The Varieties of Journey Experiences:
Dream, Out-of-Body, Near-Death,
and Abduction Experiences
Maybe you and I are still in a dream and have not yet awakened….
As we speak now, we do not know whether we are awake or dreaming.
—Chuang Tzu 90
Shamans learn to induce and direct the journeys that are their hallmark. Yet people who have never even heard of shamanism may have journey-like experiences. Spontaneous journeys include out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), lucid dreams, near-death experiences, and abduction experiences, while deliberately induced journeys are now employed in psychotherapy.
SPONTANEOUS JOURNEYS
Out-of-Body Experiences
Spontaneous OOBEs have occurred throughout history and were traditionally called “astral traveling.” Among the best-known travels were those of the eighteenth-century Swedish genius, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Around his fifty-fifth year, this brilliant scientist underwent a religious crisis and then began to describe spontaneous journeys to heaven and hell and meetings with their inhabitants. So powerful were his reports that today, over two hundred years later, the Swedenborgian movement is still thriving.
Perhaps the best-known contemporary examples of spontaneous out-of-body experiences are those of Robert Monroe. Monroe was a conventional businessman who feared he was going crazy, and he actually sought medical treatment when he found himself having OOBEs. He had never even heard of such a thing and didn’t believe it possible. Yet eventually shock turned to pleasure as he found himself able to control and explore the experiences. Like Swedenborg, Monroe assumed that the worlds he visited and the creatures he met were real, and he produced elaborate maps and guidebooks of them. He chronicled his explorations in the widely selling book Journeys Out of the Body.245 The similarity of such travels to those of shamans is obvious, and since they occur spontaneously and then later become controlled, this may be one way shamanic journeying was originally learned.
Near-Death Experiences
“May I ask about death?” inquired a disciple of Confucius, to which the master replied, “You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?”207
Death is a great mystery, but also a great teacher. “Visit the graves,” urged Mohammed,322 for “death is a good adviser.”9
It has long been known that those who have a brush with death may describe remarkable experiences. Near-death experiences, or NDEs as they are now called, occur most often in people who come close to death—for example, after a heart attack—but are resuscitated at the last moment.
The experience typically progresses through several stages. The first is a sudden switch from the agony of desperately fighting for survival to profound peace and well-being. Then comes the bewildering shock of finding one’s “self” outside the body, able to hear and see everything in the environment, including one’s own body lying inert and comatose. Some revived patients have dumbfounded their doctors with detailed descriptions of the resuscitation procedure and of what the doctors said while they were “dead.”247
Next comes a sense of moving through a vast, dark tunnel. At the end of the tunnel is a spiritual figure or light of incomprehensible brilliance, with which the dying person merges in ecstatic love. The experience ends with a sense that death would be premature and that the person must return to the world.247 NDEers commonly report that this was the most profound, important, and life-changing moment of their life, and almost 90 percent say they would be willing to repeat it.303
NDEs can cause dramatic, long-lasting personality changes similar to those produced by other mystical experiences. Not surprisingly, there is a reduced fear of death, greater belief in an afterlife, and a deeper sense of the preciousness of life, love, and relationships. This is accompanied by increased interest in learning, self-knowledge, and helping others, together with less concern with materialistic goals and worldly possessions. These dramatic changes are as much as would be expected from years of psychotherapy. As the famous astronomer Carl Sagan said after a severe illness, “I recommend almost dying to everyone, it’s character building. You get a much clearer perception of what’s important and what isn’t, the preciousness and beauty of life.”200
As yet, no single explanation—either biological, psychological, or spiritual—has proved adequate to account for the near-death phenomenon.304 But whatever their nature, because of improved resuscitation techniques, the number of people having such experiences is multiplying. Consequently, near-death experiences are increasingly impacting our culture in far-reaching ways.304, 399
There are obvious similarities—detachment from the body, journey to other realms, meeting spirits—between NDEs and shamanic journeys. One writer even went to the extreme of suggesting that “The shaman, then, is a master of death, he actually dies and is actually reborn….The shaman is the classic investigator of the realm of death; he explores the routes of travel to and in the beyond and thereby produces a map of the postmortem terrain.”189
However, it is safer to say that, while there are similarities between shamanic journeys and NDEs, there are also significant differences. For example, the shaman deliberately induces the journey, has a wider range of potential experiences, and, unlike the person approaching death, has considerable control over the process. Perhaps NDEs inspired some shamans, since one of the traditional calls to practice is unexpected recovery from illness. If some shamans-to-be survived near-death experiences, they may have sought ways to recreate their profound transformative and healing effects.
Dream Journeys
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep
—Shakespeare, The Tempest
We are all familiar with the flights and journeys of dreams. Within minutes of closing our eyes, we may journey to unknown worlds and interact with their inhabitants. Most amazing of all, we assume that these worlds, creatures, and our dream body are all utterly solid, material, and “real.”
Dream journeys can be rich sources of insight. In many religions, dreams are regarded not only, to quote Freud, as “the royal road to the unconscious,” but also as a way to wisdom and awakening. Small wonder that some shamans and tribal cultures regard dream experiences and journeys as no less real or valuable than waking ones.
A valuable variation is “lucid dreaming” in which the dreamer knows she is dreaming. Lucid dreamers can direct their dreams much as shamans do their journeys. The dreamer can travel consciously through diverse worlds, meet other beings, explore, question, and learn.
