without looking at it before going to sleep and then, if she had an OBE during the night, looking at and memorizing the number and then checking the accuracy of her memory in the morning. I saw her a few weeks later and she reported that she had tried the experiment seven times. She was always right about the number, so it seemed to her that she was really "out" during these experiences. Miss Z, as I called her in my primary report on our work (Tart, 1968), had interrupted her college work to earn needed funds and was moving from the area in a few weeks, but before she left I was able to have her spend four nights in my sleep research laboratory. Each night I recorded her electroencephalogram (EEG) in a typical fashion used in dream research that allowed me to distinguish wak ing, drowsiness, and the various stages of sleep: two channels, fron tal-to-vertex and vertex-to-occipital on the right side of the head, recording continuously through the night on a Grass Model VII Poly graph at a speed of 10 millimeters per second. I measured eye move ments with a flexible strain gauge taped over one eye and I also measured the electrical resistance of her skin using electrodes taped to her right palm and forearm. On two of the four nights I also meas ured heart rate and relative blood pressure with an optical plethys mograph on her finger. To ascertain whether she was, in some sense, really "out" of her body during her OBEs, I used the following procedure: Each laboratory night, after the subject was lying in bed, the physi ological recordings were running satisfactorily, and she was ready to go to sleep, I went into my office down the hall, opened a table 80 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES of random numbers at random, threw a coin onto the table as a means of random entry into the page, and copied off the first five digits immediately above where the coin landed. These were copied with a black marking pen, in figures approximately two inches high, onto a small piece of paper. Thus they were quite discrete visually. This five-digit random number constituted the parapsychological target for the evening. I then slipped it into an opaque folder, en tered the subject's room, and slipped the piece of paper onto the shelf without at any time exposing it to the subject. This now pro vided a target which would be clearly visible to anyone whose eyes were located approximately six and a half feet off the floor or higher, but was otherwise not visible to the subject. The subject was instructed to sleep well, to try and have an [out of-body] experience, and if she did so, to try to wake up immediately afterwards and tell me about it, so I could note on the polygraph records when it had occurred. She was also told that if she floated high enough to read the five-digit number she should memorize it and wake up immediately afterwards to tell me what it was. (Tart, 1968, p. 8) Over her four laboratory nights, Miss Z reported three clear cut incidents of "floating" experiences, in which she felt that she might have partly gotten out of her body but the experience did not fully develop, and two full OBEs. My general impression of the physiologi cal patterns accompanying her floating and full OBE experiences is that she was in no way near death. There were no major heart rate or blood pressure changes and no particular activity in the autonomic nervous system. Furthermore, floating and full OBEs occurred in an EEG stage of poorly developed stage 1 sleep, mixed with transitory periods of brief wakefulness. Stage 1 normally accompanies the descent into sleep, the hypnagogic period, and later dreaming during the night, but these were not like those ordinary stage 1 periods because they were often dominated by alphoid activity, a distinctly slower version of the ordinary waking alpha rhythm, and there were no rapid eye move ments (REMs) accompanying these stage 1 periods, as almost always happens in normal dreaming. As to what this poorly developed stage 1 with dominant alphoid and no REMs meant, that remains some thing of a mystery. I showed the recordings to one of the world's leading authorities on sleep research, William Dement, and he agreed with me that it was a distinctive pattern, but we had no idea what it meant. But it has left an idea with me that I have never been able to follow up, but which might prove fruitful. If you could teach someone to produce a drowsy state and slowed alpha rhythms, for CHARLES T. TART 81 example, through biofeedback training, would such a psychological procedure then make it easier to have an OBE? Indeed I found a report of a sensory deprivation study that reported alphoid rhythms occurring and also reported some subjects feeling as if they had left their bodies (Heron, 1957). I wrote to the researcher asking if these two things were associated, but never received a reply; perhaps the question was too controversial. On the first three laboratory nights Miss Z reported that in spite of occasionally being "out," she had not been able to control her ex periences enough to be in position to see the target number (which was different each night). On the fourth night, at 5:57 AM, there was a seven minute period of somewhat ambiguous EEG activity, sometimes looking like stage 1, sometimes like brief wakings. Then Miss Z awakened and called out over the intercom that the target number was 25132, which I wrote on the EEG recording. After she slept a few more minutes I woke her so she could go to work and she reported on the previous awakening that: I woke up; it was stifling in the room. Awake for about five minutes. I kept waking up and drifting off, having floating feelings over and over. I needed to go higher because the number was lying down. Between 5:50 and 6:00 A.M. that did it. . . . I wanted to go read the number in the next room, but I couldn't leave the room, open the door, or float through the door. . . . I couldn't turn off the air conditioner! (Tart, 1968, p. 17) The number 25132 was indeed the correct target number. I had learned something about designing experiments since my first OBE experiment and precise evaluation was possible here. The odds against guessing a 5-digit number by chance alone are 100,000 to 1, so this was a remarkable event! Note also that Miss Z had apparently expected me to have propped the target number up against the wall behind the shelf, but she correctly reported that it was lying flat. Whenever striking parapsychological results occur, both skeptics and other parapsychologists worry that they might have been fraudu lently produced, or happened through some normal sensory channel, for such things have happened historically. With the help of Arthur Hastings, who is a skilled amateur magician as well as a parapsy chologist, I carefully inspected the laboratory later to see if there was any chance of this. We let our eyes dark adapt to see if there was any chance the number might be reflected in the plastic casing of the clock on the wall above the number, but nothing could be seen unless we shone a bright flashlight directly on the numbers. Unless 82 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES Miss Z, unknown to us, had employed concealed apparatus to illu minate and/or inspect the target number, which we had no reason to suspect, there was no normal way that anyone lying in bed, and having only very limited movement due to the attached electrodes, could see it.