Astral travel is the idea – and for many people the concrete experience – that one's consciousness leaves the body and moves freely through space, sometimes through a separate "astral plane". Millions report such moments: spontaneously in danger, while falling asleep, in trance or under anaesthesia. The interesting question is not whether these experiences occur – they undoubtedly do – but what is really happening: is someone travelling, or is the brain producing a convincing impression? Researchers have tried to answer exactly this with surprisingly concrete experiments for over a hundred years.
OBE or astral travel? An important distinction
Two terms are often conflated but mean different things:
- Out-of-body experience (OBE) – the sober, descriptive term for the experience of perceiving oneself outside one's own body. That this experience occurs is undisputed.
- Astral travel / astral projection – the metaphysical interpretation: that something (an "astral body") actually leaves the body and gathers real information. That is the strong, testable claim – and the real point of contention.
The whole article turns on this seam: the experience is established, the journey is the open question.
An old idea: from Theosophy to Robert Monroe
The "astral body" is no modern invention. The notion of a subtle double reaches back through Neoplatonism, but its now-familiar form took shape in late-19th-century Theosophy – for instance in C. W. Leadbeater's The Astral Plane (1895). In 1929 Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington provided a kind of practical manual with The Projection of the Astral Body, Muldoon writing from his own experience as a frequent "projector".
The modern, demystified term was coined by the US radio producer Robert Monroe: his bestseller Journeys Out of the Body (1971) popularised "out-of-body experience" and led to his Monroe Institute and the Hemi-Sync technique, which even the CIA assessed. In Brazil the field was developed into an entire discipline under the name projectiology by Waldo Vieira, with thousands of collected self-reports. The idea is therefore neither new nor marginal – but tradition and popularity are not proof. Only the experiment provides that.
Can the journey be tested? The famous cases
If information is really gained during the exit, it should be testable: hide a target that can only be seen "from above" or from afar, and see whether the subject names it. That is exactly what was attempted.
Charles Tart and "Miss Z" (1968). The psychologist Charles Tart had a subject who reported regularly "exiting" at night sleep in his laboratory – wired to an EEG, with a five-digit random number on a board high above the bed. Nothing on three nights; on the fourth she gave the number 25132 correctly. Impressive – but the criticism is weighty: Tart monitored from the next room and admitted to occasionally dozing off; there was no video camera (James Alcock); the number could have been reflected in a clock on the wall (Zusne and Jones); and Martin Gardner scoffed that she might simply have sat up in bed and looked. A single, contested hit with loopholes – not proof, but not easily dismissed either.
Ingo Swann at the ASPR (from 1972). At the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, Karlis Osis and Janet Mitchell tested the artist Ingo Swann with target objects on a high platform near the ceiling, which he was to sketch while seated. One published series yielded 8 out of 8 matching descriptions (chance probability roughly 1 in 40,000). It was precisely out of these OBE trials that the term remote viewing emerged – and with it the trail that later led to the CIA's Stargate program. The samples, however, were small and exploratory.
Blue Harary and the kitten "Spirit" (Psychical Research Foundation, early 1970s). Robert Morris and colleagues turned the question around: instead of asking whether the "traveller" sees anything, they asked whether anyone notices him. While Stuart "Blue" Harary tried, from a separate room, to "visit" his young kitten "Spirit", the animal's behaviour was recorded elsewhere. During the exit periods the otherwise restless animal was notably quiet and relaxed. An original approach – but a single case, small and never convincingly replicated.
The reductive counter-side: does the brain build the journey itself?
The counter-thesis runs: the brain produces the OBE experience itself, with no journey at all. Two findings became famous. In 2002 the neurologist Olaf Blanke reported in Nature that electrical stimulation of a particular brain region – the temporoparietal junction – elicited, in one patient, sensations reminiscent of floating above her own body. In 2007 Lenggenhager and Henrik Ehrsson created a kind of "mini astral journey" in the lab in Science: film subjects from behind and play the image back to them live while touching their back, and in many the feeling of where they are located shifts into the seen "body" in front of them.
The psychologist Susan Blackmore – who as a student had an intense, hours-long OBE herself and became a sceptic precisely because of it – distilled this into an influential theory in her book Beyond the Body (1982): when normal sensory input falls away, the brain builds a "model of reality" from memory and imagination – and that model happens to show us from above. On this view the OBE is a real but purely internal state. Such psychological explanations deserve to be taken seriously.
As striking as these findings are, they show less than is often claimed. Blanke's famous 2002 case was a single patient with fragmentary sensations (floating, distorted body perception) – not the clear, coherent scene of a spontaneous OBE. And the VR experiments, looked at closely, produce only a measurable shift in self-location together with a body-ownership feeling – not the autoscopic floating above one's own body, but a limited laboratory model of the bodily self. In both cases, moreover, no perception of the real space arises, only a disturbed representation of one's own body. So what was reproduced were OBE-like fragments, not the full phenomenon – and that means precisely what the strong thesis claims is not established: that the brain produces a genuine out-of-body experience of its own accord. NDE researchers such as Pim van Lommel and Bruce Greyson accordingly objected that such induced states create a false sense of reality, not the wide-awake clarity of genuine experiences – and that even if the brain could one day fully produce an OBE-like illusion, that would still not prove that every OBE is an illusion.
