[This is the continued story of my first out of body experience. The series starts here, and part two can be found here.]

The first thing I wanted to try after leaving my body was passing through an object. Everyone talks about how, when you’re projecting, physical objects cease to be obstacles in any meaningful way. I could already “see” that was the case, so I turned to my right and attempted to put a foot-like appendage through the bottom rung of the bunk bed’s ladder. I was able to push through it with slight resistance, but there’s not really anything to compare it to in the real world, because the ladder doesn’t move out of the way. I’d like to say it felt like moving through a thick, soupy material, like a non-Newtonian fluid, but any sort of fluid like that moves out around your body when you push through it. (Besides, I’ve never played with a non-Newtonian fluid, so a direct comparison would be disingenuous.) Passing through solid objects during an OBE doesn’t disturb the object—at least not in a way that I’ve ever noticed. There’s a gentle resistance, and that’s about it. I never tried experimenting with different materials to see if, for example, lead provides more resistance than balsa wood.[2]

As a side note, I want to briefly discuss the form one takes. I mentioned my foot-like appendage, which seems to be the best way to describe the analogous thing I had which, I guess, would have been a foot in a regular body. I think it’s common to take the form of a body—torso with two arms, two legs and a head—if only because it’s the most familiar morphology to you. However, if you ever try to examine yourself, you’ll find this is a wholly pointless effort. Your out-of-body body (often referred to as the “etheric body”—a term I don’t like very much because it’s not made of ether—at least not as far as I know) doesn’t have any particular shape. When you look at yourself, it just melts and moves around on of its own accord, which I found unsettling if I watched it happen for more than a split second. (Another side to the side: the color of me was a bright blueish-white, like the flame and sparks you get from an acetylene torch.)

When I looked at what I considered to be my foot as I pushed it through the bottom rung of the ladder, it folded under itself and disappeared into my “leg”, which started to recede into the rest of me. I looked away. I still felt like I had a leg and foot, but if I looked at any part of my body, it would start to collapse, so I tried not to do that. I believe that if I looked at all parts of me, I would have gathered up into a ball, but I never tried to do this. As I said, I think the human-shaped body image persists because it’s how you’re used to being.

The second thing I wanted to make sure I tried was looking in a mirror. I had read someone else online say that they had never looked in a mirror while out of body, and wondered what would happen. I did, too, and I had a mirror over my dresser which I wanted to make sure I looked at it while I was still in my room. I moved [3] my way over to the mirror and took a look.

I didn’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting what I saw. Very strangely, I saw my regular-body self (clearly not how I saw me), staring back at me with a look of absolute shock. I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself look so shocked in real life: slack-jawed, mouth hanging open, wide eyes, eyebrows raised. Obviously this was exactly how I felt, but it still came as a (greater) surprise to see me looking back like that. I didn’t take particular note of what my body in the mirror looked like, although I remember that I was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt of the type I used to wear often at that age. Why I should have seen my “real” face and physical, dressed body in the mirror during an OBE is not something I could even hazard a guess at. The image, except for my face, was very dim, though, to where I could scarcely make out my form from the the background in the mirror. It moved with me, turning when I turned, although I didn’t try raising a “hand” to see what the mirror image did. So I’m really not sure what was going on there.

It was about this time I started to remember I’d have to get up and go to school soon. As you may recall, thought equals action, and almost immediately I found myself about thirty feet up in the air, out in front of the high school.

I was still excited enough about just having gotten this to work, that I didn’t immediately realize I had inadvertently moved myself to a place I didn’t even want to go in the first place. It figures, though, right? My first out of body experience—the universe at my fingertips—and I astral projected my way to the school.

The high school is a very large building, and so I won’t try to describe where I ended up. To those who know me and attended the same school: I was over the north-west corner of the campus, facing the doors which opened into the hall in front of the band room.

I didn’t notice the school so much, but being outside was pretty amazing. I swooped down to ground level, overwhelmed by the sheer livingness of it all. That sounds new-age-ish and hippy-like but it was quite true. I feel like I’m trying to describe a drug trip: Did you know everything’s alive, man? Not like that, I mean like totally alive! I was all like…yeah. And nature was all like…that’s right. Yeah.

Heavy, man. Toss me the Pop-Tarts.

But in all seriousness, there was a vibrancy about the place, where I could see/feel the same sort of bluish-white sparks of which I was made in everything else that was living. If there was anything else that exemplifies the idea that “everything has a soul”, it would have to be that. Does everything have a soul? I shrug. But if nothing else, it served to make me more conscious of the fact that everything is, indeed, living.

I was enamored by this and spent a few moments stroking the grass and integrating myself with the bark of a tree. (I know which tree it is, too, if it’s still there.) That sounds especially odd, I realize. My experience has been that I couldn’t actually touch anything, but I could still feel things like texture. However, this involves going up to the object and, rather than trying to pass through it, as I did with the ladder rung, it involves just passing through the very surface that you want to feel. But since you can’t help but pass through things, rather than actually touching the surface, you tend to integrate your appendage with the upper layer of whatever you’re trying to feel.

At this point it dawned on me that I was hanging out in front of the damn school, and that I didn’t have much time before I had to return to my body in order to go back to school. I wanted to try flying again, too, so I launched myself up over the school before I realized that I’m not at all experienced with this (it doesn’t come as easily as you would expect), my house was a few miles away, and I was probably really short on time. Instead, I figured that if I could transport to the school in the first place, I should be able to get back by doing the same thing, so I imagined myself back in my room and sure enough, space sort of folded in around me and I was back in the same spot as where I had left.

