The inner life
Out-of-Body Experience
Direct answer
Out-of-Body Experience: An out-of-body experience is the vivid impression of being located outside one's own physical body, often of looking down on it from above.
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At a glance
- Also called
- obe, out of body experience, leaving the body
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Astral Projection, Sleep Paralysis, Hypnagogia, Astral Body
An out-of-body experience is the vivid impression of being located outside one's own physical body, often of looking down on it from above.
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What is an out-of-body experience?
An out-of-body experience, often shortened to OBE, is an episode in which a person seems to be outside their body. Typically they feel themselves floating near the ceiling, see the room and their own body below, and feel fully awake. It lasts from seconds to a few minutes and is usually calm, though it can be alarming the first time.
Out-of-Body Experience happens most often at the edge of sleep, and also during accidents, surgery, migraine, epilepsy and moments of extreme fear. Roughly one person in ten reports at least one. It is one of the common features of near-death accounts. Researchers treat it as a change in the brain's sense of where the body is.
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What sets Out-of-Body Experience apart
Three features recur in the reports and define the experience for researchers: the sense of being outside the body, a raised point of view, and the sight of one's own body from that point. The work of Olaf Blanke ties all three to the junction of the temporal and parietal lobes, where signals from the eyes, the skin and the organs of balance are combined. Disturb that combining, by a seizure, a current or a clever illusion, and the self is felt in the wrong place.
- Abbreviation: OBE, in general use since the 1960s
- Phrase in print: by 1939, in the title of Oliver Fox; made standard after G. N. M. Tyrrell, 1943
- Lifetime frequency: roughly one person in ten, higher among students
- Brain region: the temporo-parietal junction, right side, in Blanke's 2002 report
- Induced in volunteers: Ehrsson and Lenggenhager, separate studies in Science, 2007
- Common settings: falling asleep, waking, accidents, anaesthesia, migraine and epilepsy
Often mistaken for something else: A lucid dream is knowing one is dreaming inside a dream world; in an out-of-body experience the person feels awake and seems to see the real room from outside the body.
The story behind Out-of-Body Experience
The longer phrase, out-of-the-body experience, stood in the title of Oliver Fox's book in 1939; the psychical researcher G. N. M. Tyrrell used it in 1943 and it was taken up by Celia Green, whose study of about four hundred cases appeared in 1968, and by Robert Monroe in 1971. In 2002 Olaf Blanke reported producing the experience by stimulating a patient's right angular gyrus, and in 2007 Henrik Ehrsson and Bigna Lenggenhager separately induced out-of-body illusions in volunteers.
Why Out-of-Body Experience matters
Out-of-Body Experience is the solid ground under the whole subject: a real, repeatable human experience that any account, traditional or scientific, has to explain.
How to read Out-of-Body Experience
Researchers and careful writers prefer the term because it names what was experienced without deciding in advance what caused it.
Out-of-Body Experience in practice: an example
A patient who later says she watched the operation from a corner of the theatre is describing an out-of-body experience, whatever its explanation.
Where readings of Out-of-Body Experience go wrong
A single experience needs no action. Repeated episodes with other symptoms, or a lasting feeling of unreality, should be discussed with a doctor.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
Out-of-body experiences are real experiences; science has not shown that anything leaves the body.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- obe, out of body experience, out-of-body experiences, obe meaning, leaving the body
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is an out-of-body experience?
It is the experience of seeming to be outside one's physical body, commonly floating above it and seeing it from outside, while feeling awake and clear.
How common are out-of-body experiences?
Surveys suggest that roughly one person in ten has had at least one in their life. Most people have only one or two, and most occur near sleep.
What causes an out-of-body experience?
The leading scientific account is that the brain briefly fails to combine sight, touch and balance into a single sense of where the body is. Stimulating one brain region has produced the experience directly.
