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thrust for a brief period of time into a very novel environment he may not be a very good observer. He is too excited and too busy trying to cope with the strangeness of it. Thus our reports from the once-in-a-lifetime people are very rough. It would be of great advantage in studying OOBEs to have trained "travelers" available who could produce the experience at will and who generally had the characteristics of a good reporter. The book you are about to read is very rare. It is a firsthand account of hundreds of OOBEs by a person who is, I believe, a good reporter. Nothing like it has been published in many years. Robert A, Monroe is a successful businessman who began experiencing OOBEs quite unexpectedly over a decade ago. Coming from an academic family and having more than the average intellectual training, he realized the unusualness of these experiences and began taking systematic notes from the beginning. I shall not say more about his experiences per se; his accounts in the rest of this book are too fascinating and lucid to warrant further introduction here. Instead, I shall note the qualities he possesses that make him a good reporter, and which give me a good deal of confidence in his accounts. When most people have a profound experience, especially one with religious import, careful questioning will usually reveal that their original account of it was not so much an account of what happened as of what they thought it meant. As an example, let us suppose that what really happens to a person is that he finds himself floating in the air above his body, in the middle of the night; while still surprised at this, he perceives a shadowy, dim figure at the end of the room, and then a blue circle of light floats past the figure from left to right. Then our experiencer loses consciousness and wakes up to find himself in his body. A good reporter will describe essentially that scene. Many people will say, in perfectly good faith, something like, "My immortal soul was raised from the tomb of my body by the grace of God last night, and an angel appeared. As a symbol of God's favor, the angel showed me a symbol of wholeness' I have often seen distortions this great when I've been able to question an individual about exactly what happened, but most of the published accounts of OOBEs have not been subjected to this kind of questioning. The statements that God's will caused the OOBE, that the dim figure turned into an angel, that the blue circle was a symbol of wholeness are all things that are part of a person's interpretation, not his experience. Most people are not aware of the extent to which their mind automatically interprets things. They think they are perceiving things as they are.