Astral Projection

Early accounts and nineteenth-century ideas

Carlos Alvarado, writing in the Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research, notes that the idea of consciousness leaving the body is mentioned only occasionally in ancient literature, citing Indian and Chinese writings and classical authors such as Pliny the Elder. He describes the idea as becoming an important topic in mesmerism in the first half of the nineteenth century and as then appearing in spiritualist writing. These earlier accounts differ in vocabulary and doctrine and are not the same practice as the Theosophical one described below.

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882. According to Alvarado, reports of out-of-body experiences were few at that time and the experience drew little attention from its researchers, although it appears in disguised form in the 1886 study Phantasms of the Living, in cases of apparent projection to a distant location.

Theosophy and the astral body

A 2020 Stockholm University master's thesis by Erik Karlström uses discourse analysis to trace how Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, understood astral projection until her death. In the thesis the practice is the willed separation of an astral body, called the linga-sarira, from the physical body, which was said to remain in a state of abeyance and to stay linked to it by a thread. Blavatsky also described projection as commonplace among Indian fakirs and Tibetan monks; the thesis reports this claim and the sources reviewed here do not test it.

Karlström reports, citing the historian Christopher Plaisance, that Blavatsky used the phrase astral plane only after A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism appeared in 1883. He describes the practice as later made better known by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley and publications of the Society for Psychical Research. C. W. Leadbeater's The Astral Plane, issued by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1895, taught that in deep sleep the higher principles in an astral vehicle usually withdraw from the body and hover near it, and that trained occultists keep consciousness across planes.

Twentieth-century accounts and research

Alvarado lists Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, authors of The Projection of the Astral Body (1929), among writers who held that something actually leaves the body, and describes Muldoon's view that his experiences arose from an effort of will combined with a physical incapacity such as illness or sleep. For the modern period he names psychophysiological studies by Charles Tart in 1967 and 1968, Celia Green's 1968 case analyses and Olaf Blanke's neurological work as redefining the topic. Muldoon's and Leadbeater's books are accounts from within the tradition, not independent evidence.

Astral projection and out-of-body experience

Astral projection is a term from Theosophical and wider occult literature for a deliberate or experienced separation of a subtle, astral body from the physical body. Out-of-body experience (OBE) is the term used in psychology and neuroscience. Blanke and colleagues describe an OBE as an experience in which a person who seems to be awake sees the body and the world from a location outside the physical body, and Alvarado notes that occult literature calls the extended form, travelling to other places, astral travelling. The two terms overlap in description, but astral projection carries the doctrinal claim that a body or consciousness actually leaves, which OBE research does not assume.

Related terms and competing models

Researchers distinguish the OBE from autoscopy, in which a person sees a second body of their own in extrapersonal space, although Blanke and colleagues found that the two share central mechanisms in their patients. Cheyne and Girard, analysing survey data on sleep paralysis, separate out-of-body feelings from out-of-body autoscopy. Alvarado describes two broad explanations: projection theories, in which something leaves the body, and hallucinatory models, in which psychology and neuroscience account for the experience.

Theosophical vocabulary such as astral body and subtle body belongs to the first kind of explanation. Alvarado describes Theosophy as characterised by a belief in subtle bodies, and the sources reviewed do not compare the different doctrines of subtle bodies or show that similar words in different traditions refer to the same thing.

Practices described by practitioners

Movement and practitioner sources describe astral projection mainly as something that occurs in sleep or is cultivated through will. Leadbeater held that most people leave the body in an astral vehicle during deep sleep without knowing it, while trained occultists develop continuous consciousness. In Blavatsky's early writings, as summarised by Karlström, willed projection was the main form of separation and accidental projection was regarded as inferior because it was uncontrolled. Muldoon described attempts that depended on will combined with a physical incapacity such as illness.

The sources reviewed do not describe a standard session format, a facilitator role, an intake process or a typical duration, and no instruction for inducing the experience is given on this page. Descriptions come from individual authors and movements, so what is called astral projection varies between them.

Circumstances reported by people who have the experience

Alvarado reports that surveys show OBEs occurring most often in life-threatening circumstances such as accidents and severe illness, and also in relaxed states including meditation, resting and falling asleep. In one study he summarises, 79% of respondents were physically relaxed and 79% mentally calm, 36% were dreaming, 27% meditating and 23% under emotional stress. He adds that the experience generally occurs once or twice in a lifetime and that most people do not seem able to induce it, although there are exceptions. Rogo wrote in 1985 that deliberately induced waking OBEs usually came about through relaxation exercises or similar procedures, and that some induction techniques rely on lucid dreaming or dream control.

Claims within the Theosophical tradition

Within the Theosophical Society, Karlström reports, astral projection was regarded as the apex of magic and was said to allow the projector to read minds, travel great distances in seconds, relive history and ultimately conquer death. Leadbeater presented knowledge of the astral plane as relevant to understanding séance phenomena. These are claims of a religious and occult movement and describe aims within its own cosmology; they are not outcomes that research has measured.

Reported after-effects of the experience

Alvarado summarises surveys of people who have had an OBE. In a Blackmore survey 10% said it changed their beliefs or quality of life; Gabbard and Twemlow found that 66% developed a belief in life after death and 86% reported an enhanced awareness of reality; and Alvarado and Zingrone found reported changes in views of the self (61%), the meaning and purpose of death (51%) and the nature of human beings (42%). These are retrospective self-reports from people who had the experience, often without seeking it, and they do not show that practising astral projection produces such changes.

