Page "Out-of-body experience" Paragraph 36

Rawcliffe ( 1959 ) connected the OBE experience with psychosis and hysteria.

Other researchers have discussed the phenomena of the OBE in terms of a distortion of the body image ( Horowitz, 1970 ) and depersonalization ( Whitlock, 1978 ).

Some psychologists ( Fordor, 1959 ; Ehrenwald, 1974 ) proposed that an OBE is a defense mechanism designed to deal with the threat of death.

According to ( Irin and Watt, 2007 ) Jan Ehrenwald had described the out-of-body experience ( OBE ) " as an imaginal con-firmation of the question for immortality, a delusory attempt to assure ourselves that we possess a soul that exists independently of the physical body.

The psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge has written that the explanation for OBEs can be found in lucid dreaming.

There are several other scientists, however, who challenge this approach, and argue that psychophysiological studies do not support the idea that the person is dreaming during an OBE For example, Frederick Aardema ( 2012 ), a clinical researcher, argues that dreaming is just one of the many different modes of consciousness a person may enter during an OBE.

In other words, lucid dreaming does not define the OBE.

Rather, lucid dreaming is defined by the OBE as an experience during which you find yourself in a location other than that of the physical body.