Until recently, psychologists dismissed lucid dreaming as impossible. Yet it has long been valued in many religions, which regard it as a capacity to be cultivated. Almost a thousand years ago, the great Sufi mystic Ibn El-Arabi—who was a towering religious and philosophical genius known to Muslims as “the greatest master”—said, “A person must control his thoughts in a dream….Everyone should apply himself to the attainment of this ability of such great value.”330 The technique has been developed most exquisitely in Tibetan dream yoga. Tibetan yogis continue spiritual practice throughout their dreams, during which they explore the nature of mind, seek inspiration, or receive teachings from the Buddha.265
Advanced yogis practice “witnessing the process of dreaming or dreamless sleep.”333 That is, the most advanced practitioners attain what Hindu yoga calls turiya, a unique fourth state of consciousness in which they never lose awareness. Rather, they remain continuously and imperturbably lucid and aware during dreams, dreamless sleep, and waking life.399 At this point, practice continues unbroken through day and night, and, according to the Christian Saint Isaac the Syrian, “Then prayer never stops in a man’s soul.”157 Electroencephalographic (EEG or brain wave) studies of advanced TM (Transcendental Meditation) practitioners have validated some of these remarkable claims for continuous, unbroken awareness twenty-four hours a day.228 There is no evidence that shamans developed these advanced skills, but they were surely inspired by spontaneous lucid dreams, and a few probably went on to develop some yogic capacities.
Instructions for cultivating lucid dreams are now widely available. A good introduction is the book Lucid Dreaming,165; 205 which is summarized in Paths Beyond Ego.399
Alien Abductions
Many cultures have myths of alien beings who appear from the stars to help or abduct humans.179 Of late, the aliens have been very busy, abducting some 2 percent of Americans.317 This would amount to more than 100 million people worldwide and an abduction every few seconds. As Carl Sagan quipped, “It’s surprising that more of the neighbors haven’t noticed.”317
Typical abductees might report awaking at night paralyzed and being transported by small humanoid creatures to spacecraft. There they are medically examined and sometimes healed, perhaps sexually probed or even fertilized, and educated about spiritual matters or the ecological devastation wrought by human destructiveness. They are left with a mélange of emotions and a sense of bewilderment, numinosity, and sacred mission.
What are we to make of such reports? Many abductees take them literally. A handful of researchers agree, of whom the most famous was John Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist.221 But the evidence Mack adduced seems painfully weak, not least because there was no physical proof, and many stories were garnered via hypnotic recall—a notoriously unreliable method that can strengthen or even implant false memories.53
The many similarities to shamanic journeys are obvious179 and viewing the abduction as a spontaneous upper-world journey makes good sense. After all, asked Carl Sagan, “Which is more likely—that we’re undergoing a massive but generally overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or that people are experiencing an unfamiliar mental state?”317
This in no way denies the power, or even value, of these experiences for some abductees. Rather, it demonstrates the remarkable prevalence of journeys and “alien” or “spirit” encounters, shows that even spontaneous encounters can sometimes be healing and educational, and reminds us how much we still have to learn about the roots of shamanism, our minds, and ourselves.
Conclusions
Out-of-body, dream journey, near-death, and abduction experiences all center on apparent “soul travel” and encounters that are often powerful, healing, and informative. The capacity for them may be partly hardwired into the brain.209 They doubtless occurred throughout history and, as such, may have inspired belief in a soul and soul travel. Since these experiences can be healing and helpful, the techniques and circumstances that favor them would likely have been carefully cultivated. Whenever these skills were collected into a coherent body of techniques, wedded to an explanatory mythology, and transmitted across generations, the shamanic tradition would be reborn.
This suggests a partial answer to the puzzle of shamanism’s far-flung distribution. If journey-like experiences recurred spontaneously, they could have inspired related practices and beliefs in widely separated cultures. This would favor the idea that our ancestors developed shamanism in many parts of the world. It would also help explain why the tradition shows striking similarities across cultures and why it has survived for so long. But of course there is no way to test this theory, and the origins of shamanism and religion will probably forever remain a mystery of history.
DELIBERATE JOURNEYS
Psychotherapy
Given the healing potential of journeys, it is not surprising that psychotherapists use visualization to evoke similar experiences. A wide range of imagery techniques is used, with names such as active imagination, visualization, guided imagery, guided meditation, or waking dreams.250 Commonly patients are asked to visualize themselves going to meet people or entities that will provide understanding and healing.3
Such experiences have much in common with shamanic journeys but also differ in several ways. Unlike guided imagery, journeys usually occur in significantly altered states of consciousness, often involve travel to other realms, and are viewed as real rather than imaginary by the shaman.
Hypnotic experiences can be closer to the shamanic journey. While in the ASC of deep hypnosis, other worlds and entities can seem unquestionably solid, material, and independent of our own minds. Both hypnotic and shamanic travels can be therapeutic, but only the shaman enters and leaves the state at will.
These two worlds are now converging as more therapists study shamanism and employ its journeys and other techniques in their consulting rooms.109, 172 The effects on both disciplines will be intriguing.
Neoshamanism
Journey-like experiences are surprisingly common, but can ordinary contemporary Westerners learn to journey shamanically? The popularity of neoshamanism demonstrates that for many people the answer is yes and that, with the aid of drumming, most people find journeying surprisingly easy and helpful. Of course, this is not to say that all people have equal talents. Michael Harner, who has taught many thousands of people, reports that “approximately nine out of ten persons have the capacity for the visualization necessary to the shamanic journey.”148
Notice the marked contrast between the large number of people capable of at least some journeying and the small number who traditionally did. While most people may have been capable, it was shamans alone who engaged in cosmic travel, while their compatriots remained firmly earthbound.