What Is Astral Projection, and Is It Real?

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 24, 2026Oct 24, 2026 · How we write

Astral projection is the belief that a subtle “astral body” can leave the physical body and travel, usually during sleep or deep relaxation. The idea comes from 19th-century Theosophy. Science studies the same experience as an out-of-body experience (OBE): real as a feeling, most common at the edge of sleep, linked to one area of the brain, with no proof that anything leaves.

Astral projection in one line

The two names describe one experience from two sides. “Astral projection” assumes something travels. “Out-of-body experience” describes what it feels like and leaves the question open. Below, “astral projection” means the belief and “out-of-body experience” means the experience.

Is astral projection real?

The experience is real. People who have it are not lying or crazy: about one in ten report it, most of them once or twice, and many say it felt more real than a dream. What nobody has shown is that anything leaves the body. For more than fifty years researchers have hidden numbers and pictures where only someone floating near the ceiling could see them. One woman read a number correctly in 1968. No one has done it since under tighter conditions. That includes two large hospital studies of people whose hearts had stopped. And the “CIA file” often quoted as proof is a 1983 Army report on Robert Monroe’s training method, not a test of it (more below).

What has been shown is where the feeling comes from in the brain, and when it tends to happen: at the edge of sleep, in sleep paralysis, in lucid dreams, in deep relaxation, and sometimes under great stress or in illness.

What science knows about out-of-body experiences

It can be switched on in the brain. In 2002 a team in Geneva led by the neurologist Olaf Blanke was mapping the brain of a woman being assessed for epilepsy surgery. They stimulated one spot on the right side, the angular gyrus. She first felt she was “sinking into the bed” and then said: “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” It happened again when they repeated the stimulation. The authors wrote in Nature that out-of-body experiences “may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information”, that is, signals about touch, position and balance.

The same area shows up in patients. In 2004 Blanke’s group described six neurological patients with out-of-body experiences. In five, the damage or abnormal activity sat at the temporo-parietal junction, the area where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, roughly above and behind the ear. A 2005 review argued that when this area fails to join up signals from the body, a person can feel they are in a different place from their body and seeing it from there.

Some people can do it at will. In 2014 two Ottawa researchers, Andra Smith and Claude Messier, scanned a woman who said she could produce the feeling of her body moving outside itself whenever she wanted, while staying aware of her real body lying still. The scan showed activity different from ordinary imagining of movement, partly in the same temporo-parietal region. It is one person. The authors called it an “extra-corporeal experience”. Still, it shows the state is not always an accident.

Researchers who take out-of-body experiences seriously, Tart among them, answer that the lab is a poor place for them. People who manage it at home often can’t in a strange room with wires on their heads. That may be true. It also means the claim that something travels is still untested, not confirmed.

Astral projection, sleep paralysis and lucid dreams

Most people meet astral projection by accident, at the edge of sleep. In sleep paralysis the mind wakes up while the body is still held still by dream sleep. The NHS lists the usual signs: you are awake but can’t move or speak, you feel someone is in the room or something is pressing you down, and you are frightened. It calls it “scary but … harmless”. A review of 35 studies with 36,533 people found that 7.6 percent of the general population have had at least one episode, and 28.3 percent of students. Allan Cheyne and Todd Girard ran a large survey of people with sleep paralysis. They found that floating, flying, spinning and leaving the body form one group of its sensations, separate from the “intruder” fear.

Lucid dreams overlap too. In a 1991 study at the Lucidity Institute, 10 of 107 lucid dreams counted as out-of-body experiences because the dreamer felt they had left their body. Stephen LaBerge wrote the same year that “the only necessary feature distinguishing lucid dreams and OBEs is how the person interprets the experience.”

Robert Monroe, who published Journeys Out of the Body in 1971, wrote that it began in 1958, after a short sleep. He felt hit by a beam of warm light that paralyzed him and made his body “vibrate violently”. A sleep doctor reading the same lines would think of sleep paralysis with vestibular sensations. Monroe read it as the start of travel, and the “vibration stage” has been in astral projection guides ever since. Both readings fit what he felt; they disagree about what it means.

Is astral projection dangerous?

The experience itself is not known to damage the body. Sleep paralysis, its most common setting, is harmless in the NHS’s words. The risks sit around it:

• A frightening night can make people afraid to sleep, and lost sleep makes sleep paralysis more likely.
• Waking up on purpose night after night to try again cuts into sleep.
• For people with depersonalization, narcolepsy, a seizure disorder or psychosis, frequent “leaving the body” can be a symptom a doctor should look at before anyone tries to train it.
• Some guides add herbs or drugs. Anything that changes consciousness has its own risks, and we don’t cover them here.

