Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
Unless you’re looking at a screen or a mirror, it’s impossible to see yourself from a third-person perspective. We are all locked inside our bodies, and yet there are a select few that report – through drugs, meditation, and even near-death experience – being able to look down upon themselves as if floating on the ceiling.
These events are known as “out-of-body experiences,” and they’ve been reported by a broad variety of people across time and all over the globe.
It’s thought around 10 to 20 percent of people have had some kind of out-of-body experience, but can they really see from beyond their corporeal form? It’s a question several studies have tried to answer.
The mysterious case of Miss Z
A scientist called Charles Tart was among the first to try and systematically investigate the possibility of seeing real things during an out-of-body experience.
One of his early experiments in a sleep laboratory centered around a subject called Miss Z, who told him casually outside the lab that she had been having these experiences all her life. So common were they for her that Miss Z thought everybody had out-of-body experiences until somebody told her otherwise as a teenager.
Informal at-home trials revealed a surprising skill: she was able to “see” a random number chosen by someone else during sleep. Tart wanted to study Miss Z in a sleep laboratory, eventually publishing the findings in a 1968 paper.
In the lab they conducted studies over four nights, during which time Miss Z slept in a bed and a five-digit number was kept on a high shelf out of view. If she floated above her body at night she was to retrieve the number and report it back in the morning.
By the end of the four nights, she’d had three floating episodes, two instances of disassociation, and one number successfully retrieved during the final night: 25132.
Given she had a 1 in 100,000 odds of guessing that by chance, you can understand why Tart’s interest was piqued.
What Robert Monroe saw
Flash forward 1998 and Tart was presenting another paper, this time on a man named Robert Monroe who also reported having out-of-body experiences. So once again, Tart showed the man to his sleep laboratory room – complete with hidden number – to see what would happen.
Monroe did not manage to retrieve the mystery number. He did, however, see something else that was even weirder. Something it would’ve been almost impossible for him to guess.
Monroe gave a detailed account of one of the technicians meeting a man in a room elsewhere in the building. It was generally against protocol for any outsiders to swing by the lab, but the team were later able to verify that one of the technician’s husbands had popped by on that particular night.
It was Tart’s view that perhaps this was evidence that someone in an out-of-body experience might be better able to lock on to moving targets rather than fixed objects like a five-digit number.
A curious conclusion that’s relevant to a very recent study into out-of-body experiences that also saw some pretty freaky results.
Until this writer can out-of-body-experience her way onto the roof to see what bird is nesting on the chimney, she remains sceptical. But you have to admit, it would be pretty cool to go exploring without the ole' ball and chain (read: body).
