Inter­est­ing read­ing — does it get you thinking?

Pro­jec­tors claim that dur­ing an astral voy­age, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with other pro­jec­tors or spir­its is pos­si­ble. Some­times the pro­jec­tor reported being attached to his/her phys­i­cal body by a sil­ver cord anal­o­gous to the umbil­i­cal cord. Pets have been said to react in a fright­ened man­ner when encoun­ter­ing a pro­jec­tor, and some peo­ple claim to have seen an astrally pro­ject­ing person’s spirit as a col­ored beam or shot of light dart­ing around the room.

In addi­tion to anec­do­tal evi­dence, lab­o­ra­tory exper­i­ments have shown that a sleep­ing per­son can be aware that they are dream­ing (often referred to as lucid dream­ing), and some of these sub­jects claim to have had out-of-body expe­ri­ences. Mod­ern sci­ence gen­er­ally inter­prets this as a purely phys­i­o­log­i­cal occur­rence within the human body, explained by sub­con­scious ideas that have been inflated by an imag­i­na­tive retelling. Astral pro­jec­tors find their first­hand expe­ri­ences com­pelling enough to val­i­date the dual­ism of body and spirit, and believe they have vis­ited another world.

Robert Mon­roe, founder of the Mon­roe Insti­tute, pub­lished sev­eral accounts of his expe­ri­ences of astral pro­jec­tion, includ­ing Far Jour­neys (ISBN 0385231822). Mon­roe devel­oped a method he calls Hemi­sync to induce men­tal states that are favor­able for pro­jec­tion. Hemi­sync is a syn­chro­niza­tion of the brain­waves of both of the brains’ hemi­spheres or lobes. This is said to work by alter­ing brain waves using sounds, together with med­i­ta­tive instruc­tion, lis­tened to on head­phones. The process based on a con­cept referred to as bin­au­ral beats.

An exhaus­tive ref­er­ence, which includes tech­niques and types of out-of-body expe­ri­ences and related phe­nom­ena, is the 1,200+ page Pro­jec­ti­ol­ogy by Dr. Waldo Vieira, MD (ISBN 8586019585), which has over 1,907 bib­li­o­graphic entries from sources in 18 lan­guages on the topic.