One especially detailed case comes from a late-19th-century volume of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. In October 1863, a man by the name of S. R. Wilmot was sailing from Liverpool to New York when his ship encountered a lengthy storm. After eight days, the weather abated, and Wilmot was finally able to have a restful night of sleep. He recounts,
Toward morning I dreamed that I saw my wife, whom I had left in the United States, come to the door of my state-room, clad in her nightdress. At the door she seemed to discover that I was not the only occupant of the room, hesitated a little, then advanced to my side, stooped down and kissed me, and after gently caressing me for a few moments, quietly withdrew.
Upon waking I was surprised to see my fellow passenger, whose berth was above mine, but not directly over it—owing to the fact that our room was at the stern of the vessel—leaning upon his elbow, and looking fixedly at me. ‘You’re a pretty fellow,’ said he at length, ‘to have a lady come and visit you in this way.’ I pressed him for an explanation, which he at first declined to give, but at length related what he had seen while wide awake, lying in his berth. It exactly corresponded with my dream. ...
The day after landing I went by rail to Watertown, Conn., where my children and my wife had been for some time, visiting her parents. Almost her first question, when we were alone together, was, ‘Did you receive a visit from me a week ago Tuesday?’ ...
My wife then told me that...[on] the same night when, as mentioned above, the storm had just begun to abate, she had lain awake for a long time thinking of me, and about four o’clock in the morning it seemed to her that she went out to seek me. Crossing the wide and stormy sea, she came at length to a low, black steamship, whose side she went up, and then descending into the cabin, passed through it to the stern until she came to my state-room. ‘Tell me,’ said she, ‘do they ever have state-rooms like the one I saw, where the upper berth extends further back than the under one? A man was in the upper berth, looking right at me, and for a moment I was afraid to go in, but soon I went up to the side of your berth, bent down and kissed you, and embraced you, and then went away.’
The description given by my wife of the steamship was correct in all particulars, though she had never seen it.
In this case, not only does the person who appears in a remote location experience traveling to that place, but she ends up being perceived there by two separate people, including someone to whom she has no emotional connection. Clearly, she is not just a dream in her husband’s mind. She’s an actual figure in the room, perceived from multiple angles doing exactly the things she remembers.
This account is consistent with more recent reports of out-of-body experiences. For instance, Loyd Auerbach relates having a “very vivid dream” in which he went to visit the house of a friend named Danita. She told him a couple days later that, at the same time as his dream, she saw him in her home and touched him. Her dog also appeared to react to his presence. Two weeks later, a similar episode occurred, this time while Auerbach was in a waking state:
I was at another friend’s bachelor party, becoming very bored.... I stood in the kitchen, fixing a drink and feeling a bit strange. Having felt the same way before when I had a few other experiences (my best psychic state appears to be boredom), I suddenly had the sensation of being in two places at once. I was in Mike’s kitchen and I was also standing in my friend Danita’s living room.... We had a short conversation, partly about the bachelor party, partly about other things, and I recall her saying she knew I was having an OBE and was only “dropping in.” I mentioned that I’d write down a few notes when I “got back” to Mike’s, and said good-bye. I found paper and pen, wrote a few notes (time, conversation details, etc.), which coincide with what Danita remembered about the situation.”
Another case of apparent physical contact during an OBE comes from the classic 1886 volume Phantasms of the Living, in which the Rev. P. H. Newnham reported a very clear and vivid dream in which he visited his fiancée’s family and put his arms around his fiancée’s waist, at the top of the staircase just as she was going to bed. He woke from the dream just before his clock struck 10pm. The next morning, he wrote a letter to his fiancée with a detailed account of his dream. The same morning, she wrote him her own letter, in which she asked, “Were you thinking about me, very specially, last night, just about 10 o’clock? For, as I was going upstairs to bed, I distinctly heard your footsteps on the stairs, and felt you put your arms round my waist.”
In 1956, Hornell Hart and his collaborators published a study in which they compared apparitions of the deceased to apparitions of living OBErs. After comparing the rates of incidence of 23 basic traits in living-person OBE apparitions to their rates of incidence in apparitions of the deceased, they concluded that the evidence pointed to these two types of apparitions’ being the same phenomenon.
So, not only do reciprocal apparitions of OBErs demonstrate that, during our lives, we have a degree of consciousness that’s not limited to the physical location of our body, but they also support the view that apparitions of those who have died—which show the same characteristics—are expressions of that same non-local consciousness, unlimited by the death of the body with which it was previously associated.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.
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