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idea of what might have caused it. In very rare instances it seems to have been brought about by a deliberate attempt. Third, the experience of an OOBE is usually one of the most profound experiences of a person's life, and radically alters his beliefs. This is usually expressed as, "I no longer believe in survival of death or an immortal soul, I know that I will survive death." The person feels that he has directly experienced being alive and conscious without his physical body, and therefore knows that he possesses some kind of soul that will survive bodily death. This does not logically follow, for even if the OOBE is more than just an interesting dream or hallucination, it was still occurring while the physical body was alive and functioning and therefore may depend on the physical body. This argument, however, makes no impression on those who have actually had an OOBE. Thus regardless of what position one wants to take on the "reality" of the OOBE, it is clearly an experience deserving considerable psychological study. I am certain that our ideas concerning the existence of souls have resulted from early experiences of people having OOBEs. Considering the importance of the idea of the soul to most of our religions, and the importance of religion in people's lives, it seems incredible that science could have swept this problem under the rug so easily. Fourth, the OOBE is generally extremely joyful to those who have it. I would make a rough estimate that between 90 and 95 per cent of the people who have this experience are very glad it occurred and find it joyful, while 5 per cent are very frightened by it, for the only way they can interpret it, while it is happening, is that they are dying. Later reactions of the person as he attempts to interpret his OOBE can be rather negative, however. Almost every time I give a speech on this subject, someone comes up to me afterward and thanks me for talking about it They had had the experience some time before, but had no way of explaining it, and worried that they were going "crazy." Fifth, in some instances of OOBEs the description of what was happening at a distant place is correct and more accurate than we would expect by coincidence. Not the majority, by any means, but some. To explain these we must postulate either that the "hallucinatory" experience of the OOBE was combined with the operation of ESP, or that in some sense the person really was "there." The OOBE then becomes very real indeed. The fact that most of our knowledge about OOBEs comes from reports of once-in-a-lifetime experiences puts us at two serious disadvantages. The first of these is that most people cannot produce an OOBE at will, so this precludes the possibility of studying them under precise laboratory conditions. The second disadvantage is that when a person is suddenly