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OBEs, astral projection and lucid dreams
Out-of-body experience, astral projection and lucid dreaming are three names for overlapping experiences, and people have argued over the differences for as long as the Gateway tapes have existed. An out-of-body experience, or OBE, is the sense of being aware from a location apart from the physical body. Astral projection is the older occult term for much the same thing, tied to the idea of an astral body traveling on an astral plane. A lucid dream is a dream in which you realize you are dreaming and stay aware inside it.
Robert Monroe used the first term and avoided the second. When his experiences began in 1958, the people he consulted told him he was doing astral projection. He found the word uncomfortable, too occult and too loaded with mystery and secrecy, and adopted the plainer out-of-body experience, which he credited to his psychologist friend Charles Tart. On lucid dreams he was firm. Asked in 1987 whether a lucid dream was anything like an OBE, he said no: the dreamer is only partly cut off from the body's signals, while the out-of-body traveler is fully detached from them and acts by will.
Later teachers and listeners do not all agree with that line. Tom Campbell calls out of body a poor term, and William Buhlman describes the experience as a shift of awareness inward, usually into what he calls the astral or second body. Some Gateway graduates insist an OBE feels unmistakably different from any dream. Others say a lucid dream and a classic roll-out are just two doors into the same aware, nonphysical state, and many listeners now use lucid dreams as a launch point, leaving the body once they realize they are dreaming.
Monroe swapped astral projection for out-of-body experience and said a lucid dream is a different state, though many practitioners now blur the line.
Key points
Why Monroe dropped astral projection
Monroe gave the same reasons across many interviews. In 1987 he called astral travel an old-fashioned occult word whose meaning nobody was quite sure of, with connotations of mystery and secrecy that did not fit what he was doing. In a 1985 radio interview he called it an old witchcraft term, too antiquated for modern Westerners. In a 1978 talk he said he still did not like it. He credited Charles Tart, who studied him in the 1960s, with coining out-of-body experience.
Neutral words were the whole point
The swap was part of a wider habit. Monroe preferred words with no doctrine attached, the same reason he numbered the Focus levels instead of naming them after any tradition. Tom Campbell, discussing OBEs on a 2022 podcast, said Monroe wanted to get rid of belief-based wording and come up with something neutral. The aim was to let people describe an experience without importing a belief about what it meant.
Monroe: a lucid dream is not an OBE
Asked directly in a 1987 radio interview, Monroe said a lucid dream is not like an out-of-body experience. He described the lucid dream as a semi-dissociated state, cut off mainly from time-space inputs, including physical sensory signals, and released from time. The out-of-body state, he agreed, is also released from time, but there one is totally detached from any physical sensory input. Earlier in the same interview he stressed control: in the out-of-body state you decide to go, where to go and when to come back.
Dream-based projection is lucid dreaming
In the same 1987 interview the host described the method of Oliver Fox, an early writer on astral travel: notice something absurd in a dream, such as green horses pulling a yellow pumpkin down the street, realize you are dreaming, and project from there. Monroe said Fox's method now belongs to another category entirely, lucid dreaming, and that lucid dreaming researchers follow a near identical pattern. He tied the extended out-of-body state to a body pattern resembling delta sleep. The dream route starts in REM sleep, where, he agreed, a different, local kind of out-of-body state also occurs.
A practical test: challenge the figure
At an October 1990 talk an audience member asked how to tell a true out-of-body experience. Monroe said to use the same tests you would use to confirm you are here right now. Then he gave one he found interesting, borrowed from lucid dreaming: if a figure is pointing at you and you tell him he does not exist and to go away, and he goes, that was a dream figure. If he wants to fight instead, it is no dream.
Lucid dreams and Focus 15
In a November 1986 Gateway talk, in a passage the rough transcript garbles badly, Monroe compared the lucid dream state with Focus 15, the Gateway state of no time. As far as the transcript can be followed, he said that a lucid dreamer who erases all the dream's action and is left in blackness reaches a condition near identical to that focus: an intense, deep blackness where nothing happens unless you make it happen. He seems to add that Focus 15 is reached by a different method, and that some lucid dreamers use that cleared blackness as a launch point.
Monroe's lab still used the old vocabulary
The neutral label was Monroe's choice, not a rule. In Explorer sessions recorded in his laboratory, Explorers and the sources speaking through them talked freely about the astral body and the astral plane. One Explorer, known by the code name MJL, said in a session that everyone leaves the body for at least a moment during sleep and that the recharging people feel is connected with the astral body's time outside. Monroe let participants use their own words.
