The denial of death and the out-of-the-body experience.

The out-of-the-body experience is a phenomenon which continues to be reported and continues to be interpreted in many ways. It seems, however, that more attention is given to finding a spiritual base for this occurrence than a psychological understanding of it. This paper considers the psychological forces of denial as a suitable explanation for the OBE and suggests that these experiences may be understood as hallucinations caused by traumatic events rather than genuine previews of the afterlife. That is: "Do these people transcend their bodies and also time and space to acquire these experiences, or could it be that nothing has been transcended at all save the need to deny death and thus transcend its feared consequence, which is 'not being'?"