Kind Of Neat

In SM Stirling's The Sea Peoples, fragments of a burning tower fall on Prince John who is protected by body armor. When his friends pull the fragments away, John's body is not to be found and we read an account of his journey elsewhere. Has he teleported? No. John's unconscious body, still lying on the ground, has been rendered invisible while his spirit has been drawn elsewhere. That is kind of neat.

Does his spirit being drawn elsewhere mean that the bearer of John's consciousness is an immaterial entity that can leave his body or that his comatose brain dreams? Mind-body dualism, an ancient belief, can be assumed in fiction and is assumed in Stirling's Emberverse series but why did this ancient belief exist? Because we seem to leave our bodies temporarily in sleep and permanently at death.

Sue Blackmore, after having an "OBE," an actual or apparent out-of-the-body experience, researched OBEs and theorized that an OBE is an ASC, altered state of consciousness, in which bodily sensations are disregarded while the environment is vividly imagined as seen from a point outside the body. Thus, nothing leaves the body.

I leave it to blog readers to enumerate OBEs in fiction, particularly in the works of Poul Anderson.