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Aug. 5, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:45
Edition 307 - Dr Susan Blackmore

Sue Blackmore on her lifetime OBE research - plus a 75 year old ice mystery solved inSwitzerland...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for bearing with me for your great feedback, all the emails that you send.
Not going to do any shout-outs on this edition, we're going to do some in the next edition, probably, because we've got two great things on this show.
One great guest and an amazing story.
Actually, the great guest also has an amazing story, a series of them really to tell.
So the guest is Professor Susan Blackmore.
And Sue Blackmore is somebody that I heard on a network radio show in the UK talking about something they tend not to talk about on network radio shows from mainstream media.
She was talking about out-of-the-body experiences.
And her take on all of this is amazing.
So Professor Sue Blackmore is the second item on this show.
It's quite a long interview.
The first thing that we're going to do is quite a short piece about an amazing story.
I think it made international news.
It certainly made the newspapers in Europe and definitely in the UK.
This is the story of a glacier, glacier, never sure how to pronounce that, in Switzerland, that after 75 years, and because of thawing and melting, threw up the bodies of a couple, a man and wife, who disappeared in 1942, 75 years ago.
They'd gone out together on the ice, I think, to milk the cows there, and they simply vanished.
And nobody knew what had happened to them.
It was suspected, it has indeed happened.
They'd fallen into a crevasse.
But 75 years later, their mummified bodies, with their clothing and possessions pretty much intact, were revealed just a couple of weeks ago.
So I was able to speak to the boss of Glacier 3000.
It's a resort in Switzerland, where all of this happened.
His name is Bernhard Shannon, so we'll be hearing from him first.
And then we'll hear from Professor Sue Blackmore, who is a remarkable person, I think.
And I'm sure you're going to love her.
But Sue, great show, I think, in prospect here on The Unexplained.
If you want to get in touch with me, please do so.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link from there.
And it's the same website if you want to send me a donation.
There's a link for that too.
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Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot for creating the website, maintaining it, and getting the shows out to you, as he always does.
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Give me your feedback about the show and give me guest suggestions.
Right, let's get to the first item on this show, and that is my conversation with the man who runs Glacier 3000, Bernard Shannon, about the discovery of two people who disappeared in the ice 75 years ago and their mummified remains found remarkably preserved in the last couple of weeks.
This is Bernard Shannon.
Glacier 3000 is located between Le Djableré and Gestad, which you already heard for sure about it.
And it's a glacier resort at 3,000 meters.
We have glacier excursion all year for the non-skiers.
And we have skiing from October to May.
It sounds fabulous.
And I love when you phone, you get a menu of options asking if you would like to hear the current conditions.
What are the current conditions?
How is it now?
Beautiful weather in the morning.
Now it's getting a bit cloudy.
We had some rain, but the sun is coming back.
So it looks good.
Okay.
Now, of course, you've made international news in this last few days about something that is, on the face of it, a little disturbing, but fascinating as well at the same time.
This is a couple who went missing, a Swiss couple, isn't it?
Massillin and Francine Dumolin.
And they vanished, I'm trying to work it out, 75 years ago, but their bodies have been uncovered.
Can you explain how this happened?
Yeah, last Thursday our staff was working on the glacier and one staff was coming on the under the lower part of the glacier with a piston machine, a slope machine.
And when he passed the glacier, he saw on his right side something which looked dark and looked like stones.
When he came a bit closer, he was thinking that it's strange, it's too big.
So he went to have a look at it and then he realized that he was looking at two bodies, still half in the glacier, half outside.
So he could see two woman shoes, a man's shoe, a backpack, there was a water bottle, an umbrella.
So he was quite shocked in the first moment, but then he reacted very well and he called his security manager, which called me.
And I then informed the police.
So we went up with the police on Friday morning.
They took a look and then arranged a helicopter.
So then they cut out a block out of the glacier and took the bodies and the material for examination to Lausanne, where they were trying to identify the persons.
And today the police confirmed that it was the couple Di Moula from Savière, which were missed since 15th August 1942.
And they just confirmed it today.
What a truly amazing story.
What did you, first of all, think you had discovered?
Did you think that those bodies were perhaps more recent than 75 years ago?
No, the bodies were in a very good shape.
They had been very well conserved, as well as the clothes.
So we could see that they were very old from the beginning.
And we were thinking that, and some staff of us had heard about the story that some people were missing.
They were thinking 30, 40 years ago.
And then soon we found out that probably it was this missing couple from Xavièz, but we couldn't give any confirmation because first the police had to be sure that it's really the couple Di Moulin which was found on the glacier.
Was their disappearance a famous case?
It was in the newspaper.
We found an article about it, I think around the 20th of August 1942, which explained that the couple was going from Savières, the valleys part over the glacier, to the Bernie's farm they had.
And the sad thing is, the wife went for the first time with her husband because before she was always pregnant, they had seven kids, and this was the first time she could go with him.
And they never came back.
It was planned that they came back the same day or the day after.
So they were looking for them for more than two months and they couldn't find them.
And the snow was coming, the winter was starting.
So the bodies were lost in the ice for more than 75 years.
And why came they out now?
The last years the glacier lost every year half a meter, one and a half meters of thickness due to the hot temperatures and the less snow in winter time.
And we believe that our staff found them quite early when they came out of the glacier.
So they were not a long time out of this ice.
This is why they were in a very good, very well conserved.
I mean, we don't want to be macabre about it, but how did they look?
Did they look as if they'd only fairly recently disappeared?
You know, the actual condition of their bodies?
They were mummified.
So you could see that they were a long time in the ice, but you still could see the, yeah, everything was very well conserved.
And I think what we believe what happened was that when they passed, that they fell in a croas and that they died in the croas.
So it's a very sad story with a kind of a happiness to call it like this, that the two living daughters of them now know what happened 75 years ago, that the glacier gave back the bodies and that they can say goodbye to their parents.
So it's in a way a very, very sad story with kind of a happy end.
Yes, I know exactly what you mean.
There's a kind of closure to it now.
Have you spoken to them?
What have they said to you if you have?
No, we didn't talk to the two daughters, as I informed.
We waited to be sure that the police confirmed that it was really this couple and not that suddenly in the last minute it was not them.
So we didn't talk to the family.
Is this the first time something like this has happened?
Because I know that there's a famous saying about the sea.
The ocean always gives up its dead in the end, even if it's a long time.
I'm wondering if it's the same with glaciers, that you may disappear, but one day you will be found.
I think it's more probable to reappear on the glacier than on the ocean.
It was the first time that we found two bodies like this at Glacier 3000, but just two, three years ago in the Lurchenthal in the upper valley, three bodies were found which did an alpine tour 70-80 years ago and they were just recently found as well.
So I think what went into the glacier will come out one day or the other.
Then the question is, do some people find it?
Or if they don't find it, then it's slowly disappearing again.
But I think that there will be more bodies or material from the old time coming out of the ice.