Where the idea comes from: Theosophy, Muldoon and Monroe

The phrase is younger than it sounds. Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) wrote of the “astral light” and of the “soul (astral body)”, and quoted Paracelsus to the effect that in sleep “the astral body is free” and can “hover round in proximity with its sleeping vehicle” or travel far. Her later Theosophical Glossary (1892) defined the astral body as “the ethereal counterpart or shadow of man”, the “Doppelganger”, and gave it a Sanskrit name, linga sharira.

Her followers made it a body you could use. Annie Besant’s Man and His Bodies (1896) said that in sleep “the astral body slips out” of the physical one, and that “comparatively few work in it separated from the physical.” Charles Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane (1895) described the place it was supposed to go, with its scenery and inhabitants.

The practical manual came in 1929: The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan Muldoon, an American who described his own projections, and the psychical researcher Hereward Carrington. Its index runs through the “astral cable”, “astral catalepsy” and the role of the subconscious will. Then in 1971 Robert Monroe, an American radio executive, published Journeys Out of the Body. He later patented Hemi-Sync, a binaural-beat sound method, and founded the Monroe Institute to teach his methods. Researchers by then preferred a neutral term. Celia Green’s 1968 survey was called Out-of-the-Body Experiences, and the same year Charles Tart published one of the first sleep-lab tests.

Indian parallels

Theosophy took much of its vocabulary from India, so the parallels are real, but the ideas are not the same.

• The subtle body. Hindu texts distinguish the gross body (sthūla śarīra) from a subtle body (sūkṣma śarīra, also liṅga śarīra) made of the senses, mind and breath. In the Mahanirvana Tantra it “contains in itself the cause of rebirth”: it carries a person from one life to the next. It is not described as a double that goes out at night.
• Yogic powers. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali list, among many siddhis, the mind’s “entrance into another body” (3.38) and “travelling in ether” through meditation on the body’s lightness (3.42). Just before them, the text warns that such powers are “obstacles in the meditative condition” (3.37). Numbering differs by one between editions.

So the old texts treat leaving the body as a rare power of advanced yogis, and an obstacle in meditation. The modern idea that anyone can learn it in a few nights is Western and recent.

Is astral projection in the Bible? The silver cord

The Bible never mentions astral projection. The passage people quote most is Paul’s: “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2). Paul describes a vision. He says plainly that he doesn’t know how it happened, and he teaches no method.

The “silver cord” that many guides say ties the astral body to the physical one comes from Ecclesiastes 12:6: “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken”. In context it is a poem about old age and death. Whether trying to leave the body is wrong is a question for your own church or tradition; we don’t answer it for them.

What came later: the CIA file, methods and films

• The “CIA astral projection” document is a 1983 U.S. Army report by the officer Wayne McDonnell, Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, about Monroe’s training program, later released in the CIA’s online reading room. It is one officer’s assessment of the method and the theory behind it, not a controlled test showing that anyone left their body.
• Named methods such as the “rope” and “roll-out” techniques fill modern guides and videos. All of them work at the edge of sleep: lie still, let the body fall asleep, keep the mind awake. That is the same state in which sleep paralysis and hypnagogic sensations happen. So people who try them often report both. We describe them here as history and don’t teach them.
• Films and games such as Insidious (2010) and Doctor Strange (2016) gave the idea its current look: a glowing double, a cord, a threat of not getting back.

What this page does not promise. We don’t say whether a soul or astral body exists, and we don’t teach how to leave the body. The check is not a diagnosis and can’t tell you what really happened to you. Nothing here treats sleep paralysis, anxiety or any illness.

How the check works

The check has seven questions about one episode: when it happened, whether you could move, vibration or floating, seeing yourself from outside, knowing you were dreaming, fear or a presence, and how often. Each answer adds points to one or more of four well-described experiences, using the signs named in the sources above: the NHS and Cheyne and Girard for sleep paralysis, Cleveland Clinic for hypnagogic sensations, Levitan and LaBerge for lucid dreams, Blanke’s papers for out-of-body experiences. The result names the closest match. When the scores are close, it names a second one, because these states often overlap. Four optional ticks add doctor notes from NHS, Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic; the crisis tick shows help lines at once. The example above uses one sample night. Nothing is saved or sent.

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