Astral Travel and Remote Viewing: The Mind’s Two Maps of Elsewhere

In one account, a man closes his eyes and feels himself lift from his sleeping body, drifting over rooftops and oceans before returning with a jolt. In another, a woman sits awake in a silent lab, sketching the image of a distant building she’s never seen.

One calls it astral travel. The other, remote viewing. Both claim to project awareness beyond the limits of the body — yet their roots, purposes, and evidence tell two very different stories.

Two paths to the same horizon

Astral travel belongs to the spiritual and esoteric traditions — a personal journey of consciousness believed to leave the body and explore other planes or physical locations. It’s often emotional, symbolic, or visionary.

Remote viewing, by contrast, emerged not from mysticism but military research. In the 1970s, the U.S. government funded programs such as Stargate and Grill Flame, testing whether trained individuals could describe hidden targets from miles away using only mental perception.

Both involve detaching ordinary awareness from physical senses — but their frameworks differ:

• Astral projection is experiential, often framed as the soul traveling.

• Remote viewing is procedural, designed to test whether information can be obtained nonlocally under controlled conditions.

The question is: Are they two versions of the same mental state, or entirely separate phenomena?

The altered-state connection

At a psychological level, both practices depend on altered states of consciousness — shifting the mind from analytical to intuitive processing.

Techniques overlap: relaxation, focused attention, and sensory reduction. EEG studies of experienced remote viewers and meditators show increased theta and alpha rhythms, associated with deep focus, imagery, and dissociation — the same brain signatures seen in lucid dreaming and hypnosis.

In both astral and remote contexts, practitioners describe a distinct “phase change”: time distortion, vivid mental imagery, and an externalised sense of perception.

From a neurocognitive perspective, these features point to a decoupling of sensory input from internal imagery, meaning the brain’s internal model of reality temporarily operates without direct reference to the physical body — similar to the out-of-body experiences studied by Olaf Blanke and Susan Blackmore.

The evidence — and its limits

Astral travel: deeply subjective

There has never been a verified case of a person accurately describing a location or object while claiming to travel there in astral form under controlled conditions. However, psychological studies show that the vividness of mental imagery and the sense of presence during these experiences can feel indistinguishable from real perception.

Neuroscientist Susan Blackmore calls this a “virtual body” experience — an internally constructed world so coherent it feels external. It should be said at this point that although there is no recorded verified account, some who have experienced it have reported events and locations accurately but it was not performed in a scientific environment therefore does not qualify as verifiable evidence in the scientific world.

However, there have been reports of patients on the operating table describing in great detail what happened in the operating theatre aan claim they were floating above their bodies observing. I would argue this falls into astral travel and can be verified by medical staff in non controlled scientific environments but not explained.

Remote viewing: tested, debated, and unresolved

The U.S. government’s Stargate Project, declassified in the 1990s, concluded after two decades of experiments that while some trials appeared impressive, overall results did not exceed chance expectation once controls were tightened.

Psychologist Ray Hyman, who evaluated the data, found methodological flaws and confirmation bias. Still, some researchers — including Edwin May, who led parts of the program — argue that subtle statistical anomalies deserve further study.

The best summary may be this: remote viewing produced intriguing data but not replicable scientific proof.

So what might link them?

Psychologically, both phenomena share three key mechanisms:

1. Focused inward attention – shifting away from sensory input to inner imagery.

2. Altered agency – a sense that the information or movement is “happening” rather than being created.

3. Cultural framing – interpretation shapes experience: a mystic calls it travel; a parapsychologist calls it perception.

In both, imagination and expectation guide perception. Where the astral traveller believes they are moving through space, the remote viewer believes they are perceiving from afar — both mapping internal imagery onto external space.

From a cognitive-science lens, these may represent different interpretations of the same underlying altered state: one experiential and symbolic, the other task-oriented and informational.

The meaning behind the mystery

To the believer, astral travel and remote viewing prove consciousness can transcend the body. To the scientist, they reveal the mind’s extraordinary ability to construct convincing simulations of space and presence.

Perhaps both are right in their own way. Even if awareness never truly leaves the body, the feeling of leaving — of perceiving beyond — teaches us something vital about the flexibility of human consciousness.

The mystery may rest not in choosing between dimensions or neurons, but in how consciousness can inhabit both stories at once — how the mind, through focus, can turn inner vision into lived experience.

Seen this way, astral travel and remote viewing are not opposites but reflections of a shared human impulse: to stretch consciousness past the borders of the physical and glimpse what lies just beyond ordinary sight.

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References and Further Reading

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Blackmore, S. (1982) Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-Body Experiences. London: Heinemann.

Blanke, O. & Arzy, S. (2005) ‘The Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction,’ The Neuroscientist, 11(1), pp. 16–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073858404270885 Accessed Nov 1 2025

Hyman, R. (1995) ‘Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena,’ Journal of Parapsychology, 59(3), pp. 321–332. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267978941_Evaluation_of_Program_on_'Anomalous_Mental_Phenomena Accessed Nov 1 2025

May, E. C. & Marwaha, S. B. (2018) The Star Gate Archives: Reports of the U.S. Government Sponsored Psi Program, 1972–1995. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Tart, C. (1998) Investigating Altered States of Consciousness. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.

Irwin, H. J. (1985) Flight of Mind: A Psychological Study of the Out-of-Body Experience. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.