Inevitably, with the thawing, I guess that's absolutely true.
I mean, what is the state of the glacier now as it's beginning to thaw in this way?
So as I said, we lose every year half a meter to one and a half meters.
We got fresh snow, like five, six meters of fresh snow every winter on top of the ice.
So last year we had the fresh snow all summer long.
And this year we have not so much snow in Switzerland.
So the glacier is on big parts already the ice, the all snow is coming out.
So probably this year we will lose a bit more of ice.
But it's still in a good shape and we still can start our ski business in the end of October.
And it will last for the next 40, 50 years for sure.
And how is the person who found the bodies?
Is he okay?
He's okay.
He was shocked at the beginning because he was looking at stones and then suddenly it appears that it was not stones but two bodies.
So he was quite shocked, but he reacted very well by calling immediately the security manager.
And he's getting better because what we said before, it's kind of a good story.
And the deaths were not like somebody's deaths in two days or ten days.
You really could see when you saw them that it already happened several years ago.
Have you had to do a lot of interviews with the media?
Yeah, the last three days was quite busy.
We went up to show the place to several media and we had several medias calling us from Australia over Europe to the New York Times.
So most of the places called us.
And I guess it could make the resort even more famous.
I mean, this is not the main point in this story, but for sure the name Glacier 3000 was very much in the media of the last days.
And yeah, we're happy that the two dead people were found and that the family can say goodbye.
It's a wonderful story, and the fact that those people all these decades later have got closure now.
When people come there, it's obviously a beautiful natural space.
You know, it's a cold place.
It's a bit of a wilderness place.
What advice do you give people when they go out trekking?
Okay, when they come to Glacier 3000, we have several tracks which are secured, let's say, which are marked so that people know where to walk.
We have as well a glacier walk over the glacier, but this glacier walk is secured every day by our staff, so we check for crevasse.
It's marked on the glacier, so you can go easily there.
You don't need a mountain guide.
But as soon as you leave the public path, let's say the marked path, you have to be careful because you don't, there can be a crevasse who looks very small, then you go close and then suddenly it's a very big crevasse.
So you have to be very careful and follow the instructions given on the hiking maps and the usual instructions when you go up at 3000 meters for walking.
You have to respect it.
Have you any idea how many people have gone missing, have died, have perished there over the years?
So far as I know, at Glacier 3000, except this couple, nobody's missing.
I just know that the police of Malis informed that they have a list of 280 missing persons in the whole state of Malis.
So we are happy that we don't have, as we know by today, not too many in our region because we want to make more publicity with our great excursion point, our peak-to-peak suspension bridge, and not with missing people found on the glacier.
Well, Monsieur Shannon, thank you so much for talking with me.
And I wish you a marvelous season and the way you describe Glacier 3000, I must come to see it one day.
Thank you.
Thank you too.
Thank you.
And my thanks to Bernard Shannon and everybody at Glacier 3000 for making that possible.
And it is at least heartening to know that after 75 years, the daughters of that couple who vanished all those years ago now have closure.
But what a remarkable story that made headlines all over the world.
Now, let's get to Professor Sue Blackmore, and we're going to talk about out-of-the-body experiences and her new research on them, which stems from an experience she had back in 1970 when all of us were a lot younger and the world was a more innocent place.
This is Professor Sue Blackmore.
Thank you for doing this and for coming on the show.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right.
Tell me about you then.
My interest in you was peaked when one of my listeners told me that you were on a national network radio station talking about out-of-the-body experiences.
Now, to get that kind of thing on a national network mainstream radio station, not very often they do that kind of thing.
So I started to get interested from there.
And I thought, my God, she's good.
I've got to contact her.
And that's how we're speaking today.
Great.
Well, I'm glad you did.
Talk to me about you, then.
Psychologist and writer researching from what your biography says, consciousness, anomalous experiences, and that kind of thing.
Yes, it's a long story how I became whatever I might be now.
But a lot of it is bound up with the out-of-body experience because I had this absolutely extraordinary long experience as a student back in 1970.
And, well, we may explore some of what happened then, but that led me to become a parapsychologist and investigate all kinds of weird stuff.
And then to become very skeptical through the things that I discovered, and then to kind of give up on it, which is why, as you mentioned, I've done a lot of work on consciousness, because I kind of got the impression that there's all these mysteries I don't understand, but I'm not getting anywhere by pursuing the paranormal line.
So what really is the deep question?
And the deep question is, well, what is any of this?
Here I am sitting at my desk with all this stuff around me and the trees blowing in the wind outside and the blue sky.
What is this?
You know, is there a material world and a mind?
There can't be separate things.
How could they possibly be one?
What's going on?
What is consciousness?
What is anything?
So that's kind of, I can go on forever like that, because that's what drives me in my life is those big, big questions about existence and mind.
And that's why I did all that and work on drugs, why I've been meditating for, well, every day for 30 years and before that, for probably another 10 years and less regularly.
And has brought me to many other things.
And then there's my interest in memes, which was really sparked by reading Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins and so on.
I tend to do quite a lot of weird things.
Who else am I otherwise?
Well, I play in our village Samba band.
I love drumming and that's really great.
I'm an old lady in my garden, you know, tending the vegetables.
That's another big part of my life.
I do powerlifting because I want to keep strong as I get very old.
And I have a kayak.
I live quite near the sea and I have a kayak.
That's sort of about, I think that'll do.
So if I was to describe you in three words, having listened to what I've just listened to, I would come up with the words very full life, I think.
Yes, too full life, I think, sometimes, yes.
And my way of having a slightly less over-the-top life is a bit of a smoke of cannabis every so often.
That's the how to stop the manic overworking.
It's all too much.
And kind of, actually, there are other things in life than packing every single minute of the day with activity, which is, I'm afraid, what I and many other people tend to do these days.
And as somebody who is, I mean, we don't turn this into a heavy news interview, but as somebody who is a psychologist, are you at all concerned about the long-term effects of cannabis?
I never thought I would be asking you a news question.
Yes, I am, but I'm particularly concerned about the fact that, as far as I can see, it's prohibition that has caused these problems.
Because the old-fashioned kind of cannabis that we used to have, you know, back in the 70s and which you can grow out in the garden and so on, that has low THC levels and high cannabidiol levels.
And cannabidiol is a kind of neuroprotector.
And the modern stuff that's grown intensively, very fast under lights, has a different makeup and much higher THC and much lower CBD and is much more dangerous.
You know, there's evidence towards that.
I wouldn't say that case is proven, but the evidence seems to be building that way.
So it's because we make these things illegal that the criminals make breed things that they can sell for a profit and they don't care.
Of course they don't care.
That this is why youngsters are now having serious long-term effects and even leading to psychosis and so on.
It's very, very upsetting.
And I do my best to campaign for the legalization because it would be better to not have the criminals doing it all, but to have some kind of laws and controls and labeling and proper doses and all of that.
I think that's the way it's got to go.
