They may be successful in doing so for a considerable time, but only at the cost of great discomfort to themselves.
They are shut out from both worlds, and find themselves surrounded by a dense grey mist, through which they see very dimly the things of the physical world, but with all the colour gone from them.

It is a terrible struggle for them to maintain their position in this miserable condition, and yet they will not relax their hold upon the etheric double, feeling that that is at least some sort of link with the only world that they know.
Thus they drift about in a condition of loneliness and misery until from sheer fatigue their hold fails them, and they slip into the comparative happiness of astral life.

Sometimes in their desperation they grasp blindly at other bodies, and try to enter into them, and occasionally they are successful in such an attempt.

They may seize upon a baby body, ousting the feeble personality for whom it was intended, or sometimes they grasp even the body of an animal.

All this trouble arises entirely from ignorance, and it can never happen to anyone who understands the laws of life and death.
When the astral life is over, the man dies to that world in turn, and awakens in the mental world.