Sleep paralysis and hypnagogia
The vibrations, paralysis and vivid imagery match the transition between wakefulness and REM sleep.
Tested, target never read
Astral projection
Astral projection is the claimed ability of leaving the body and perceiving from outside it. Status: tested, target never read.
The other claimed abilities put to the same test: medium, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, clairsentience, clairaudience, psychometry, empathy, healing and aura reading.
What people describe
Astral projection is described as leaving the physical body and travelling in a second, "astral" body — often beginning with vibrations or paralysis at sleep onset, then a sense of floating, seeing the room from above, and moving through walls or to distant places.
How it entered the record
The idea of an astral body comes from nineteenth-century Theosophy. Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington's "The Projection of the Astral Body" (1929) gave step-by-step methods, and Robert Monroe's "Journeys Out of the Body" (1971) popularised the phrase "out-of-body experience". In 2002 neurologists reported in Nature that electrically stimulating a region at the junction of the temporal and parietal lobes produced out-of-body sensations in a patient.
The experiment
Charles Tart, 1968, and the AWARE studies of Parnia and colleagues, 2014
Read the paper: Parnia et al. (2014), “AWARE — AWAreness during REsuscitation”, Resuscitation 85
How it was run
A number or image is placed where it can only be seen from above. If the person is really looking down from the ceiling, they can read it.
Sample
Tart: a single subject over four nights. AWARE: 2,060 cardiac arrests across 15 hospitals, with visual targets installed on high shelves
Result
Tart's subject reported the number correctly on one night, under conditions later criticised as leaky. In AWARE, of 2,060 cases, 140 survivors were interviewed; of the 101 given the detailed interview, 9 had near-death experiences and 2 recalled seeing or hearing real events — and no target was reported. The one checkable account came from an area with no shelf.
The out-of-body experience itself is entirely real as an experience and can be induced reliably by stimulating the temporoparietal junction. What has not happened is anyone reading the card on the shelf.
Claim
Leaving the body and perceiving from outside it
Word from
Greek astron "star" — the "astral body" of nineteenth-century Theosophy
Status
Tested, target never read
Where the word comes from
The term comes from Theosophy in the 1880s; the experience itself is far older and universal.
What psychology offers instead
Body-map disruption
When the brain's integration of vision, balance and touch is disturbed, the sense of being located in the body can shift.
Lucid dreaming
Many projection techniques are close to techniques for inducing lucid dreams, and the experiences overlap.
How to test it fairly yourself
Have someone place a random number or image high on a shelf where it cannot be seen from the bed, without telling you what it is. If you can report it after a projection more often than chance, that would be evidence; hospital studies using hidden targets have not yet produced a verified hit.