A praying-mantis figure during astral projection has people asking whether altered states share a common source?

The Story

Bright tunnels and voices can feel external when waking and dreaming overlap, but the experience alone does not establish another realm.

The bright tunnel, voices, and apparent beings fit experiences that can arise as the brain shifts between waking and REM sleep. During these transitions, dream imagery can intrude into awareness, while disrupted body-position signals can create the feeling of leaving the body. Visual-cortex activity offers a plausible route to tunnel-like forms. This explains how the experience can feel lucid and external without showing that an entity or realm exists outside the mind.

• Sleep boundaryAttempts to project, falling asleep, waking, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis can blend perception with dream imagery.
• Body modelWhen systems tracking body position are disrupted, the mind can generate a convincing sense of floating or observing from outside.
• Entity imageryMantis-like or other beings may be dream content shaped by memory, expectation, medication, or psychedelic states; the sources do not establish a shared external cause.

• A 2023 PNAS Nexus perspective places hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences, sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, and out-of-body experiences on the transition between waking and REM dreaming.pmc
• A 2024 review connects out-of-body experiences with lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis in a shared conceptual model of sleep and wakefulness.sciencedirect
• Tunnel forms can arise from physiological changes involving the visual cortex and a changing mental model of the self in the world.doi