Astral Roster
An index of roles
Each name here is on this page for a reason: who reported a night, who taught a method, who wrote about another culture’s words, who ran an experiment, who argued the extra-somatic story is not proven. Read what the person actually did before you take on their theory.
What this page establishes
- Each name is a job: who reported a night, who taught a method, who ran an experiment, who argued extra-somatic travel is not shown.
- A famous practitioner is not a mechanism. A cortical paper is not a night.
- Evidence status
- Index of roles. Biographies live in the books; this page says what work a name does here.
How to read a name
This page does not complete a biography. It does not hang a portrait. It says what work a name does here, what influence it actually had, and what it cannot be asked to prove. Fuller lineage lives on Schools. Papers live on Research. Titles live on Library. Worlds that are not the English how-to chapter live on the Atlas.
A famous practitioner is not a mechanism. A cortical paper is not a night. Experience is not interpretation is not a scientific claim.
Who taught a method
Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington. Their job is the early English how-to. The Projection of the Astral Body (1929) already treats projection as something a person might learn. Literary and experiential history. Not a replicable induction study.
Oliver Fox (Hugh Callaway). First-person record. Astral Projection (1939) gathers magazine accounts and experiments the author treated as his own. A careful night in print. Not a trial.
Robert Monroe. First-person American narrative, then a civilian audio school. Journeys Out of the Body (1971) is a report in a plain style. Hemi-Sync, Focus states, and Gateway are a later training language and product line. Influence on English popular practice is historical fact. Identity with this console is not. Binaural beats predate him; this site generates true stereo in a browser and does not host his tapes. Read the book as experience. Read the school as a school. The government file that assessed that school is on Files. Audio; Monroe in the FOIA record.
William Buhlman. Practical exploration: intention, targeting, a surveyor’s attitude rather than a purely spontaneous narrative. Adventures Beyond the Body (1996) is the English book that later “go to the living room” advice still quietly copies. Useful counterweight to cosmic travelogues. Not laboratory evidence that a destination was reached in physical space. Target language and this site’s blinded Remote Viewing games stay apart.
Robert Bruce. Tactile curriculum. Astral Dynamics (1999) made the rope technique and an “energy body” set of drills famous in internet English: climb a remembered rope until the body-map argues; persist; ignore the demand for a cinematic visual. Label the book as a practitioner system. This console’s The Climb uses our own timed program as a bed; it is not a reprint. What Bruce cannot do: convert tactile imagination into demonstrated physics.
Michael Raduga. Practitioner taxonomy. The Phase treats lucid dream, OBE, and adjacent sleep-edge states as one trainable “phase,” with deferred methods after awakening. The method family is real as culture. The “three days” frame is a training advertisement. This archive will not publish it as a result. Useful if you need a map of sleep-edge neighbors. Dangerous if it erases distinctions the lab still needs. Words.
Who compared and who journeyed
Robert Peterson. The stitcher. Out-of-Body Experiences and later Hacking the Out-of-Body Experience read across schools instead of founding one, with a practitioner’s interest in what actually happens at the edge of sleep. Use him when you need a bridge. Do not use him as a verdict.
Thomas Campbell. Worldview. My Big TOE is a consciousness metaphysics built by a physicist’s habit of system-building. Label: theoretical school, not mainstream validation by physics. Read it as an interpretation of reports, not as a textbook of the universe, and not as a hidden layer of this console’s signal generator.
Michael Harner. One American handbook that taught civilians to journey with a drum. The Way of the Shaman (1980) is a curriculum of healing and power with named ethnographic roots (Jívaro / Untsuri Shuar; Conibo). It is not ethnography of “all shamans,” not a laboratory proof, not a missing chapter of astral projection, and not a substitute for the Atlas. Matching sit: The Drum. Journeying.
Mircea Eliade. Comparative type-maker. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (French 1951; English 1964) made “magical flight” into a figure universities and later popular shelves could hold in one hand. Historical influence on how English speakers talk about soul-journeying. Also a synthesis. Later anthropologists have argued that he over-unified very different specialists. Treat the book as a map of a literature, not as fieldwork in your city.
Who tested
Stephen LaBerge. The dream lab the projection world keeps borrowing. 1981 signaling work established that a lucid dreamer can communicate from REM; the 1985 book Lucid Dreaming carried the finding into public English. Keep him honest: he is not an astral-projection scientist, and lucidity is not a synonym for OBE. Shared practice exists (sleep interruption, intention at the edge). Shared definition does not. LaBerge 1981; Sleep.