How later teachers sort the terms
William Buhlman, who led the Monroe Institute's out-of-body workshop for about a decade, says his early experiences were called astral projections before out of body became standard, and that the phrase is flawed because the move is inward, from the dense body to a finer one, usually the astral or second body. Skip Atwater, a former Institute president, used OBE and astral projection interchangeably on a radio show and set both against remote viewing: in an OBE you feel yourself move up, down and through the wall, while remote viewing involves no such travel. Monroe drew the same line in 1987.
Listeners split on whether they differ
Podcaster and Gateway graduate Jordan Crowder treats them as distinct worlds. He describes an OBE as visceral, close enough to feel the insulation as you pass through a wall, and in a book-report episode calls OBEs in the physical world clunky, often black and white, while astral projection is vivid hypercolor. A speaker in a 2026 podcast with Paul Citarella of the Monroe Institute says the opposite: a classic roll-out and a lucid dream are different ways into the same lucid nonphysical state. A 2012 Institute newsletter noted that lucid dreamers mostly see their experience as something different from an OBE.
Rolling out of a lucid dream
Many listeners report leaving the body from a dream. One Gateway Voyage graduate said that of two OBEs since returning home, one came by rolling out of a lucid dream and the other from bed. Another listener described realizing a dream was a dream, deciding to go out of body, and being thrown out with a whooshing roar into floating darkness. A 2011 TMI Journal book review notes the same route in older literature, including Patricia Garfield's idea that you can turn a lucid dream into an OBE by passing through a barrier.
In their own words
Quotes are checked word for word against the recordings and documents they come from. Bracketed words correct transcription errors; “…” marks an omission.
“Astral travel is what we consider an old-fashioned, occult kind of word, and we're not really sure exactly what it means, first of all. Secondly, from the point of view of the idea of astral travel, [it] has a connotation that bears a lot of mystery and secrecy about it, and we don't feel we're that mysterious or that secretive.”
“No, it isn't. From our perspective, a lucid dream appears very much to be a semi-disassociated state, but disassociated principally from the various inputs from time-space, including physical sensory signals, and also a release from time.”
“The interesting one, of course, in the out-of-body, is, and it's somewhat a similar pattern as a lucid dream, in the sense that here's a guy staring you in the face like this, and pointing his finger at you. And you say, 'You don't exist, and you go away': that's a dream figure. But if he says, 'Come on, let's fight,' it's no dream.”
“The term out of body is a very poor term … I think Bob Monroe coined that term, you know, an out-of-body experience. Before that it was called astral projection and had a few other names to it, but he wanted to get rid of the belief-based wording and come up with some kind of neutral wording.”
“Out-of-body experience is definitely different. It feels real. It's visceral. Like you, you're not just partially out of your body. You are out of your body. Like, your whole consciousness … you can go through walls, and, and when you go through walls you feel, like, the fibers and the textures and, like, the fiberglass and the insulation and this kind of stuff.”
“I don't experience much of a difference between kind of the classic out-of-body, roll-out-of-your-body experience and, and something like a lucid dream. To me, in my experience, they're just different ways of getting into this lucid non-physical state. And once you're lucid in this non-physical awareness, there's all kinds of things that you can do.”
“I was having a dream. I realized, like, 'Oh, this is a dream. I can go out of body.' And when I uttered those words, I guess in my head, in my dream, I felt myself being thrown with such force that it caused a large whooshing sound in the side of my ears, and everything went black. I felt like I was floating. I felt weightless, like I was kind of floating in darkness.”
Important things to consider
Ask what each speaker means by the word
There is no agreed boundary between these terms. Monroe used out-of-body for a willed, fully detached state; Atwater treats OBE and astral projection as one thing; Crowder splits them into separate worlds; others fold lucid dreams in as well. When you read an account or compare notes, find out what the person means before deciding whether you had the same experience.
Vividness is not the test
Lucid dreams can be extraordinarily vivid; the 2012 Institute newsletter quotes researcher Stephen LaBerge saying lucid dreamers often count them among the most wonderful experiences of their lives. Meanwhile some OBE reports are dim, grainy or black and white. Monroe's tests were about control and consistency: check your surroundings the way you would check you are here now, and see whether figures behave like dream figures when challenged.
Expect a jolt of fear at the transition
Listeners who find themselves awake outside the body, especially the first time they see their own body in bed, often describe real terror, and some talk themselves into calling it a dream afterward. Monroe told Gateway groups that once you get past the barriers of fear, the freedom lets you go out and explore, and that what you meet will not bite. Fear usually snaps people straight back into the body.
Beliefs block all three
Asked in 1987 why most people who set out to have a lucid dream, an OBE or a remote-viewing session fail most of the time, Monroe said the real reason is usually the belief system. Expecting a particular cosmology, whether astral planes or pure brain activity, shapes what you allow yourself to notice.
