or events that were out of eyesight. Simply put, an OBE is an experience in which the mind may be consciously apart from your body (Peterson).A good word to describe an OBE is "escapade," which has the same root as the word "escape." According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an escapade is: An adventurous action that usually violates conventional standards of behavior. It is an escape from our bodies, it is adventurous, and it violates conventional standards of behavior (Peterson).Other identical OBEs occur during what are regarded as unconscious periods caused by accident or injury. Mostly these are categorized as freak events and are tucked away in memory as anomalies--or something that didn't really happen. Human belief systems would not allow it to be otherwise. Some of the most striking of the spontaneous OBEs are now often identified as near-death experiences(NDEs) (Monroe 8).The typical NDE often begins as an out-of-body experience during which the NDEer observes things that he or she could not possibly see from the location of the inert and unconscious body (Duncan 45). At age eleven, a subject from a study in Seattle experienced cardiac arrest and was without a heartbeat for twenty minutes. "I heard a whooshing sound in my ears," he told the doctor. "I felt like you feel when you go over a bump in a car going real fast and you feel your stomach drop out. The next thing I knew, I was in a room, crouched in a corner of the ceiling. I could see my body below me. . . . I could see doctors and nurses working on me. My doctor was there and so was Sandy, one of the nurses. I heard Sandy say I wish we didn't have to do this.' I wondered what they were doing. I saw a doctor put jelly on my chest. My hair was really messed up. It seemed greasy, and I wished that I had washed my hair before coming to the hospital. They had cut my clothes off, but my pants were still on. I heard a doctor say, Stand back,' and then he pushed a button ...
