Out-of-the-Body Experiences

Celia Green's Out-of-the-Body Experiences is an early systematic academic study classifying around four hundred first hand accounts of the experience, published through her own Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford. Green adopted and helped popularize the term out of body experience, coined earlier by G. N. M. Tyrrell, specifically as a neutral descriptive label distinct from the occult term astral projection, a genuine and influential contribution to how the phenomenon came to be discussed in psychology and parapsychology alike. Its authority rests on that classificatory groundwork rather than on any claim to have explained the experience's cause. Its limit is that it is a descriptive collection of self reported accounts rather than a controlled experimental study, so it documents what people report experiencing without establishing what produces the experience, a question later addressed by the clinical and neuroscience literature.