the.com/out of body experience

means A sensation of consciousness detaching from the body, feeling as though you're observing yourself from outside — often reported during trauma, near-death states, meditation, or certain neurological and drug-induced conditions.

from The phrase is a 20th-century coinage, built from plain English rather than borrowed from Latin or Greek roots. It gained currency through parapsychology and near-death-experience research in the mid-1900s, where investigators needed a clinical-sounding label for something people had described for centuries in religious and mystical terms — the soul leaving the body, astral travel, spirit journeys. The modern term stripped the mysticism down to a flat, almost bureaucratic description, which is part of why it sounds so oddly calm for something so disorienting.