Lehal Library

"Then we started to move, with the familiar feeling of something like air rushing around the body. After a short trip (seemed like five seconds in duration), we stopped and the hand released my wrist. There was complete silence and darkness. Then I drifted down into what seemed to be a room. . . ." I've stopped quoting from Mr. Monroe's notes at this point, except to add that when he finished this brief trip and got out of bed to telephone me it was 2:05 A.M., his time. Thus the time match with my wife and I beginning to concentrate was extremely good: he felt the tug pulling him from his body within a minute or so of when we started to concentrate. On the other hand, his continuing description of what our home looked like and what my wife and I were doing was not good at all: he "perceived" too many people in the room, he "perceived" me doing things I did not do, and his description of the room itself was quite vague. What do I make of this? This is one of those frustrating events that parapsychologists encounter when working with poorly controlled phenomena. It is not evidential enough to say that it was unquestionably a paranormal effect, yet it is difficult simply to say that nothing happened. It is comfortable to stick with our common-sense assumptions that the physical world is what it seems to be, and that a man (or his sense organs) is either located at a certain place and able to observe it or he is not. Some OOBEs reported in the literature seem to fit this view, while others have a disturbing mixture of correct perceptions of the physical situation with "perceptions" of things that weren't there or did not happen (to us ordinary observers). Mr. Monroe reports a number of such mixed experiences in this book, especially his seeming to "communicate" with people while he is having an OOBE, but their never remembering it. The second puzzling "experiment" occurred in the fall of 1970 when I briefly visited Mr. Monroe in Virginia, en route to a conference in Washington. Staying overnight, I requested that if he had an OOBE that night, he should come to my bedroom and try to pull me out of my body so I could have the experience too. I realized at the time that I made this request with a certain amount of ambivalence: I wanted him to succeed, yet another part of me did not. More on that later. Sometime after dawn that morning (I had slept somewhat fitfully and the light was occasionally waking me), I was dreaming when I began vaguely remembering that Mr. Monroe was supposed to try to get me out of my body. I became partially conscious, and felt a sense of "vibration" all around me in the dream world, a "vibration" that had a certain amount of indefinable menace connected with it. In spite of the fear this aroused, I thought that I