Lehal Library

Our history is full of references to what we now call out-of-body experiences, including the language we use. You are “beside yourself,” “out of your mind,” you “fall” asleep, wake “up,” pass “out.” One of the very few relevant surveys in the past ten years showed that over 25 percent of our national population recall having at least one spontaneous out-of-body experience. If you think about it, you may be among that 25 percent. Can you remember having a “flying” dream, with or without an airplane? Can you remember dreaming of looking for your car among many others in a parking lot, finding it, and waking up immediately after doing so? (We often subconsciously look upon our car as an additional body.) Can you remember having a “falling” dream, where you wake up instead of hitting “bottom”? This is quite common when reentry into the physical body is hastened by the ringing of an alarm clock! Until 1970 the whole research effort operated quietly, if not covertly. After all, I was the head of a conventional business dealing with conventional people. I was sure that any public revelation of my secret life activity would bring doubt of my ability to conduct responsible business affairs. But I could not remain silent forever. With the publication of my first book, Journeys Out of the Body, our work began to attract much attention. We were able to select a number of volunteers as subjects in our laboratory. Most of them were able to replicate the out-of-body state so familiar to me, using the methods we had developed.