Some people believe that they are able to leave their bodies, spiritually, through the practice of astral projection.

Astral Projection

Astral projection refers to the supposed ability to travel—to project oneself—out of the body. Astral projection is the older term for what has come to be known as out-of-body experiences. This “projection” is conceptualized in terms of the soul or individual human consciousness traveling outside the physical body in a spiritual or astral body. The astral body is said to be an exact replica of the physical body but composed of subtler elements, etheric in nature, more akin to the life force than to matter. It is supposedly capable of detaching from the physical body at will, or under certain special circumstances. It can also spontaneously leave the physical body during sleep, trance or coma, under the influence of anesthetics or other drugs, or as the result of accidents. The astral body is the vehicle of consciousness, said to particularly embody desires and feelings. When it separates from the denser physical body, it takes with it the capacity for feeling. As one might well anticipate, the existence of such a body has not been proven to the satisfaction of mainstream science.

The concept of bilocation, the ability to be in two places at the same time, is associated with the notion of astral projection. Because a person cannot literally be in more than one place at the same time, one possible explanation is that the physical body is in one place while the astral body is in another.

Many everyday experiences of astral projection have been reported. Among the researchers who have studied this phenomenon is the British scientist Robert Crookall, who compared hundreds of cases in which people left the physical body and reentered it after traveling unseen in the astral body. Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, in their famous books The Phenomena of Astral Projection and The Projection of the Astral Body, maintain that there are degrees of projection, ranging from fully conscious projection to unconscious projection, such as occurs during sleep.

Unconscious projection during sleep is often associated with certain types of dreams, such as “psychic” dreams in which one dreams about something happening many miles away and then later discovers that whatever one dreamed about (for instance, a conversation, a disaster) actually occurred. One possible explanation for such dreams is that during sleep the dreamer unconsciously projected his or her astral body, was spiritually present when the event occurred, and remembered the experience later as a dream.

Astral projection has also been used to explain the prevalence of dreams about flying. Flying is one of a handful of dream motifs that are so common that almost everybody has had them on more than one occasion. These motifs include such common scenarios as falling dreams, dreams of nakedness in public, and unpreparedness dreams. Such shared dreams tend to arise from experiences and anxieties fundamental to all people. Although flying is one of these shared motifs, it is difficult to clearly identify the common human experience that might account for the prevalence of flying dreams. (Note that flying was a widespread motif even before the advent of airplanes, being extensively treated in Artemidorus‘s ancient classic, the Oneirocritica.) One explanation sometimes put forward by occult and metaphysical writers is that during sleep everyone at times travels outside the physical body, unencumbered by such physical limitations as gravity. Such out-of-body experiences are then remembered as dreams in which the dreamer floats and flies.