And I think that, thank goodness, it probably is going that way.
Of course, I will.
Yes, all drugs are dangerous in some way.
What you have to do as a society is to try to manage them properly so that people use them well rather than abusing them.
And prohibition leads to abuse and deaths and misery.
I'm sure you've debated this a zillion times and that isn't what we're here to do today, I promise you.
No, I'm always happy to throw in some thoughts about that.
It's something people should think about and care about for the reasons that I've said.
And also, because you can use these things in very positive ways, and I hope that's my intention.
What I do myself is to use them responsibly for inspiration, for getting ideas, for working things out, for asking those questions about who am I, what is the nature of the world, and all of that.
I mean, the great issue always is, and whenever I've done programs in the past about this, not so many now, the one point that is always put is that people who start small with a little bit of cannabis end up tripping, without knowing it, into more serious forms of drug abuse and use and wanting to get an even greater high.
And that's where the problems begin.
Well, everybody started on mother's milk, didn't they?
And they progressed to other things.
Actually, the evidence doesn't seem to suggest that it's a gateway drug in that conventional way.
But as you said, this is not what we were here to call.
It isn't.
But I mean, actually, the only reason really that we're discussing this, I mean, apart from the fact that you speak very animatedly about it and you summarize the arguments incredibly clearly, is that it was a part of that out-of-the-body experience that you had many years ago from what I read that led you into all the research that you spent your life doing.
Yes.
And I often ask myself, what on earth would my life have been like if I hadn't had that two and a half hour experience in 1970?
Because just my whole life has in some ways been driven by that.
It's very strange, isn't it?
So if I hadn't had a friend who'd given me some cannabis a few couple of weeks before that, so that I was smoking some that evening.
This is 1970, mind you.
I was wearing my hippie garb and my headband and my jangly staff and, you know, all that.
That was how it was then.
But if I hadn't had that, I doubt, I don't know whether the experience would have happened anyway, but it might not have.
And then my life would have been quite different.
I guess everybody has things in their life like that, don't they?
Moments when they say if that hadn't happened, everything would have been different.
I mean, I have to say, I feel and I have felt all my life that I've been a little cheated because I missed out only just on 1970 and the questing era that that was.
You know, I was there and saw it, but I was way too young to be a part of it all and ask the questions that people were asking.
But as I look back on it, and I have an older sister, I look at it as an era of questing when people, they didn't have the internet.
They didn't think they knew the answers to everything.
They were asking questions then in a way that I don't think we are now.
Yes, and they were thinking about how society could be different or better.
The whole free love thing, which of course has its ups and downs and good and bad sides.
But that was just coming out of there.
Can't we live in a better way?
Our parents, our post-war parents are so obsessed with material things.
Can't we reach out into a more spiritual kind of life, a more loving kind of life?
They were all good intentions, but some of them went horribly wrong, sadly.
And today we live in a world where it seems to me, but I have to give myself a big reality check a lot of the time, where people are just so damned accepting.
Yes.
Accepting of the miseries of the world, you mean, of the horrors going on?
Accepting of those things, yes, but accepting of whatever they are told.
Oh, don't.
And when we're in an era of post-truth and alternative facts, whatever they are told.
No, I think people, I think that whole movement, I think, is leading to some kind of increase in questioning because intelligent, you know, curious people are thinking, but I don't want alternative facts.
I want to actually find out what happened.
I hope that might lead to a resurgence, but am I too optimistic?
Well, you know, I share your hope.
I do hope it is that way.
All right, Sue.
So there you are in 1970.
It is an era of questing.
It's an era when the possibilities, from what I've been told and from what I saw as a little kid, seem to be absolutely limitless for people.
And you are in the process of taking a little bit of cannabis.
You have a two and a half hour out of the body experience.
Talk to me about this, how it came about and what happened.
Right.
Well, I got to Oxford and I was just thrilled by everything.
So I joined in all kinds of things.
And one of the things I joined was the Society for Psychical Research.
I didn't know much about it, but I had these friends who were in it and told me about astral projection.
And I started learning to read tarot cards and we did Ouija board sessions and which is not a very sensible thing to do.
Sue, why, just to divert you for a second, why do you think it's, I mean, I know people who do it and I've always resisted, but why do you think it's not a great thing to do?
Because you think what's happening, we know that it works by unconscious muscular action.
So your arm is stuck out ahead of you.
So the detectors in your muscles, which are telling you where your arm are, start to habituate and they don't give you proper signals anymore.
So you don't really know where your hand is.
The glass begins to move.
Your hand will follow it and overshoot and push it in whichever direction it begins in.
So we know how all that works.
But what's underlying that is ideas that you have.
So if the question is, I mean, when we used to do it at school as kids, you know, what will I get for my French, wasn't the GCSEs, my French O level, you know, or will I pass my French O level?
Well, you've got someone there who wants you to fail and, you know, pushes it that way.
Or much more serious things can come up, people's fears, things they worry about, names that upset them.
And if those come out in a situation with four or five, not very responsible, possibly, you know, late at night, drunk or anything else, they can be quite dangerous in a purely straightforward psychological way.
I do not believe that there's any actual contact with spirits or anything.
I mean, one time, for example, in this society I was just mentioning, we decided that spirits, if they were there, would be able to see through the bits of paper.
You know, we have a ring of letters around the table and the glass in the middle that you put your fingers on.
And so we wrote, we turned all the pieces of paper over, shuffled them around and put them in a new ring with numbers on the back so that then we asked the questions, wrote down which numbers the glass went to, and then turned them all over again.
And it was gibberish.
And every time we did it with them visible, you know, it spelt out sense, which suggested that either spirits is not the right interpretation or spirits for some reason can't see the underneath of the piece of paper.
And one would have thought if they were from another dimension and all-seeing and all-knowing that little gambit on your part would have had no effect.
That is very telling.
I've never heard that before.
Very, very interesting.
Just a little experiment that we did.
So, you see, we were already very curious and very imaginative.
We were sort of scientifically minded.
I was studying physiology and psychology, and my friends were studying all sorts of, you know, scientific and other subjects.
So, that's the kind of people we were.
And we did that.
But, you know, that didn't make me terribly skeptical at the time.
I was just like, oh, that's interesting.
So then one evening, we were doing this Ouija board for hours.
And I'd been burning the candle at both ends.
So I was sleep deprived anyway.
But I promised that I'd pop up to a friend's room for a smoke before bed when we finished the Ouija board, which I did.
And there were three of us sat there.
So you have to imagine me in my hippie garb and really, you know, wow, life is amazing at last kind of platitude.
And I'm sat there cross-legged on the floor, listening to music, which I honestly don't.
I wish I knew what it was, but it was probably either Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon or some, you know, wonderful thing like that.
So it was a little late for Prokohara and whiter shade of pale, I guess.
Oh, it could have been.
Yeah, I definitely remember listening to that at my 21st birthday, but anyway, enough.
So there I was listening to whatever music it might have been.
