Naming and Collecting the Experience

The sensation of viewing one's own body from outside it has been described across many cultures and centuries, usually folded into occult or esoteric traditions under the name astral projection, which framed the experience as the literal separation of a subtle, non-physical body from the physical one. Psychical researcher G. N. M. Tyrrell coined the deliberately neutral term "out-of-body experience" in his 1943 book Apparitions, and British researcher Celia Green adopted and popularised it in 1968, stepping away from the occult framing and collecting several hundred first-person written accounts through public appeals, which she analysed and classified by common features: whether the experience arose spontaneously, during illness or trauma, during sleep paralysis, or through deliberate practice, and whether the person reported a distinct secondary body or simply a shift in visual perspective.

Green's work reframed the OBE as a psychological experience to be studied and categorised on its own terms, separable from the metaphysical claims traditionally layered onto it, and her terminology became the standard in both parapsychological and later neuroscientific literature, even as the two fields drew very different conclusions about what the experience actually was.