Sleep paralysis may be associated, as some of my correspondents have emphasized, with a sense of floating or levitation, and even hallucinations of leaving one’s own body and flying through space. These experiences, so unlike the hideous night-mare ones, may go with feelings of calm and joy (some of Cheyne’s subjects used the term “bliss”). Jeanette B., who has had a lifetime of narcolepsy and sleep paralysis (which she refers to as “spells”), described this to me:
It was after college that the spells became both a burden and a blessing. Not being able to pull myself out of the paralysis one night, I let go; and felt myself slowly rising out of my body! I had come through the terror part and felt a wonderful peaceful bliss as I rose out of my body and floated up. Now, as I experienced this I found it very difficult to believe it was a hallucination. All of my senses seemed unusually sharp: someone’s radio playing in another room, crickets chirping outside the window. Without going into detail, this was a hallucination that was more pleasant than anything I had ever experienced. . . .
I suppose I became so nearly addicted to the out of body experiences, that when offered some meds from my neurologist to help with the nighttime paralysis and hallucinations, I refused, rather than give up the out of body experiences. I didn’t say that was the reason.
For quite some time, I would try to will myself into that pleasant hallucination. I discovered it usually came after much stress or lack of sleep, and would deprive myself of sleep in order to achieve the experience of floating amongst the stars, high enough to observe the curvature of the earth. . . .
But bliss can coincide with terror—Peter S., a friend, found this when he had a single episode of sleep paralysis with hallucination. It seemed to him that he left his body, cast a backward glance at it, then soared up into the sky. He had an enormous sense of freedom and joy, now that he had left the limitations of his human body, a feeling that he could roam at will through the universe. But there was also a fear, which became terror, that he might be lost forever in infinity, unable to rejoin his body on earth.
Out-of-body experiences may occur when specific regions of the brain are stimulated in the course of a seizure or a migraine, as well as with electrical stimulation of the cortex.72 They may occur with drug experiences and in self-induced trances. OBEs can also occur when the brain is not receiving enough blood, as may happen if there is a cardiac arrest or arrhythmia, massive blood loss, or shock.
My friend Sarah B. had an OBE in the delivery room, just after giving birth. She had delivered a healthy baby, but she had lost a lot of blood, and her obstetrician said that he would have to compress the uterus to stop the hemorrhage. Sarah wrote:
I felt my uterus being squeezed and told myself not to move or cry out. . . . Then, suddenly, I was floating with the back of my head against the ceiling. I was looking down on a body which was not my own. The body was some distance from me. . . . I watched the doctor pound on this woman and heard him grunt loudly with his efforts. I thought, “This woman is very inconsiderate. She is giving Dr. J. a lot of trouble.” . . . So I was completely oriented to time, day, place, people, and event. I was just unaware that the center of the drama was myself.
After some time, Dr. J. withdrew his hands from the body, stepped back, and announced that the bleeding had stopped. As he said this, I felt myself slip back into my body like an arm sliding into the sleeve of a coat. I was no longer looking, from a distance, down on the doctor; instead he was looming above and quite close to me. His green surgical scrubs were covered with blood.
Sarah had critically low blood pressure, and it was probably this—her brain getting insufficient oxygen—which precipitated the OBE. Anxiety may have constituted an additional factor, as reassurance did in ending the attack, despite her still very low blood pressure. Her not recognizing her own body is curious, though it is commonly reported that the body looks “vacated” or “empty” when the now-disembodied self looks down on its former home.