Gateway is not an astral projection course
Gateway starts from Focus 10 and covers far more than leaving the body; only a few exercises aim at separation. Even the 1987 interviewer, who came for OBE talk, noticed that the Institute barely mentioned it during his week there. Online courses that promise you will learn astral projection and lucid dreaming at Gateway describe one teacher's framing of the program, not its official curriculum.
The older astral literature is still useful
Writers such as Oliver Fox and Sylvan Muldoon with Hereward Carrington described techniques, including dream-based exits, that later teachers still use. Their books come wrapped in occult cosmology. You can borrow the techniques without adopting the framework, which is roughly what Monroe did when he renamed the field.
What the evidence does and does not show
Lucid dreaming is well established in sleep laboratories, where dreamers have signaled awareness from REM sleep with agreed eye movements. Charles Tart's 1960s lab sessions with Monroe recorded dreamlike brain activity during his reported OBEs but did not establish that he perceived distant places. So the line between a lucid dream and an OBE rests on how the experiences feel and behave, not on a settled physiological test.
Common questions
What is the difference between astral projection and an out-of-body experience?
For Robert Monroe they were the same phenomenon with different labels. Astral projection was the older occult term; when his experiences began in 1958 people told him that was what he was doing. He disliked the word because it was old-fashioned, vague and loaded with mystery and secrecy, so he adopted out-of-body experience, which he credited to psychologist Charles Tart. Former Institute president Skip Atwater also used the two terms interchangeably. Some modern teachers draw a line anyway. Podcaster Jordan Crowder, for example, calls an OBE a visceral trip through the physical world and astral projection a vivid journey to nonphysical places. If someone insists they differ, ask how they define each.
Is a lucid dream the same as an out-of-body experience?
Monroe said no. In a 1987 radio interview he described a lucid dream as a semi-dissociated state, cut off mainly from time-space inputs and physical sensory signals, whereas in the out-of-body state you are totally detached from physical sensory input and act by deliberate choice. He placed dream-based projection methods, such as Oliver Fox's trick of spotting absurdities in a dream, in the lucid dreaming category. Not everyone agrees. Some experienced practitioners say a lucid dream and a classic roll-out are simply two ways into the same aware, nonphysical state. A 2012 Monroe Institute newsletter noted that lucid dreamers themselves mostly see their experience as something different from an OBE.
Why did Robert Monroe stop calling it astral projection?
He never liked the term. In talks and interviews from 1978 to 1987 he called it an old-fashioned occult word, an antique witchcraft term, and a label whose meaning nobody was quite sure of, with connotations of mystery and secrecy that did not fit his approach. He wanted words that carried no belief system, the same reason he numbered the Focus levels. He credited his friend Charles Tart, the psychologist who tested him in the 1960s, with coining out-of-body experience, and the phrase and its abbreviation, OBE, became the standard worldwide.
Can you go out of body from a lucid dream?
Many people report doing exactly that. A common account goes like this: you realize you are dreaming, decide to leave the body, and feel yourself pulled or thrown out, often with a loud whoosh, darkness and a sense of floating, before finding yourself in a room that looks real. One Gateway graduate said one of his two OBEs after his program came this way. Older writers taught similar routes, including passing through a barrier in a lucid dream. Monroe himself classed dream-based exits as lucid dreaming rather than a full out-of-body state, so whether you call the result an OBE depends on whose definitions you use.
How can I tell if it was an out-of-body experience or just a dream?
Monroe's advice was to use the same tests you would use to confirm you are here now: look closely, check details, see whether things stay consistent. He also suggested a test borrowed from lucid dreaming. If a figure confronts you and you tell it that it does not exist and to go away, a dream figure will vanish; one that wants to fight is no dream. Vividness is a poor guide, since lucid dreams can be extremely vivid and some OBEs feel dim or grainy. Write the experience down right away, including anything you could check later, and judge over many experiences rather than one.
Does the Gateway Experience teach astral projection or lucid dreaming?
Not by those names. Gateway teaches states of awareness, starting with Focus 10, mind awake and body asleep, and a few exercises aim directly at leaving the body, such as Lift Off and First Stage Separation on the Freedom album. Monroe used the term out-of-body experience rather than astral projection on purpose. In one Gateway talk, in a passage the rough transcript garbles, he appears to compare the blackness a lucid dreamer reaches after erasing a dream with Focus 15. Some online teachers say you learn astral projection and lucid dreaming at Gateway; that is their framing. The Institute itself offers tools for an OBE but no guarantee of one.
In Monroe’s books
Summarized in our own words; the books are not reproduced on this site.
Journeys Out of the Body. Monroe recounts that when he first looked for explanations, people familiar with occult literature told him he was experiencing astral projection. He found that literature steeped in belief and decided to test the experiences himself, which shaped his preference for plain, neutral terms.
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