"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

my way down again. At first it took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it
got easier. I was able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was
about as far as I could go for quite a while.
It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could move myself
to my loins, I should be able to get completely outside of my body. So I was able to "sit
to one side." It's hard to explain ­­ I'd move my hands and shake the water, and although I
couldn't see them, I knew where they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to
each side, part way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and
everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting outside,
"observing" all this.
From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to move
further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would move my hands I
would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going up and down ­­ they weren't
flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still able to feel everything. The feelings would be
exactly consistent with the motion, but I also had this feeling of "he is that." "I" even got
out of the room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where
things happened that I had seen earlier another day.
I had many types of out­of­the­body experiences. One time, for example, I could
"see" the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I moved my fingers, I
saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I saw the blue sky. Of course that
wasn't right; it was a hallucination. But the point is that as I moved my fingers, their
movement was exactly consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing.
The entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are doing,
much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching something (and you
don't know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear what it is. So the entire imagery
would suddenly appear, except it's unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine
the ego to be located in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the
back of the head.
One of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while I was
having a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and would therefore be only
dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams, and I wanted a new
experience. It was kind of dopey, because when you're having hallucinations, and things
like that, you're not very sharp, so you do these dumb things that you set your mind to do,
such as checking that you're not dreaming. So I perpetually was checking that I wasn't
dreaming by ­­ since my hands were often behind my head ­­ rubbing my thumbs
together, back and forth, feeling them. Of course I could have been dreaming that, but I
wasn't: I knew it was real.
After the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination made
them "jump out," or stop happening, I was able to relax and have long hallucinations.
A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain works
compared to how a computing machine works ­­ especially how information is stored.
One of the interesting problems in this area is how memories are stored in the brain: You
can get at them from so many directions compared to a machine ­­ you don't have to
come directly with the correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word "rent,"
for example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four­letter word that
begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income, or activities such as