Blackmore's interpretation, too, is only a model, not a proof. It proposes how the experience could arise (from memory, imagination and above all what is audible), but does not produce it in the lab and does not explain the cases with verifiable details; her sweeping conclusion that paranormal perception in OBEs is "groundless" is a sceptical position, not a result – and is disputed by NDE research. That leaves the objection that veridical reports do not hold up under scrutiny anyway. But that is exactly what Janice Holden systematically counted: in the literature she found 107 cases of apparently non-physical veridical perception – by the strictest possible criterion 92% were completely accurate. Against that, the reductive side has so far not a single hit: no full OBE reproduced in the lab. And the burden of proof is not symmetrical – the strong materialist thesis would have to hold without exception, whereas for the other side, as the philosopher Godehard Brüntrup stresses, a single watertight case would suffice, one lone "white crow". What is needed, then, is not reliable repetition but a single undeniable case – and there are over a hundred candidates.
The decisive test – that never really happened
With this the real question is only sharpened, not answered. That partial, OBE-like effects can be elicited in the lab (body distortions, shifts in self-location) is established; that the brain generates the full experience on its own, as we have seen, is not. What matters in any case is: is information ever gained in such states that the brain could not have obtained by normal means? The cleanest approach to test this prospectively was the AWARE study by Sam Parnia: hospitals placed picture targets on high shelves, visible only "from the ceiling" – to test whether resuscitated patients with out-of-body perception could name them correctly.
As compelling as the idea is, it was never really carried out. The shelves hung in only a fraction of rooms: around 78% of cardiac arrests occurred where no target was placed at all. And crucially: in not a single case did an out-of-body perception coincide with a prepared room. The one well-confirmed case – a man who accurately described audible events of his resuscitation – occurred precisely where no picture target was hanging. So AWARE did not answer the visual-target question – it simply never tested it. That is not a null result against astral travel but a logistical failure of the study – too few prepared rooms, and never a coincidence of target and the right moment. On top of that comes an operational weakness the study has rightly been criticised for: survivors were often not interviewed at all, or only belatedly – and with every passing day memories fade and cases are lost unnoticed. The designated hard test thus effectively never took place.
The easier path, in fact, is staring us in the face. A near-death experience cannot be ordered up: you need a cardiac arrest, in the right room, with prepared targets and perfect timing – much luck and great effort, exactly what AWARE foundered on. A deliberately induced out-of-body experience, by contrast, would be far easier to test: someone who can produce it on command could be examined in the lab as often as you like, on schedule and under control. Yet precisely this obvious approach (Tart, Swann, Harary) was pursued only in a few small, old studies and never built out with seriousness and resources. The real failure, then, is not that evidence is lacking – but that the most easily testable route has hardly been taken.
The robust material is supplied, in any case, by the spontaneous, later-verified cases from near-death experiences – including reports from blind people. They are anecdotal and not forced in the lab, but for that very reason harder to dismiss reductively than an induced bodily illusion. This is the hard core where the question of the relationship between consciousness and brain is really decided.
Conclusion
The out-of-body experience is a real, well-defined experience; that the brain produces it in full on its own, however, is not shown – neuroscience has so far produced only OBE-like fragments. Astral travel in the literal sense – a body that travels and verifiably brings something back – is, by contrast, not established; but also because the decisive test has so far never been carried out cleanly. The controlled target tests consist of single, contestable hits (Tart, Swann, Harary), and the large prospective attempt (AWARE) did not really test the visual-target question at all. What remains honest is less a verdict than a not-yet-tested: the phenomenon is real and deserves, at last, a properly designed investigation – and to say "astral travel" today claims more than the (so far neglected) experiments deliver. What would settle it is not more tradition but a single, cleanly controlled case – most readily where an out-of-body experience can be induced at will and repeatedly. That this obvious, most-testable route has so far barely been taken is the truly astonishing thing about the whole story.
Sources:
• Charles T. Tart, A psychophysiological study of out-of-the-body experiences in a selected subject, Journal of the ASPR 62 (1968).
• Janet L. Mitchell & Karlis Osis, OBE target experiments with Ingo Swann, ASPR 1971/72.
• Olaf Blanke et al., Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions, Nature 419 (2002), 269–270.
• B. Lenggenhager, T. Tadi, T. Metzinger, O. Blanke & H. Ehrsson, OBE illusions, Science 317 (2007).
• Susan Blackmore, Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-the-Body Experiences, Heinemann 1982.
• Sam Parnia et al., AWARE – AWAreness during REsuscitation, Resuscitation 85 (2014).
• Janice M. Holden, Out-of-Body Experiences: All in the Brain?, Journal of Near-Death Studies 25 (2007).
• SPR Psi Encyclopedia: Out-of-Body Experiences.
Related posts: The CIA Gateway Process – Monroe Institute and Hemi-Sync, Waldo Vieira and projectiology, Ingo Swann – from the ASPR to remote viewing, Veridical perception in near-death experiences, Near-death experiences in the blind, Consciousness and the brain.