I had an out of body experience and then a near death experience - and it made me question everything

A diary entry from Dr Jess

If you would have asked me if out of body experiences existed a few years ago, I probably would have said that they don’t literally exist, but maybe the mind constructs them, or maybe we dream them, or maybe they are the result of head trauma.

I am a psychologist with a PhD. I studied psychology for 9 years - and the discipline espouses values of science, fact, rigour and empiricism - whilst strongly condemning anything with any mystical, spiritual or paranormal leaning.

Whilst there are some parapsychologists, they are few and far between, most are heavy sceptics, and when I showed interest in the topics during my PhD, I was told it would be career suicide, and that if I ever wrote anything about paranormal experiences, I should do it under a pen name so I didn’t destroy my own reputation.

When I had shown an interest, back in 2015, it was because I had been having vivid dreams that seemed to predict things or give me information I needed. Some of you will know that I dreamt my entire PhD thesis when I was around 23-24 years old. I saw the finished thesis, and I was able to flick through it and take in as much as I could. I woke up at around 1am from the dream, and sketched out my entire PhD thesis, theories, diagrams and models in a little notebook I had next to my bed.

I almost instantly fell back to sleep (which is probably even weirder than the dream). When I woke up to my alarm the next morning, I felt groggy and tired. I had these vague memories of a dream where I saw something about a PhD, and wrote it all down.

I turned over in my bed, and saw the notebook and pen right next to me. In shock, I picked up the book and found I had written 2-3 pages of detailed notes, theories and diagrams. I couldn’t believe it.

It was those notes that led to me applying for PhD, and I used all of the notes in my 5000-word PhD proposal, which was immediately accepted. I was one of only 13 people who got on to the PhD programme that year.

I rarely tell that story, and I think this might be the first time I’ve ever written it publicly. That dream changed my life forever. But when I enquired about the true power of dreams and the mind, my professor told me not to write or speak on the topic.

Dreams had become forbidden topics in psychology (beyond basic science of REM sleep and cognition, of course). Dream psychology had become something you do for a laugh. Dream interpretation had been relegated to superstitious bullshit. Dreams had been theorised by cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists to be just the byproduct of memory processing during the sleep cycle. Dreams were meaningless. Useless. Jumbled up bollocks. To be ignored, and certainly not to be studied in any depth.

At the time, I took the advice, and I also decided that it must have been a huge coincidence. Spirituality was silly to me. I was atheist. I told myself that dreams were nothing important - just unconscious processing. We are just bones and blood and tissue. We live. We die. There is nothing else.

And anyway, I didn’t want to be seen as incompetent, or unscientific as a young psychologist!

But what happens when we have experiences that science cannot yet explain? That we are told are impossible? That we thought were impossible?

I had my first full out-of-body experience in 2023 - and it challenged everything I thought I knew. About myself. About science. About the world. About spirituality. About humanity.

And whilst I was still reeling from that experience, I came face to face with my own mortality in early 2024, and together, these two experiences have changed my perspective on everything from scientific validity to the meaning of life.