You might have observed that, while just falling asleep, you sometimes experience a jumping sensation. People believe that this happens when the astral body or the spirit or the soul gets back into the physical body. Others consider this to be the astral body getting out and then hastily returning, owing to the person's fear of leaving his/her body.

People who have experienced near-death experiences (NDEs) have actually left their physical bodies and watched it from outside. They could see clearly what was happening to their physical bodies, and later, they were able to report this to the tiniest detail.

Another term for OOBE is astral projection. There is absolutely no scientific explanation for an OOBE, but one out of every ten persons experiences it.

Recently, more and more people have been trying to have an astral projection by directly stimulating their brains. Some of them use their minds to project to the astral planes, while others report being pulled out of their physical body without making any attempts to leave the body. Temporary paralysis just before the OOBE is a common experience.

In some cases, people aren't even aware that they just experienced an OOBE. Usually, people who have been involved in violent accidents report to have watched the violent scenes from outside their bodies and their vehicle. The experience strongly resembled a dream, they reported.

People who experienced such an OOBE saw their own physical body, watched people working hard to rescue it from the smashed vehicle, and witnessed the quick drive to the hospital. Some of them witnessed deceased loved ones and had an irresistible desire to follow them to the other world. However, they desisted because a message was telepathically conveyed to them that their time on earth was not yet up.

Several people use meditation to speed up the process of astral projection. Meditation is usually used to achieve a dream-like condition that is favorable for a projection. However, not all people can use meditation as a tool for astral projection, simply because some people find it intensely difficult to relax.

People also use drugs to induce an astral projection. Irrespective of the method used, people have had common astral experiences. They have all experienced weightlessness and have retained the power to see, hear, and understand all the events that took place when they were not inside their physical bodies.

Many people do not believe in astral projection. They think that it is just a dream, which unfolds when people are asleep. But it cannot be a dream for a simple reason. People who have had an NDE could later describe, down to the tiniest detail, what happened around their physical body in their absence. They even knew the type of treatments used to revive them. So, astral projection is a real experience; it simply cannot be a dream, although you can dream that you are projecting.