And I started going down a tunnel.
It was like a tunnel of trees.
Like imagine in the autumn and you're going along one of those roads like we have around here where I live very narrow lane with trees all around and there are leaves on the ground and leaves all around.
And I'm zooming down this towards a bright light.
This is 1970.
The idea of near-death experiences, that term was not coined until 1975.
And the idea of tunnels with lights at the end was not, you know, I'd never heard of it and I don't think most people had.
So, you know, it can't have been that I'd heard of it.
So I'm going down this tunnel and my friend Vicki said to me, do you want some coffee?
And I just couldn't answer.
I just couldn't, you know, compute.
And she went off in a half.
And then my other friend, Kevin, said, where are you, Sue?
Which is a very weird question, isn't it?
When you're sitting on the floor in front of him.
So, Sue, you were in this other place, but still able to commune.
Well, on some level, people were still able to communicate with you, even if you weren't able to communicate with them.
Well, I was, because when Kevin said, where are you?
It was such a weird question that I kind of went, where am I?
I'm in Vicky's room.
I'm in the tunnel.
And then, as I thought about the room, suddenly it was as though a light came on, as it were, a picture clarified.
And I was looking down from the ceiling at myself and my two friends down there.
And I saw my own mouth open and shut and say, I'm on the ceiling, I can see you.
And all that.
Now, that was deeply, deeply weird.
And I still find it weird.
I mean, we have a lot of answers now, which is why I've written a new book about it.
But it's still extraordinary how the mind can produce such a vivid, vivid picture.
Anyway, typically in out-of-body experiences, people come back to normal very quickly, usually because they're scared.
I mean, it is quite scary.
I think mine carried on all that time because Kevin just kept on asking questions and wouldn't stop.
You know, he said, oh, can you move?
Yes, I can move.
And I tried moving.
Oh, well, have you got a silver cord?
Oh, yes, I've got a silver cord, you know, which might have been suggestion.
I don't know.
Can you get out of the building?
He just didn't stop.
So I didn't have time to be frightened.
And I wanted to answer his questions.
So I set off.
And the first thing I did, being, as you have noted, sort of of an inquiring nature, was to look at the roofs of the college and try and remember where the chimneys were and what the gutters were like and what the tiles were like and all of that kind of thing.
And having done that, I set off and I traveled.
And if I tell you all the travels, it'll be incredibly boring.
But I just, you know, I went all over the place, all over the Atlantic to New York and then back to the Mediterranean.
But you were able to make conscious thinking decisions of what to do and where to go.
And even at the same moment, people were able to ask you things.
I've never heard that before, Sue.
No, there were lots of extraordinary things about this.
But yes, that is unusual, but it's not unheard of.
I mean, there's a famous case reported by Celia Green, who did the first collections of out-of-body experiences in the 1960s.
There's one of a vicar who, I think he was probably nervous giving a sermon, and he gave the sermon and he was watching himself giving the sermon from the other end of the church.
And the report says that, you know, he then asked his parishioners, did they notice anything strange or different?
And they said, no, it was fine.
And there are other cases of someone taking a driving test while feeling as though she's sitting on the roof of the car and making every possible mistake while she did it.
And probably again through nerves.
There is a tendency for sometimes these experiences to be set off by being very self-conscious or thinking about the self and asking questions like, who am I?
So they were probably examples of the self-conscious type.
But you, in this experience, took yourself, for example, you say, to New York.
Well, what I thought was I ought to go and look at somewhere that I don't know what it's like so that I can check the next day.
But I was not being terribly rational because there's no way I could have gone and checked that.
You know, what I should have done, and oh, how much I've kicked myself over 45 or however many years it is, 47 years, I kicked myself that I didn't say to them, will you please go in the next room and do something random or pick a book or, you know, something that I would have been able to then see if I could go and see what it was.
And I didn't have the presence of mind to do that.
So a lot of my traveling was like that.
But interesting things happened, which I think teach us something about OBEs.
So I began as a typical out-of-body experience with another body.
So up there on the ceiling, there was a kind of duplicate me, which is always described as silvery or greyish and slightly moving.
And mine was exactly like people describe and arms and legs and head and everything.
But then over the next sort of hour or so, I changed shape completely and then became, you know, like a flat sheet, a blob, and eventually disappeared into what is called a somatic.
In other words, without a body, out of body experience.
So I was just a point of, you might call it a point of vision or a point of consciousness floating about the place.
And I tried to come back.
I tried twice to come back.
And the first time I sort of more or less succeeded and then thought, okay, I'll go off and have some more fun and went off to have some more fun.
But by the second time, I was getting very tired.
And I thought it's time to come back for real, even though I didn't want to because it was also amazing and I was seeing such fantastic things and it was also bright and colorful and wonderful.
So I tried to come back.
The problem was that I could come back and see the room and the body and everything and I tried to get inside it, but I got too small.
And I couldn't, you know, because I'd been just this point.
And I thought, I've got to get bigger.
I've got to sort of be the same size as the body.
And I was saying things to myself, like, you know, you've got to take the body with you if you go anywhere and that kind of thing, you know.
You've got to get the same size as the body and look out through the eyes.
So I started to get bigger.
And I know this sounds completely mad.
I know it does.
I started to get bigger and bigger.
And I just expanded and expanded and expanded until it became something else I'd never heard of.
It became a mystical experience of oneness.
I mean, you know, I've read so many accounts of this kind of thing since then, but it's a classic mystical experience where the distinction between self and other is gone.
So instead of looking down, sorry for interrupting, but looking down on yourself, I don't want to lose this point, but when you were looking down at yourself before you were able to make that re-entry, if we want to call it that, how did you look?
Ah, that is a very telling question.
The first time I came back, I think I looked relatively normal.
I don't particularly remember that, but I think I would probably notice it otherwise.
But the second time I came back, everything looked weird and my own body was kind of horrible brown color and didn't have a head.
There was only a neck and I went in through the neck.
So that was becoming quite unpleasant.
But I don't know.
I don't think I was frightened or, you know, I don't remember there being unpleasantness to it.
But thinking about it now, it seems really weird to see your own body without a head.
But then everything had become very weird by then and space and time had begun to be a bit dodgy, you know.
Now, drugs were involved on this particular.
Let me finish about the expansion because I think this is important that this is a kind of classic thing that happens where you are everything and there's nothing beyond.
And that was really as far as I thought I could go.
And Kevin even then said, well, there must be something further.
And I thought, well, there can't be.
And that sort of opened up the sense that there was, but I couldn't, I didn't know what.
And left me with a feeling that however far you go, there's always something further, which is quite a nice sort of life lesson.
And then I had to come back for real and it was a real struggle.
And it took a good half hour, three quarters of an hour to get back to the point where I could actually stand up and walk around and be relatively normal.
What about the sensation of elapsed time?
Because you're very specific about this being a two and a half hour experience.
How did you sense time passing when you were having the experience?