Susan Blackmore. The refusal this archive is not allowed to skip. Beyond the Body (1982) is a psychological and skeptical investigation: the reports are real as reports; the extra-somatic interpretation is not thereby shown. A competent brain-based story exists — expectation, body-schema, sleep-edge imagery, dissociation. Reading her is not sneering. Refusing to read her is how a library becomes a shrine. What she cannot be asked to do is erase intensity, antiquity, or the unfinished status of veridical-perception claims.
Olaf Blanke. The cortical case. With Ortigue, Landis, and Seeck, “Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions,” Nature 419:269–270 (2002): a 43-year-old woman, right angular gyrus, vestibular and somatosensory distortion, OBE-like perspective. The self’s location can be moved with a probe. That is demonstrated in that setting. It is not headphones. It is not a universal solvent for every spontaneous night. Blanke 2002.
H. Henrik Ehrsson. The ethical cousin of Blanke: OBE-like illusion without a craniotomy. Science 317:1048 (2007) — visuo-tactile conflict, cameras, stroking, a felt location of the self that can be pulled. Why the role matters: “where I am” is, at least sometimes, a constructed percept in people who are not surgical patients. Why it does not finish the archive: a laboratory mismatch is not an ethnography of a high-reality, long-duration report at 3 a.m. Ehrsson 2007.
Gerald Oster. Puts binaural beats back on a scientific desk. “Auditory Beats in the Brain,” Scientific American (October 1973): two tones, one per ear, a pulse constructed centrally, no consumer protocol, no metaphysical switch. This console’s honesty about headphones — if the tones mix in the room you are not running Oster’s setup — is his distinction. He belongs in the audio chapter, not in a projection hagiography. Oster 1973.
Celia Green. Academic-adjacent hinge. Out-of-the-Body Experiences (1968) gave psychologists a named report they could argue about without joining a lodge. Questionnaires, cases, cooler diction. Not a practitioner school.
Who opens another world
Nāropa / Tsongkhapa, via Glenn Mullin. The Six Dharmas associated with the Indian master Nāropa, taught onward in Tibetan presentations including Tsongkhapa’s, typically include inner heat, illusory body, dream (milam), clear light, intermediate state, transference. Mullin’s English translations are a responsible door, not a substitute for the lineage. Dream yoga sits inside a liberation system. “Clear light of sleep” is not a YouTube theta track. Do not say Tibetans were doing astral projection. Label: distinct phenomenon, with shared practice only at the thin level of attention during sleep. Tibet & Himalaya.
Pregadio / Eskildsen; Gignoux; the Pali suttas. English doors onto Daoist spirit that can leave, the Wīrāz leave-see-return, and early Buddhist flying / mind-made body. Close in the obvious way. Different jobs. Daoism; Iran; Early Buddhism.
If this site later publishes founder field notes, they are not added to this roster as a thirteenth school. They wear the operator’s label — first-person field report — not presented as proof of a universal mechanism — and they sit with other cases, not with Blanke. Roles stay roles.
Bibliography
- Monroe, R. A. (1971). Journeys Out of the Body. Doubleday.
- Harner, M. (1980). The Way of the Shaman. Harper & Row.
- Eliade, M. (1951/1964). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
- Blackmore, S. (1982). Beyond the Body. Heinemann.
- Oster, G. (1973). Auditory beats in the brain. Scientific American, 229(4), 94–102.
- Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., & Seeck, M. (2002). Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. Nature, 419, 269–270. DOI 10.1038/419269a.
- Ehrsson, H. H. (2007). The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences. Science, 317, 1048.
- Mullin, G. H. (trans./ed.). The Six Yogas of Naropa. Snow Lion.
- Bruce, R. (1999). Astral Dynamics.
- Buhlman, W. (1996). Adventures Beyond the Body.
- LaBerge, S. (1985). Lucid Dreaming. J.P. Tarcher. Signaling paper: LaBerge, S. P., Nagel, L. E., Dement, W. C., & Zarcone, V. (1981). Lucid dreaming verified by volitional communication during REM sleep. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 52(3), 727–732. BBM reading.
Educational only. Not medical advice. Headphones required for a true binaural beat. Not affiliated with the Monroe Institute. Experience is not interpretation is not a scientific claim.