My out-of-the-body experiences

When did it happen?
Mostly, I am guessing, when I was aged 4-6 but may be up to about 9 years old. I strongly suspect the same happened before aged 4 too, because by 4 years old, the experience already seemed commonplace to me, but it’s hard to be sure.

What was the experience?
It usually happened when I was lying down, so probably asleep. I seemed to leave my body on the bed and float above it, seeing it below. Or to put it another way, I had two bodies: one unusually heavy and immobile one and a very light or weightless body that could ‘fly’. I did call it ‘flying’ but remember I was only 4 years old then.

Whilst ‘flying’, I was very much in the light body and at first could still sense the heavy body (associated with the body I could see below), but often I quickly became unaware of the feeling of the heavy body altogether. The end of the 'flying' seemed to coincide with an increasing focus on my heavy body, but I don’t remember thinking one caused the other: they just seemed to happen together.

Most often I stayed in my own room through anxiety about leaving my ‘other’ body behind and so only rarely ventured into the room next door. I don’t remember going anywhere else.

What caused it?
There seems to be a lot of theorising and experimentation, none of it conclusive. I tend towards it being a mental phenomena that we cannot explain yet, in the sense that the supernatural is only what we cannot yet explain scientifically. If we ever reach a scientific understanding of it, it will probably link to related phenomena such as ESP, remote viewing, etc. I am mildly curious about research in this field, but don’t set out to track it down.

What were the emotions?
The emotions I remember are elation; surprise followed by curiosity; and anxiety. Elation at being able to leave my usual body and move without it. Curiosity for the same reason. The anxiety was more complicated. I think this was caused by

- Uncertainty of whether I was alive or dead. Occasionally I was certain I was dead or at least believed that my body ‘was wrong’, as I put it in my childish way, or when I was older that my heart had stopped.

- The abnormality of what was happening: I could see my own body below and could move around above it. (When I was really young, I thought that that was what flying was.)

- The fear that I would not be able to return to my body and the world I knew (family, etc)

Regarding my heart stopping, I often had the feeling of abnormal heart rhythm (like a vibration or trill) whilst awake right through to my teens. Indeed I was diagnosed with a suspected heart murmur, in my late teens I think, that seemed to disappear as I got older. It was this abnormal heart rhythm that preceded the feeling that my heart had stopped altogether just before / during the out of-the-body-experience.

Coming to terms
At school in the early 1980s, I read some of Celia Green’s books, Lucid Dreams and Out-of-the-body Experiences, being the most relevant for me, plus others whose titles I have forgotten (one about seeing ‘visions’ and ‘ghosts’ may be). They were the first I had read that seemed to be aiming more at objectivity and scientific method than the supernatural or a religious explanation. I don’t remember them really explaining the phenomena to me (and I suspect we still can’t today). But they gave me a description that I recognised; a way of distinguishing the two; and, crucially, the knowledge that I was not the only one to experience this. This helped take a little of the weirdness out of them, especially as I had kept this to myself and told no one.

Interestingly, though, a recent conversation with a friend shows that the anxiety associated with the experience is still embedded in my memory somewhere. While she was describing a recent out-of the-body-experience that occurred in more traumatic circumstances, all the unresolved anxieties of my own experiences came flooding back, as if they were yesterday. Hopefully that will be cathartic in some way, though I can’t say it’s particularly important to my life now, one way or the other.

Conclusion
I would like to think that scribbling this down this adds to the record of out-of-the-body experiences and may be reassures someone else they are not the only one this happens too. I am happy to hear from others who have experienced similar.