Well, for most of it, it seemed quite normal time.
I mean, I would travel from A to B and I, you know, according to how fast was how long, it didn't seem odd at all.
But the later stages of the experience, I think it did seem rather odd.
And certainly, once I came into this kind of one state of oneness, it was as though time had no meaning anymore, not at all.
But I had those two friends there.
So they could tell me the time when I got back, when I finally could look at my, you know, when I finally could work my eyes again properly and see from my eyes, not from whatever was before.
I could look at my watch.
So that's why I'm reasonably accurate.
And that night, Kevin said to me, I mean, it was sort of, I don't know, two in the morning by then, he said to me, your astral body will, if you sleep tonight, your astral body will go out again and never come back and you'll die.
Because that's all we knew about was astral projection in those days.
We didn't have the science that we have now.
And so I was kept awake all night, which was really horrible.
And, you know, I felt very, very weird for the next couple of days.
But I did then on the third day, I wrote as good an account as I could.
It's sort of seven or eight pages with a lot of detail in.
And that includes sometimes which I guess I got from them telling me.
Drugs were involved in all of this.
And you know, and they are on that mainstream radio show, of course.
That was the first thing they went to.
Were you not just having a drug-fueled experience?
Well, how can I say?
I always mention the drugs because I think people would think I was hiding it otherwise and I don't want to hide it.
But I think there were three factors here.
One was that I was sleep deprived.
And, you know, that can tend you to sort of, you know, hallucinate how feel strange, not be quite in connection with your body anyway, if you're really badly sleep deprived.
And then there was the little bit of cannabis, which added to that.
And I can say this, we were smoking most evenings then.
You know, we were not like modern stoners, as they call them now and they didn't then, you know, who just smoke all day and go out of it and, you know, lose all motivation.
It wasn't like that at all.
We would, you know, get together of an evening, probably not every day, but someday, you know, a few days a week or whatever, and have a smoke and have a laugh and enjoy it.
And this time, I just took one drag and I just didn't, I just thought, I'm too tired.
I can't cope with this.
So I really had smoked a very little.
I think it was a combination and that with Kevin constantly talking to me and asking questions.
I think that is why it happened and carried on for so long.
And you would tend to think that if it was a drug experience entirely, the experience that you would have had would have been less connected and more random.
This doesn't sound like something that was random at all because you were, in a sense, in control during this.
Absolutely.
It didn't feel like, I mean, I know what it's like to smoke various different kinds of marijuana and to take many other drugs.
And it doesn't feel like any other drug experience that I've had.
Everything seems so vivid and bright and real.
And as you say, I felt in control.
I made decisions about where to go.
I was thinking logically.
And until the very last parts which were so very different.
But then they're more like experiences that I've had in meditation ever since.
So, no, I mean, as I say, I admit to the drug because I think it helped me relax and it probably was a little impetus.
But I, you know, most people who, well, almost nobody who smokes cannabis has out-of-body experiences.
Just occasionally they do, but it's not feasible just to blame it entirely on the drug.
I would want to, if I came back from something like that, I would want to verify as much of what I'd seen as I could.
So, for example, you said you were floating over the rooftops.
If I'd seen a loose tile somewhere, I'd want to go and try and find out if I possibly could, you know, see if that was really there.
You do ask good questions because I was just thinking, oh, I didn't tell him about the roofs.
So, I did say that, you know, I did look at them.
So, the next morning, I went out and on the building I was in in my college, there are no chimneys, even though I'd seen chimneys.
And I had seen in inverted commas old-fashioned iron gutters and downpipes, and they were all modern white plastic.
So, my instant reaction was disappointment that it was wrong, but not full-scale skepticism.
You see, this is the extraordinary thing that happens.
A friend of mine, a German philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, has written somewhere that anyone who had that type of experience would be bound to become an ontological dualist.
In other words, believe in the separation of mind and body.
And that's just because it is so, you know, ask anyone who has an OBE, perhaps not anyone, but, you know, mostly, they will say it's clear and vivid and vision is kind of in some weird way brighter than usual and so on and so on.
So although I had the evidence that the gutters were wrong, that what I had seen of the roofs of Oxford wasn't right, I didn't instantly think, oh, well, that proves I didn't really leave my body.
I thought, well, perhaps the astral plane, perhaps the chimneys on the astral plane are different from the, you know, the real ones in the physical world.
And perhaps this is a spiritual world that I've entered into that's nearly the same, but not quite.
Well, perhaps the roof looked like that 100 years ago.
Oh, but yes, yes, yes, perhaps that, but it didn't because it was built in, I think it was the 60s building or 50s building or something.
I mean, I can't remember when it was built.
I'm sorry.
I could look it up.
But, you know, those are the sort of things I tried to think up all sorts of explanations.
It is certainly possible that it had older gutters, but I don't think they would have taken chimneys off.
But, you know, it's possible, isn't it, that it would have been a question worth asking.
But what it did to me was just what Thomas Metzinger suggested.
You know, I became a very convinced dualist.
It made me not only absolutely sure that my spirit had left my body and that therefore I could survive death, which is illogical.
It doesn't follow at all since my body was perfectly healthy and sitting there on the floor all the time.
But that's the conclusion I came to.
And this is what drove me to this case.
I mean, it's quite funny in some ways to remember, but, you know, imagine the sort of idealistic young student in that era who has this experience.
I was like, wow, all my closed-minded lecturers, you know, that were teaching me, you know, cutting up rat brains and running rats in mazes and pigeons pressing levers and skinner and, you know, all that stuff that we were learning in my degree and neurons and how they fire and all that.
I'm thinking, they don't understand.
They don't realize that there's this whole world beyond and I've been there and I've seen it.
I'm going to prove them all wrong.
So that's why I decided more or less immediately then that I was going to become a parapsychologist and study all these things and prove that modern science is totally narrow and misguided and materialistic and they're all wrong.
Now, maybe one of the first questions that a lot of people might have asked after that experience, and I guess you might have, is the things that I saw, was I seeing them or was I being somehow shown them?
Oh, that's that's I didn't have much of that, but I did have some of it.
Towards the end, before the out and out mystical bit, there was a sense there were some kind of beings there who were indicating what way I should go.
I had a sort of feeling of being guided.
That was towards the end.
And I've heard of many people who've said similar things.
That happens, tends to happen more in near-death experiences than in ordinary OVEs.
There was a hint of that, yes.
And had you opened up a portal to something else or had you discovered another aspect of yourself?
I mean, that's a huge question, isn't it?
It is.
But I have to say something about the book that I've just written, which is called Seeing Myself, the New Science of Outer Body Experiences, because it's the new science that I think can begin to answer these questions.
So if you had asked me that a few years after I'd had the experience, I would have answered in one way.
If you'd asked me 10 years after that, a different way.
And then I kind of went into the doldrums and couldn't really, no research was going on on out-of-body experiences and so on.
