Then he stood up impatiently, moving around in a kind of slow frenzy. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, more to himself than to me. “And what do we tell our young man here?” As he muttered this last, he swung around to face me. “We greatly need some good experimental work in this field. They’re doing it all wrong,” he said.

“Who? What field?”

“You really wouldn’t know what I’m talking about, of course, being a hard-line behaviorist. You are, aren’t you? Never mind.” He sat down heavily, too heavily in my wicker chair for a man his size. The chair creaked and groaned, but held. “Now, this is it,” he said. “I have a proposal to make. First, you have no insight at all, yourself, into the experiences you just told me about?”

“I have no explanation, if that’s what you mean. Some odd quirk of perception? Complete hallucination brought about by a belated response to my wife’s leaving me? Who knows?”

“Exactly,” Ram-Ram said. “So?”

“So? So—nothing. If I didn’t hallucinate, then I was really out of my body, and I can’t buy that. I hoped that with your background, you might have some alternate explanations.”

“Suppose you were out of your body?” he asked. “I’m not for the moment saying that you were, but have you considered the possibility seriously?” “Why, not really,” I answered, surprised. “I’m the first one to admit that behaviorism hasn’t solved all our problems, or begun to, but it’s offered sufficient evidence that our consciousness is the result of our physical mechanism and the way we use it. In those terms, there’s no ‘me’ to get out of my body. I wouldn’t have any perceiving organs.” I paced about, rather angry and defensive. All of this was too obvious to me at the time to argue about.

“Now, hold on,” Ram-Ram said. “Look. You felt that you were out of your body. You felt that you were hanging out in the air there, and later you looked down at your own body. Since all this was so vivid and unmistakable then, what convinced you that it was not in fact happening?”

“At the time, I thought it was happening, of course,” I said, more mildly.

“Then what later convinced you that it hadn’t?”

By now my exasperation was rising again. “Good common sense, I suppose. People just don’t hang out in thin air without support … without falling—”

“You deny the evidence of your own experience, then?” Ram-Ram smiled his famous mischievous-little-boy-psychologist grin and said, “That would be true insanity, you know.”

“I don’t deny having the experience or I wouldn’t have called you,” I shouted.