The Metachoric Phase State

[Summerlander]

In Lucid Dreaming: The paradox of consciousness during sleep by Celia Green and Charles McCreery, in a chapter about false awakenings and OOBEs, the term 'ecsomatic' was introduced as an alternative to 'out-of-the-body'. 'Parasomatic' is where the percipient possesses a body which differs from the real body however slightly; and 'asomatic' describes an experience where no body is perceived. An asomatic OOBE is reported by Green:

'I went to my room and lay on my bed ... After a while my whole body felt very heavy and sank into the bed. I tried to get up but could not. Then I found I was standing in front of the dressing-table mirror. I looked into it, there was no reflection of me. I touched the mirror to make sure it was there. It was, but I was not, but I could see across the room in the mirror. I was still lying on my bed. This time I became terrified. Frantically I wondered how to get back in! ...I went back to bed, lay with my body.'

The chapter also records a parasomatic experience by J. H. M. Whiteman, where he acquired a good idea of what it is like to be a girl:

'Awareness in separation began with the sight of a tree, about twenty feet away, in a pleasant natural scene. I moved a little nearer, so that the tree was on my left. The freshness of the air and the joy of being in a smaller and acceptable form again made me start dancing, with movements exhilarating in their freedom ... Still affected with the joy in nature, I lay down on the ground, vividly feeling the cool grass with my fingers and the firmness of the earth beneath. I began to be afraid of the mounting excitement, that it would pass beyond my control, and decided to stand up again. As I did so, I noticed vividly how different it was, getting up off the ground in my proper form, from what it would have been in my physical body, on account of the great differences in bodily form, the smaller height, and the proportionately wider hips. In spite of this being, as it were, a strange discovery, the movement was completely natural to me, and wonderfully satisfying in its ease and grace. The memory-impression of what the contrasting movements of my physical body would have been, on the other hand, seemed only an outer illusory and provisional covering to the reality I was expecting.'

It is Celia Green's understanding that both OOBEs and lucid dreams are metachoric experiences, that is, the environment is a complete hallucination—even if it closely mimicks the physical world or appears to be an extension of what's objectively real.

Interestingly, Sylvan Muldoon-inspired Oliver Fox, author of A Record of Out-of-the-Body Experiences, made the claim in the '60s that persistently prolonging the experience of lucid dreaming as much as possible will eventually produce a distinct 'click' in the head, leading to an ecsomatic state which he believed to be a genuine OOBE, failing to grasp the subjective ontology of autoscopic hallucinations which arise in the phase state (waking consciousness during sleep hybridisation at 40Hz of brainwave activity).