And it wasn't until 2002, when a neuroscientist, a neurosurgeon called Olaf Blanke discovered the spot that can induce out-of-body experiences that the science really took off.
And on the basis of that science, I would now answer your question by saying it was all coming from my mind.
Now, remember that my mind has come from loads of other people's minds as well, and from, you know, everything I'd ever learned and read and so on, and from the physical world itself.
But I am convinced now, as convinced as it's possible to be, that there was nothing in there that I saw that was from another dimension or another world or spiritual anything.
But that doesn't degrade this experience.
That means that we are amazing.
Yes, yes, yes.
Good for you.
Because I've got so depressed over the years.
I've done an awful lot of, I mean, in the old days when I was a parapsychologist and then when I became very skeptical because none of my experiments worked out and all the haunted houses I slept in had normal explanations and so on.
I used to be what I call rentersceptic.
I used to do all of the, you know, Kilroy chat show and Friday Night Live and all those chat shows where there'd be a hundred people who've seen a ghost and Sue Blackmore to give the balance and say, you know, it's all in the temporal lobes or something, you know, whatever.
And it was kind of distressing to do it all.
But, you know, you were the person they had to get on shows like that.
And this still happens because you have to make sure the regulator is satisfied.
You have to have a skeptic in there.
Otherwise, you know, you might get complaints.
Yes, yes, indeed you do.
But I was all those years, really, I wasn't able to say anything about this experience other than that I had tried.
And I wrote a book about OBEs back in 1982, Which I did my absolute best to make a psychological theory, but we just didn't have the brain science.
There was no neuroscience then, there were no brain scanners.
We had no idea what would be happening anywhere in the brain at all.
And of course, we're still way off really understanding how brains work, but we know an awful lot more.
And this is what to me is now so exciting.
And that's why I can say with much, much more conviction now, that I am sure that we understand the basis of OBEs.
We've got a lot more to learn, but we know which part of the brain, what's happening and why they happen.
So are you saying in your new work that this is an aspect of consciousness, an aspect that we haven't as yet explored?
Yes.
Oh, and I remember why I just said that about the TV, because you said, and good for you, this doesn't make, you know, this doesn't kind of deny the importance of the experience.
It doesn't make it, I can't remember exactly what you said.
It makes us even more amazing than we knew we were.
Yes.
And what made me so frustrated about all those TV programs, it was always contrasting the, are OBs real or are they just dreams or only hallucinations?
No, they're real experiences, but actually nothing really leaves the body.
And those experiences, as you say, show us how amazing, what amazing things our brains are capable of, our minds are capable of, the different ways our consciousness can change dramatically.
And many, many people would say after OBEs that it actually changes their life and their attitude towards things, that they become less materialistic and so on.
Not because they visited a spirit world, but because their whole sense of self has changed.
It's kind of expanded out to think, well, I'm not, I always thought I was just a little thing inside my head, but actually, what am I?
It provokes these deep questions, which many people like myself turn to meditation to work on questions like, who am I and what's the point of it all and all that kind of thing.
So the dichotomy, I think, is not, you know, are they real and therefore exciting and wonderful or are they hallucinations and therefore they're boring and not real?
And oh, you know, you're so unspiritual.
It's here is actually an experience which in some ways should be called spiritual or mystical because it alters your sense of self.
And that's what spirituality is, to my mind, a lot of it is about.
You know, a spiritual path is about transforming yourself from a greedy and closed little misery gut who thinks about yourself all the time into something that kind of is interconnected with the world.
And I think that's one thing these experiences can show.
And the fascinating question is, I suspect, maybe, that little part of yourself that you were able to post somewhere else during that experience that flew around everywhere for two and a half hours, does that element of yourself when you die get emailed to somewhere else?
No.
I mean, I'm only giving an opinion here.
My opinion is this.
The easiest thing in the world, and we start as young children very, very naturally as dualists, the easiest thing in the world is to think of yourself as some kind of nugget of consciousness and intelligence and personality that lives inside your body, whose body is some kind of a, you know, I'm the driver and this is the carriage or all those old metaphors.
And to think of yourself as a little thing inside looking out through the eyes and seeing an actual physical world out there.
Now, I think that is not how it is.
It seems to be how we have evolved to simplify the world, to get around and to cope with life.
But it's not true.
The truth is more like there's an interconnected world.
It's all one in some complex way.
Everything is interacting with everything else.
A self is something that's constructed by the brain.
It's constructed out of language, out of the body, and out of the way we move and the way we have to organize our actions and plan things and integrate them into our body.
And the self is therefore an ongoing structure that's forever changing.
This is what I've learned through both science and through my decades long of meditation.
And so the self becomes a very, very fluid thing that is absolutely dependent upon, inextricable from, part of the brain processes and body processes and the world, which gave rise to it in the first place.
And so there isn't anything to survive.
And this is what, you know, Buddhists in particular would say, well, those who believe in reincarnation are a bit different, but certainly Zen, the tradition that I'm trained in, would say, you know, the self is an impermanent thing.
There isn't something that could survive and carry on.
And it's the same as the neuroscience says.
And it's the same as what the latest research on out-of-body experiences says.
Because that neurosurgeon, when he did this, by absolute luck, he was operating on this woman.
He had electrodes all over the surface of her brain.
And when he stimulated this spot in the right temporoparietal junction on the right side of the brain, he could induce out-of-body experiences, stop them, start them, make them stronger or weaker.
And that spot, the critical thing is this, that spot turns out to be where the brain is integrating the body schema with a whole lot of other things.
And the body schema is this sort of like map, if you like, of your body.
So imagine you, I imagine you're sitting down somewhere and you can probably feel the chair under your bum and you can, you know, probably I'm waving my arms around.
I do that.
But, you know, in order to wave my arms around or whatever you're doing, leaning on the desk or anything you might be doing, you can feel all that and your brain knows exactly where your hands and feet are.
It has to, as does cats, dogs, chickens, whatever animals you think of.
They've got to know in order to run over there, they've got to have a sense of where the body is and what it's doing.
So imagine that you disrupt that bit of the brain in some way, whether that is by a neurosurgeon putting an electrode on it, or whether it's by you being sleep deprived, which we know affects the TPJ, and having a little bit of cannabis, which affects the sense of self, whatever, it's all affecting that part and it's blowing it apart.
And the brain is constantly trying to keep it back together.
So what seems to happen is that if you really disrupt that bit of the brain, the body schema splits and you've got the body, the actual body, and you've got the body schema not connected with it.
So it's like a free-floating feeling of having a body.
You do know that by saying this, all the spiritualists and ghost hunters and all of those people are really going to hate you.
Yes.
Oh, don't, don't.
Don't, don't worry.
A lot of them hate me already.
It's a shame that they hate me, but you know, I'm used to it.
It's very interesting because when I was a believer in stuff all those years ago, the skeptics never got at me at all.
But when I became skeptical, the believers really got at me.
And it's very sad because it's the skeptics on the whole, I mean, a lot of them just debunking, which is not my obviously preferred way of going about things at all.
