Comments about people’s attitudes to out-of-body experiences (OBEs)

There are some letters about out-of-body experiences in the Daily Mail of 1 March 2001. It is ironic to think that my attempts to do some research that would get me back into a university career had an effect on modern culture, by contributing to it at least two previously unknown concepts (OBEs and lucid dreams) which were never heard of before -but without doing me the slightest good, even in the way of making me able to write and publish any future books except at my own expense. (Although a psychology editor at Routledge said that mine was ‘a name to conjure with’.)

When I published my first book on OBEs ( Out-of-the-Body Experiences, still in print, IPR, 1968, distributor Book Systems Plus, Cambridge) the phenomenon was unknown outside a very limited population of people with an interest in psychical research or some form of spiritualism. I thought I had rescued them from the realm of superstition as a genuine phenomenon on which really significant scientific research could be done which could soon shed light on, and possibly revolutionise our understanding of, both perception and psychosis (provided the research was done by me). It is ironic, also, that they were quickly relegated to the role of a speculative gambling counter on which dogmatic opinions of one sort or another could be based (combined with evaluations of other people's reasons for having different dogmatic opinions). An openness to speculation, or the hypothetical, is noticeably absent from these letters.

Dr Peter Fenwick of the London Institute of Psychiatry, apparently considers there may be life after death. Other correspondents express their views on the probability or otherwise of this idea, asserting dogmatically, for example, ‘There is no mechanism whereby the mind can function once the brain has been switched off,’ and, ‘People who seize on these stories to prop up their own belief in an afterlife are guilty of an enormous act of wish-fulfilment.’

So far as I am concerned, these phenomena have no effect on my views on the finite situation. Our experience of an apparent external world is of uncertain status, and if my experience includes reports from other people that there is a way of continuing physical life somewhat differently, that seems very claustrophobic, and in no way provides a solution. The reports are of uncertain status and shed no light at all on the probability to be ascribed to this rather claustrophobic idea.

I notice the reference to brains responding to shortage of oxygen, which is Dr Susan Blackmore's socially acceptable but unscientific theory. While no real research has been permitted to be done (and it still looks as if I shall have to provide my own funding if I am ever to do any) it is clear, even on the basis of anecdote, that the category of near-death experiences is a spurious one, and does not provide information about how brains respond to a shortage of oxygen, since the salient features of so-called near-death experiences are all found in experiences reported by young and healthy subjects in non-crisis situations.

Another correspondent, asserting ‘that what awaits us all at physical death is a continuance of life and that we get but an occasional magical glimpse while in the confines of the physical body’, also pays homage to the modern worship of people who have been placed in academic positions by other people holding academic positions. He says, ‘I have the greatest respect for Dr Fenwick’s scientific knowledge’. Well, he should not have. All he knows about Dr Fenwick is that he has passed some exams, and holds sufficiently acceptable views on his area of specialisation to have been allowed to hold a prestigious position. As with other academics, this is far from being a guarantee that he is any better at science, in the sense of finding out what is really the case, or that his speculative opinions are any better than average.