“Goin’ on a year now I ain’t had nothin’ twixt my nethers weren’t run on batteries!” - Kaylee

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

I used to believe all this crap, you know.  I didn’t spring forth from my mother’s loins (ew…) and start saying nay all over the place.  You would have heard about it if I did, because I would be the most awesome baby ever. And for a good many years, I tended to believe whatever fantastical claim was put in front of me.  It started with religion, since my Baptist parents didn’t give me any choice in the matter.  And while I quickly realized that my interest in the Narnia-with-sex aspects of the Bible was caused by the same kind of mythological geekdom that had me watching Clash of the Titans for the twelfth time or reading Tolkien for the thirteenth, I turned my credulity elsewhere.  Aliens, ghosts, auras.  This was crap that had explanations.  Inter-dimensional portals, energy vibrations, chakras.  This stuff sounds almost scientific if you don’t have any understanding of science.  Which, I suppose, is the definition of pseudoscience.  But as terrified as the possibility of an alien abduction made me, I felt exhilarated by the idea of using ancient wisdom to leave my body and travel through the stars.  Or, barring that, spying on tits.

See, I’ve astrally projected before, and no, that isn’t a reference to the famous all-night drive-in porno theater I ran from my back yard in junior high.  I actually felt like I’d left my body.  On a regular basis, and by my own will.  Back in the days of text-based Internet (when nudie pics were nothing but sexy strings of ones and zeros) I downloaded a book all about inducing your own astral projections, where your “astral” (or “spiritual”) body leaves your physical body behind and explores…well, whatever.  It took a lot of breathing, a lot of lying on my back with my arms at my sides.  I had to learn to relax every muscle in my body. The e-book said my jaw would be the hardest to let loose, and it was.  The e-book said after a while my breathing would become automatic, and it did.  The e-book said my ears would fill with a sound like rushing water, I’d hear a pop, and I’d suddenly find myself floating above my body.  Check, check, and check.

So how can I now say none of this stuff is real?

II. The Findings

I can’t, actually.  Astral projection, just like any other out-of-body experience (OBE) is real.  At least, the perception is definitely real.  Similarly, UFOs are real.  People really see things in the sky they can’t explain.  The question of reality falls under the interpretations of these experiences.  Just because you see a cigar-shaped light in the sky, it doesn’t mean reptilian aliens are coming to drain our natural resources.  (Which is probably a good thing, since I don’t think Marc Singer is up to fighting them off these days.  Or doing much of anything, for that matter, other than sending out resumes.)  And just because you feel like your shimmery blue spirit is leaving behind your stinky corporeal flesh, it doesn’t mean that’s what’s really going on either.

When I “left my body”, I could vividly see my bedroom.  I could fly up through the ceiling and into the night sky.  I saw my neighborhood and my town, and I could follow the roads wherever I wanted.  Of course, I also saw a guy in a gray body suit with the head of a wolf who tried to sell me the same kind of fat pencils they made me use for standardized tests in kindergarten.  No matter how real any of my experiences seemed (and some of them were so real I can remember what things felt like on my astral skin, or “ass-skin”), there was never any correlation to the real world.  For example, I couldn’t fly to a sleeping friend’s house and pull him out of his body.  None of my astral experiences were shared with anyone else, and I never saw anything I later verified as actually happening at a distance.  You’d think astral bodies would bump into each other somewhere in the ether.  Maybe exchange phone numbers or even engage in a little astral sex, or “ass-sex”.  But unless there’s a Meetup.com group I don’t know about, this never happens.  In essence, what I was doing on a nightly basis was inducing a lucid dream.  The only difference between my lucid dreams and the typical accidental one was that I didn’t know I was dreaming and could, therefore, keep myself from waking up.

Which isn’t to say that all OBEs are just lucid dreams.  One of the most common forms of OBE is the near-death experience.  You’ve heard of them before.  People’s hearts stop, they feel like they’re floating above the operating table and/or physically exhausting orgy pit.  They float down a tunnel of light.  They come back with superpowers.  It’s an old story.  But like my lucid dreams, no one who’s experienced an NDE can ever recall specific events they wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.  They don’t float into another room and read someone’s embarrassing hospital chart.  Every NDE “revelation” about what went on when a person was supposedly out of body can be explained by conversations overheard during a pre-unconscious or post-unconscious daze or by observations made before the NDE happened.

What’s more, the out-of-body experience can be replicated in a laboratory.  Drugs like the anesthesia ketamine can recreate the characteristics of an OBE.  So can epileptic seizures and oxygen deprivation to the brain.  For that matter, so can hallucinogenic drugs like that stuff I licked off the paper I found under my uncle’s bed that time.  The brain is a very complicated place–kind of like Casa Bonita, only more sensical.  We don’t know everything about it, but every study so far has shown that there is a section of the brain that controls our feeling of possessing our own bodies.  Our brains have to tell us where our bodies are at all times.  We have to have a sense of where we exist in three-dimensional space even when we can’t see our limbs.  Consequently, we feel like we exist “inside” our bodies.  But the part or parts of the brain that control this sensation can be disrupted, creating an OBE.  That feeling, combined with hallucination, can very effectively convince us that our spirits have left our bodies and are free to break every state’s privacy laws.

III. The Conclusion

Currently, a large study into NDEs is happening at a few hospitals across the country.  The goal is to place pictures on top of high shelves in emergency rooms so that they can only be seen from above.  Since cardiac arrest patients most commonly report experiencing NDEs, the study will ask 1,500 of them if they can identify these pictures.  This will work toward proving whether people really are leaving their bodies and floating through 3-D space.  The prankster in me wants to switch these pictures with Magic Eyes just to see if I can drive some astral bodies insane.  But, unfortunately, I’ve got better things to do.  Real or not, that image of my sexy neighbor I see while astrally projecting isn’t going to peep on itself.

Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS

About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

Can’t get enough amateur science? Join Brian for The Amateur Scientist Podcast.