And, you know, I'm not saying they're wonderful, but they don't tend to, you know, be horrible and send death threats or any other horrible things to the psychics and all of that.
But I've had a lot of death threats over the years from people who say things like, you know, I'm psychic, I can see the future and I can foretell you in terrible pain in hospital and then you die very slowly.
It's what you deserve for not believing.
And, you know, these kind of horrible things.
So they're not exactly open-minded questing people, are they?
No, no.
And, oh, absolutely.
Open-minded is such an important thought.
What does it mean to be open-minded?
You know, there's that old joke about if your mind's too open, it's just like a skip and everyone can throw their junk in.
So you don't want to just believe any old rubbish.
But on the other hand, if you're not at all open-minded, you stick with whatever idea you first had and you will not change.
Now, I am a kind of, would this be too big-headed to say that I'm a kind of expert in being open-minded?
I only mean it in this sense, because I had to make this massive change from this, you know, hippie tarot reading, I Ching reading, crystal ball gazing.
I've trained as a witch.
I did all kinds of magical stuff.
Did any of that work?
Well, not in the sense of like paranormally working, no, but it does have effects on you.
We did a lot of training in imagery, you know, imagining really strange and difficult things.
And I think that's always kind of helped my imagination ever since.
But no, it didn't work in kind of paranormal ways, no.
But I asked you that for a reason.
I interviewed somebody who says that she's a witch recently.
In fact, I caught up with her.
She was on holiday, I think, in Spain, but she lives in this country.
And she told me that she'd used the craft to try and get a particular house she wanted to move to.
And she was able to succeed in doing this.
But because she had done whatever she'd done to get the house, somebody's dog died as a consequence.
Post-hoc rationalizations.
No one can ever prove whether the magical operations had that effect or not, because we don't know what would have happened about the house and the dog, do we?
So, you know, she might be right, she might be wrong.
But what I mean about this open-mindedness, I had to make a change.
My whole, who people saw me as had to change, as well as my beliefs.
I had to change when I became skeptical when all my experiments didn't produce any ESP and clairvoyance and precognition and all the things that I was studying.
And I did it.
And it was painful, but it seemed to me necessary.
So to me, the essence of being open-minded is not that you just believe anything, but that you have ideas, you try and test them, you read up stuff, you do experiments yourself, you ask questions.
And if the evidence suggests you're wrong, you start a new idea.
That's how science works.
You know, endlessly, oh, we had that idea.
Well, that one was rubbish.
Get rid of it.
Have another one.
Oh, that was kind of partly right.
But actually now we know a bit more.
It wasn't completely right.
So let's build a better idea.
And that experience, awful as it was at the time, really, having to give up what I expected to spend my life doing, has taught me how to be open-minded in that sense of respecting the evidence and being willing to take the world as I find it, as I learn and change and study and do experiments and meditate and ask questions.
That's what I think open-mindedness should be.
And you're quite right.
A lot of the spiritual people, and I don't mean to say everybody, but a lot of people who call themselves spiritual mean that they believe in guardian angels or spirits that survive death and they are very, very wedded to that and cling on to it.
All I can say is have a look at the evidence.
See, ask yourself in your own heart, how difficult would it be to go along with the evidence rather than what we want to believe?
And if you want to stay with what you want to believe, okay, but please don't try and push it on everybody else because the evidence actually says you might be wrong.
But what about ghosts, Sue?
You know, I don't believe things until I've seen them, and I would have expected to be the last person in the world who would ever see a ghost, but I have seen one.
I saw one a couple of years ago.
I was working in a broadcasting tower in Liverpool.
I was doing a late-night phone-in show.
It was after midnight.
There was only me and the producer, Jonathan, who was in the studio.
During the news, I went upstairs to answer a call of nature.
I came back.
I wasn't looking for anything.
I wasn't expecting anything.
I'd heard no stories about that place.
And standing at the studio door was a little man in a flat cap who looked at me.
I looked at him, and then he disappeared before my eyes.
Now, I was perfectly conscious.
I'd only been drinking coffee to keep me awake that night.
And I just, I wasn't scared.
I was just such a surprise.
And I went into the studio and I said to Jonathan, the producer, Jonathan, I've just seen this little man who disappeared.
Are you going to think I'm crazy?
He said, we all see him.
Well, that's, you know, this is a classic ghost story.
I don't know what to make of it.
You know, I wasn't there.
I can't now.
I can't do anything to investigate it, can I?
It's terribly, terribly hard.
So I'm not going to say that I can explain it or explain it away or anything else.
But I could tell you a story when I did, I mean, I see loads of weird stuff, interesting stuff.
One thing I did was act as a judge, I suppose, for a competition to find the most haunted house in Britain that was run by a brewery or something, you know.
And I had to do the southwest, Wales are the southwest.
And I went to, I don't know how many pubs.
One of them in South Wales, the story was that there was this grey figure that went along the back of the bar and was seen by lots of people, usually late at night.
And that there'd been a barmaid there who had been standing at the bar, pouring a gin and tonic.
And suddenly she saw the grey ghost go across the end of the bar and the gin and tonic shattered and she ran out of the pub and never came back to her job again.
So this sounded quite convincing.
But by interviewing all the people there, and particularly her, I discovered that, yes, lots of people had seen this, but in those days, don't forget bars were full of smoke.
So that actually, if you're slightly pissed or tired or something, it would be very difficult to see a bit of smoke as a figure.
But as far as she was concerned, yes, she said she'd seen it, but then, you know, she said everybody saw it and she wasn't really that sure.
On a different occasion, she'd been pouring a gin and tonic and the whole glass smashed and went all over the place.
Well, that can happen.
She, you know, we don't know whether it was a hot glass from the dishwasher, but that can happen when you put ice in and cold liquid into hot glass.
And on a different occasion again, she'd been asked by the boss to stay up late, to stay up after normal closing time because there were two people expected staying the night in the pub in the accommodation.
And she'd stayed there for ages and the people didn't come.
And she was really frightened because of all these ghost stories.
And so she gave in her notice and never came back again.
So, you know, there's a thing that I did and that always, it always turned, you know, every single time I did something like that, it always turned out with that kind of ending.
That's not to say it always was.
It's not, it always would.
It's not to say there are no such things as ghosts.
But you can imagine after all those years of doing that, I did rather come to the conclusion that there aren't.
My father was a policeman, and I know I've told this on this show before, so I'll keep this very brief, but he had numerous experiences.
I remember him telling me once, and this was in the days when policemen rode bikes.
He was riding home past a cemetery in Bootle, in Liverpool, at one o'clock in the morning after his shift.
And in Bootle Cemetery, he looked across through the railings and standing by one of the graves was, again, a man in a flat cap on.
Funnily enough, maybe this experience has haunted the pair of us.
I don't know.
And he got off his bike, went into the graveyard, went into the cemetery, and walked up to this man and said, what are you doing here?