There was one other thing I wanted to do during the OBE. I wanted a way of verifying that the OBE was “real”, in the sense of learning some piece of information during it that I wouldn’t have otherwise known. I had given considerable thought to the best way of accomplishing this: looking for an object somewhere that I could go find later (not reliable enough); getting someone to write something on a piece of paper and hiding it (not practical for a number of reasons, least of which was the necessity of telling someone what I was trying to do. Completely out of the question); visiting an area that I hadn’t previously been to, then going there later (couldn’t come up with anything workable).

Finally, I decided on the following. I would go out and memorize a pattern of stars somewhere, then double-check the sky the next evening and see if that pattern was the same. This had a number of flaws I hadn’t considered before the OBE, namely the ability to “see” stars that you can’t see with the naked eye. But at the time, I hadn’t done any star-gazing (indeed, it was the OBEs that got me interested in star-gazing in the first place) and I was largely ignorant of astronomy. So while I could have subconsciously known the arrangement of the stars beforehand, that seemed unlikely to me, and it also seemed like the simplest and most straightforward method of double-checking.

So the first thing I did after returning to my room was go and stick my head-area through the curtain and window. Fortunately enough, there happened to be a very distinctive pattern of stars right on the horizon—three small points of “light” forming a little triangle. I saw that and thought perfect. It was exactly what I needed: an easily identifiable arrangement that I knew exactly where to look for in real life. Having armed myself with this checksum, I went back into my room.

One thing I made a point not to do when I first got out of my body was turn around and look at it. This isn’t something I mentioned before, but the temptation is incredibly strong. I mean, it’s like the first thing you want to try, right? What do I look like to other people? Don’t do it. For some reason, when you look at your body, you are uncontrollably sucked back to it. I had heard other people talk about this, so I purposefully avoided looking towards the bed while in my room.

However, I realized that time was probably growing short, and, quite regretfully, I was going to have to get up and go to school. Again. I figured that if looking at your body returns you to it, that would be as good a way as any to end the thing. I was standing at the foot of my bed (between my bed and my mirror/dresser), and I slowly turned to look. My thought-action was already “going back to my body, now”, so I started to move in that direction—when I suddenly thought I wasn’t done! I still wanted to just be out there because it was, I don’t know, better somehow. But that was the beginning of the end, and sure enough, I was sucked back to my body, suddenly thinking no, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO! It didn’t help.

On the plus side, I got a glimpse of my sleeping body on the way back in. My thought was, “Ew, that’s what I look like? I look dead.” Which is true enough, I suppose. So I can say with authority: not only will looking at yourself end the OBE, but trust me when I say there’s nothing worth seeing. I had only been out of the thing for a couple of minutes, but I was already disgusted by it.

I popped back into my meat-self and—BAM—was wide awake. I’ve never felt like this except just after an OBE. I was completely energized, much moreso than after sleeping, totally wide awake, not the least bit fatigued in any way. It annoyed me, actually, because even though I would sleep for hours at a time, I still always felt like crap upon waking, whereas just a few minutes with an OBE left me almost bouncing off the walls and feeling awesome.

The downsides to returning were many. For one, I became painfully aware of the fact that I was, indeed, a pile of meat. It’s disgusting. Seriously. I’m not sure the full disgustingness of this can be appreciated unless you’ve projected. Another thing: I now had to swing my limbs around to move. It doesn’t seem like it would be that big of a deal, but the OBE makes you very cognizant of it. I’m always extremely clumsy following an OBE—much more so than usual, and I’m already a pretty clumsy person. I nearly jumped out of bed (not really, because it’s still a bunk bed, remember), and promptly fell over. I spent the rest of the morning making blatant gross-motor mistakes. I crashed my hand into the doorknob of my door when I tried to open it, I got twisted in my shirt while I was trying to put it on, and I kicked a book across the floor because it just didn’t cross my mind that my foot might connect with it. I was actually a bit worried about driving at that point, but I managed to do okay. [4]

I hopped out of bed and checked the clock: 7:45AM. The OBE lasted for about sixteen minutes, and left me aghast, excited, and somewhat confused. But it also left me disappointed. The first thing I did after getting up was run over to the window to double-check my star arrangement. I stuck my head up underneath the curtain, looked out to the horizon and saw—a hill.

Where sky should have been was a wooded hill. I couldn’t have seen those stars through the hill. Or maybe I could have? But now how would I check? Would I need to find a star chart and teach myself how to read that to determine what was behind it? I was mentally face-palming for not taking a look up into the sky to really make sure I had some stars—or at the very least, tried to memorize a few different patterns of stars so I ‘d have some more points of reference.

Figures, I thought. Maybe it didn’t work. But despite the apparent check-sum failure, it was still one hell of a thing.

And thus ends the tale of my first out of body experience. But questions remain: how real was it? All a fancy trick, right? My verification method didn’t work. And besides, what does this OBE—and the others I’ve had, which I’ll probably talk about but not discuss in detail like this one—what do these things mean to me personally? How can I be an atheist in light of this? How does it fit in the bigger picture?

These are a few of things I’ll explore tomorrow in the final installment.

[Continued on Friday]


2. I realize this sounds really interesting when you’re sitting there reading it, but in all honesty, once you get out of your body, experiments like this just seem like a stupid waste of time. [Back]

3. I’ve glossed over “move”, as you may have noticed, because I don’t know how to describe it. I didn’t walk, obviously. It seems like “float” would be the right verb, but it’s really not, because that implies bobbing along like a balloon. I didn’t walk or hover or teleport or zip—I just moved. [Back]

4. I find it very interesting that I’m much more comfortable out of my body than in it. I’ve only been out a few times, but I’m much better at maneuvering around there than I am while trying to, say, play basketball. [Back]