Have you ever experienced flying in your dreams or felt as if you were falling and then awaken with a jolt? These are some of the dream memories that have inspired philosophies and religions from the dawn of man. The frontier of how the brain works when it is sleeping is just beginning to reveal answers to so many questions about what we call the human experience.  The idea of having a physical body and a non physical body (energy or subtle body) requires the basic belief that such a thing exists.

Most of the world's religions believe in the existence of the "soul." One could consider this the opposite of outer space travel and look upon it as exploring the frontiers of the inner space of the mind.  In the 1960's and 1970's people experimenting with LSD or smoking marijuana often reported out of body experiences.  So it may be safe to say that astral travel occurs in an altered state of consciousness.

Not to be confused with paranormal phenomena, such as ghost sightings, telepathy or clairvoyance, astral travel has it's own place in the metaphysical dictionary. Some argue that astral travel is evidence of the existence of parallel or other dimensional planes between which we can go in and out during an altered state. And then, of course, such experiences could all be in our head, as part of how the brain functions in an altered state. What we do know is that we experience something.  What that is remains a mystery. The mystery is yet to be solved.