In a policeman's kind of way.
And the man disappeared before him.
And the way my father tells the story is, and I'll clean it up, is you couldn't see my backside for steam when I got back on that bike and rode away.
My father swore that was the case, and he was always having experiences like that.
But that's not to say that, you know, they are ghosts or presences or people who've existed before.
But there is some aspect of something or ourselves that we have yet to explore, I suspect.
There's so much we have yet to explore, and that's what keeps me going.
I mean, I feel that doing this latest book to cover all the science that we now have is kind of the beginning for me of a new phase in which I can start to build on that.
And there are some other things that I'd perhaps be able to mention here, which is all the relationships between OBEs and other kinds of experiences.
So lucid dreams, for example, the same people tend to have lucid dreams as have out-of-body experiences.
Lucid dreams being those dreams that you know during the dream that you're dreaming.
But then there's also sleep paralysis.
Have you ever woken up and couldn't move?
Yes, and it's the most terrifying experience.
It's only the most terrifying experience if you don't know what it is.
At least most people are greatly reassured when they discover that it's perfectly normal.
It happens to almost 50% of people that have it at some point in their life.
It happens in every culture that we know about.
And in fact, most cultures, perhaps all, have what are called sleep paralysis myths.
So, you know, they have the Kanashibari in Japan and the Kokma in Nigeria and all these different names for them.
And perhaps alien abduction is our modern version.
Because what you get with this, and we know why it happens, it's when the mechanism that separates REM sleep from waking slightly overshoots or undershoots.
And the paralysis that you have to have during REM sleep in order to not to act out your dreams, that paralysis persists when you've partly woken up and are able to think and feel the experience and become frightened.
So that's what's happening.
But there's a lot of hyperactivity in the brain, as there is during out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences.
And this hyperactivity or excessive activity, random activity that is the cause of all these things.
And it causes strange noises, grinding noises.
Some people hear it more as musical but weird sounds, creepy feelings on the skin, sexual arousal, which comes over from REM sleep.
And a horrible sense that you can't breathe.
And that's one of the things that makes it most frightening.
The feeling that there's a heavy weight on you.
Sometimes you call it the old hag, this black creature who sits on your chest and tries to suffocate you.
Well, the reason why you feel as if you're being suffocated is actually very simple.
In REM sleep, your breathing is under automatic control because a lot of the brain is disconnected from the rest of the brain and getting on with dreaming and stuff.
So the breathing is just automatically controlled.
If you now try to control it yourself, you can't.
So if you're frightened and you think, I've got to breathe faster or, you know, or you're trying to calm yourself, you can't do it.
So you feel you're suffocating, but you're not.
It's just going to, the breathing is just going to go on absolutely fine.
So for anyone out there who's frightened, please know millions of people have this.
The best advice, but it's hard to take is, oh, just lie there and enjoy it.
It's fine.
But that's hard to do.
The next best advice is don't try and move anything big.
Just try and move a tiny little finger or try blinking, just one small thing like that, and you might break the paralysis.
Whenever I've had these, and I've had this experience quite recently, you try and lift an arm or do something and nothing will move.
That's right.
That's why they have to say only a tiny little finger or blinking.
You can usually blink and that often helps.
But you see, the great thing to do, now I suggest you do this next time, is you can think, right, this is the perfect opportunity for having an out-of-body experience.
So what you then have to do, the two generally recommended to be the best methods, one is just roll out of bed.
So as you say, nothing happens, but just very, very clearly, as clearly as you can, imagine you're rolling out of bed.
Imagine what it feels like, all the movements and so on.
And with any luck, you'll feel as though you have rolled out of bed.
You'll then be looking at the floor and you can then rise up.
The other thing is you're probably lying on your back, were you?
Yes.
It's very much more common lying on your back.
So lie on your back.
So imagine you're floating upwards.
Just imagine, imagine, imagine that the bed is disappearing way behind you.
Because in that paralyzed state, what's happening is the brain is trying to move the muscles to make you, as it were, float up.
Nothing happens.
But the body schema, which is the heart of what the OBE is about, which is controlled in the temporoparietal junction and all that, that body schema will now start to shift with the intention that you have got in mind to lift.
And the body doesn't because it's paralyzed.
So it's so much easier to induce an out-of-body experience when you're in sleep paralysis than at any other time.
So lucky you, I only get it very, very rarely.
So I, you know, I'm good for you.
And I'm one of these people also who has, I thought everybody did, but I have three-dimensional, multicolored dreams where I have conversations that I'm thinking about with people I've never seen before.
Oh, yes.
I don't think that's so unusual, is it?
I mean, weird people, often the people in dreams are kind of mixtures of other people.
They look a bit like one person, but you think they're somebody else and so on.
I mean, the people who appear in dreams are very odd.
There have been a lot of studies of dream figures and how they appear and what they're like.
And yes, people, you can have conversations with them.
The problem is dream recall.
For most people, it's pretty hard to remember in detail.
And of course, there's a lot of mysteries there.
When you recall a dream, was it really happening in the time that it seemed to be taking?
Or was it all concocted when you wake up?
Was there really just one dream thread or lots of multiple threads going along?
And you're just picking and choosing when you wake up which to remember.
But there's such a lot we don't know about dreams.
But hey, doesn't this make it exciting?
I mean, I am not running out of things to investigate.
Well, listen, you are a wonderful guest to speak with.
And you are still, it strikes me, and maybe other people say this about you, that you are still that animated person that you were when you, I don't think you've changed at all from when you were that person at university.
If you looked at me, you'd see how much I've changed.
That goes for us all, really.
But I'm glad to think that I might still have some of the enthusiastic curiosity that set me off on this in the first place.
Now, this new book will eventually, you know that we have many listeners, not only in the UK and Europe and Australia and New Zealand, very big in Melbourne for some reason.
I keep getting emails from Melbourne, which is great.
But we have a huge audience in the United States.
This book of yours is going to eventually come out there, isn't it?
It is indeed.
It's out in Britain, and I think probably Australia and New Zealand count the same, and it should be available there, I hope.
The American edition will be, I am told, a few months, but I can't give a date on it.
So, well, let's hope it's sooner rather than later.
Okay, well, I hope we can speak again because you are fascinating to speak with.
You've got a great website.
What is the address of that website?
It is www.susanblackmore.uk.
Susan, thanks very much for speaking with me.
And it's been fun.
Thank you very much.
Professor Sue Blackmore, a really remarkable person, and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.
Hope you enjoyed it too.
Let me know what you think by emailing me through the website theunexplained.tv.
Before her, you heard Bernard Shannon, the boss of Glacier 3000, about that remarkable story of the two people whose bodies reappeared after 75 years in the ice.
That's the kind of thing we talk about here on The Unexplained, and we have more great topics and great guests coming up through the back end of this summer 2017.
Thank you very much for being part of all of this.
That's it.
So until next we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and please stay safe.
Please stay calm and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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