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position than the investigator to decide whether or not he had an out-of-body experience; (2) we wanted to emphasize the sense of location of self-awareness rather than the complex and extremely variable visual and auditory experiences reported in the anecdotal literature;5 (3) whether or not there is objective laboratory demonstration of a separation of self-awareness from its normal location in the brain seems not relevant to the study of the phenomenon from a psychiatric point of view. Although some take the position, for example, Osis,6 that such a criterion should be fundamental to the experience, we feel it peripheral to an understanding of its psychological impact and its meaning to the individual, particularly in terms of his value structure and the organization and functioning of his ego. For now, we feel that the experience should be subjectively defined. However, we are very aware of the vast literature on perceptual illusion suggesting that such research is enormously subject to bias; for example, Orne7 demonstrated that experimental results are directly affected by the experimenter’s personal belief system. Attempts such as those of Tart8,9 and Twemlow10 to obtain psychophysiological correlates of such an experience cannot be said to characterize it even partially adequately, not unlike, for example, trying to describe a whole person using only an EKG. Reported laboratory studies show no stable features, but are suggestive. In our own studies10 of the gifted subject Robert Monroe, and in a time series study of 11 Ss conducted to examine his OBE facilitating technique, one naïve subject did show some unusual EEG changes, an occipital EEG pattern most similar to an occipital slow wave of sleep variant. Tart8,9 notes, as we do, that EEG measures in general show a dramatic reduction in neuronal energy in the alpha and theta band with some unusual patterns not characteristic of REM sleep or other normal sleep stages The term “out-of-body experience” was coined by Tart in 1960 primarily to avoid the judgmental alternative names present in the literature which implied some nonexistent exact knowledge of etiology of the experience, for example, such terms as astral projection, ESP projection, doubling, astral travel, etc. Some writers feel that out-of-body experience is a specific form of depersonalization, a point to be addressed in the third paper of this series. Others such as Ehrenwald11 emphasize not only the sense of separation but also the visual accompaniments of what is seen by the self located “outside” the body. Following Tart’s generally widely accepted definition of an altered state of