Prevalence and psychological correlates

Alvarado reports that eight random-sample surveys gave positive answers to an OBE question in 6% to 14% of respondents, with a mean of 9.3%. He cautions that the surveys used differently worded questions and none followed up with interviews, so a yes answer may not meet the research definition. Experiencers have scored higher than others on measures of dissociation, absorption, fantasy proneness and schizotypy, and OBEs are statistically related to lucid dreams, but these are survey correlations and personality findings have not been consistent.

Neurological and experimental findings

A 2002 Nature report by Blanke and colleagues described repeated induction of an OBE by electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in one patient being evaluated for epilepsy; stimulation at that site also produced illusory limb changes and whole-body displacements, which the authors read as a failure to integrate somatosensory and vestibular information. A later study of six neurological patients located brain damage or dysfunction at the temporo-parietal junction in five, and found that body position before the event influenced the experience.

In healthy volunteers, Ehrsson (2007) and Lenggenhager and colleagues (2007) used conflicting visual and bodily input to make participants feel located outside their physical body or displaced toward a virtual body. Cheyne and Girard's survey data on sleep paralysis were consistent with out-of-body feelings following vestibular-motor sensations. These findings show that the sense of location in the body can be altered; they do not show that every spontaneous or practised experience arises in the same way, and they do not test whether anything leaves the body.

Controlled tests of veridical perception

Veridical perception means reporting real details of a distant place or hidden object that could not have been known by ordinary means. Alvarado says questionnaire studies found such claims in 10% to 40% of reports but that they were not followed up beyond the questionnaire. In the best-known laboratory test, Charles Tart placed a randomly chosen five-digit number on a shelf out of reach of a young woman, Miss Z, who slept in the laboratory with EEG electrodes attached; on the fourth night she said she had an OBE and reported the number correctly.

Alvarado also describes a study with the subject Keith Harary in which physical detectors showed no sign of an out-of-body presence and changes in a kitten's movements did not reach statistical significance, and an Osis and McCormick study in which strain gauges around a viewing window responded more on trials where the subject gave correct information. Blackmore described the Tart and kitten results as unreplicable and, after her own experiments and review, concluded there was no real evidence for psi in OBEs or for anything leaving the body. Alvarado calls laboratory research in this area scant.

Competing explanations

Alvarado states that defenders of projection argue that veridical perception could not occur if the experience were purely hallucinatory, while some parapsychologists suggest clairvoyance as an alternative, and that the hallucinatory model has predominated in academic circles in recent years. He describes Irwin's emphasis on dissociation and Blackmore's cognitive approach. Blackmore's 1987 account says she stopped asking whether OBEs are paranormal and asked why they feel convincing, proposing that when normal sensory input is lost the brain substitutes a memory-based model of reality, and she reported that experiencers were better at adopting elevated viewpoints in imagery tasks.

Physiological recordings and a cardiac arrest study

Rogo's 1985 critique reviewed EEG studies of people able to induce OBEs and reported no consistent brain state across subjects: alpha activity near 7 to 8 Hz in Tart's study, theta activity in another, and waking-like records in others. The AWARE study (Parnia and colleagues, 2014) was a four-year multi-centre observational study of cardiac arrest survivors, not of astral projection. Of 2,060 arrest events, 140 survivors completed a first interview; 46% reported memories, 9% near-death experiences and 2% awareness with explicit recall of seeing and hearing events, and the authors reported one verifiable period of awareness. The abstract available for this draft gives no detail of the hidden-target component.

Limits of the evidence reviewed

Searches of PubMed on 5 October 2026 for astral projection, and for out-of-body experience combined with systematic review, meta-analysis or randomised controlled trial publication types, found no trial of deliberate astral projection practice and no systematic review of its practice or of veridical-perception claims. Few of the studies above are recent, several rest on single subjects, and the original Tart report was not opened for this draft. Alvarado is a parapsychology researcher writing in an encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research. The sources reviewed contain no evidence on whether practising astral projection affects stress, sleep, mood, pain or other health outcomes.

Reported experiences and distress

The sources reviewed contain no study of adverse events from deliberately practising astral projection, so the frequency of harms is unknown. Muldoon reported shocks in the physical body if he returned too fast, and Alvarado's own 1984 survey, summarised in the Psi Encyclopedia, found shock on return to the body in 33% of respondents. In Blavatsky's account, as summarised by Karlström, the thread linking a projected body to the physical body could be broken with fatal results for the projector; this is a doctrinal belief and not a documented medical risk.

In a different setting, the AWARE authors suggested that fearful experiences around cardiac arrest may contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder. That concerns unplanned experiences during medical emergencies and does not show that deliberate practice carries the same risk.

Neurological and psychiatric context

OBEs have been recorded in neurological and psychiatric settings. Blanke and colleagues studied six neurological patients and described the experiences as paroxysmal disorders of body perception, and the 2002 report involved a patient being evaluated for epilepsy. A 2021 case report described a 15-year-old with an OBE who was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and dissociative fugue; as a single case it shows the experience can occur in that context and says nothing about how often. Alvarado concludes that, apart from schizotypy, survey research shows no clear link between OBEs and pathology. Practising astral projection should not delay or replace assessment of new, recurrent or distressing episodes, seizure-like events, or other neurological or mental health symptoms.

Training and regulation

The sources reviewed identify no professional body, register, training standard or protected title for astral projection, and no statutory regulation or training standard was found. They contain no information on fees, courses or practitioner qualifications, so no statement is made here about the competence of anyone offering instruction.