Sarah wasn’t expecting to experience paralysis at 7 am on a weekday during a meditation at her home.
But in August, while listening to “The Gateway Tapes”—a set of guided meditations intended to help people reach new planes of consciousness—she says her limbs froze.
Sarah, who is in her early thirties and didn’t want her real name used due to privacy concerns, says the tapes—which she had been listening to on and off for months—took her on a roller-coaster journey of out-of-body experiences. “I was in and out of time and space,” she says. It felt like a bad trip, she says, despite the fact she was sober.
She recalls a subsequent three-week period of disorienting instability that veered from feelings of intense spiritual connection to fears that she may never again relate with others. Looking back, she is relieved she was not left “in a kind of a spiritual psychosis,” but she sees the events as part of an ultimately positive “awakening” process.
Sarah is not the only one to report baffling and petrifying experiences thanks to the Gateway Process, which has been around for over 50 years and has exploded in popularity since the pandemic. But, like many others, she also credits it with helping her calm her mind and make transformative life changes.
Developed by radio broadcasting executive Robert Monroe, the Gateway Process claims to be “a voyage of self-discovery” that can help people go “farther, deeper and faster into different dimensions of consciousness.” Monroe founded the Monroe Institute in 1971 in Faber, Virginia. Dubbed an American “Hogwarts” by one consciousness content creator, the facility claims to help coax people out of their bodies via in-person and virtual retreats, and even Spotify playlists, by way of self-hypnosis style exercises powered by “binaural beats”—sounds attuned to different frequencies which play in each headphone ear. Proponents claim binaural beats balance the two sides of the brain and boost wellness. And while there is still an absence of scientific evidence to support the institute’s methods, that hasn’t stopped the military from taking an interest in Monroe’s mysterious courses which also include manifestation and “remote viewing”—a form of clairvoyance in which one leaves the body to investigate the real world using only the mind.
Since 2022, some 12,500 people, including military service people, psychonauts, and meditators, have joined online and in-person “Gateway Voyage” programs. That’s a 35 percent increase in participants over the pre-pandemic period of 2016 to 2019. In 2025, there were 80 in-person retreats with 20 participants each, according to the institute. “For the first time in our history, we have reached the absolute maximum capacity of our campus retreats this year,” says Paul Citarella, the Monroe Institute’s executive vice president. In-person retreats cost $2,695 while virtual ones are $1,150. The growing demand has prompted the institute to host retreats beyond just Virginia at other locations across the US, as well as in Romania, Italy, Switzerland, and Greece. The organization’s Expand app has been installed 386,000 times since its July 2021 launch, company data shows.
In June, the institute announced it is undertaking what it calls “the world’s first higher states of consciousness study” with neurofeedback company Neuphoria, which claims that the research could help people become “among the first humans in history to map, master, and return to altered states—on demand, with data.” Some 333 Gateway Voyage graduates have signed up and will soon spend four weeks tracking their brain state data while listening to the meditations, paying $897 a piece.
A straight-laced southerner with a gray moustache, Monroe wasn’t initially interested in mysticism or the metaphysical. In the 1950s, he began experimenting with binaural beats. He later trademarked this method as “Hemi-Sync” technology. This was all in an effort to develop new methods of “sleep learning,” a practice which aims to manipulate the mind to receive information and improve memory while asleep. Then, while testing the techniques, Monroe spontaneously experienced feelings of separation from his body. The event led to him writing his cult classic 1971 book, Journeys Out of the Body, which helped popularize the term “out-of-body experience” (OBE).
“I smoothly floated up over the bed, and when I willed myself to myself to stop, I did, floating in mid-air,” Monroe wrote of his first spontaneous OBE. “It was not a bad feeling at all, but I was nervous about falling suddenly.”
Years later, he and his team created the Gateway Tapes, and they became the go-to shortcut for seekers of OBEs. The remote viewing aspect, which may be familiar to Stranger Things fans, sounds particularly hard to believe, but the idea has obvious military appeal.
And so, in the early 1980s, amid fears that the Soviets had a psychic warfare edge in the Cold War, the CIA and the Department of Defense sent US Army lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell to the institute to ascertain its suitability as a defense contractor. McDonnell gave the organization and its unusual curriculum his approval in a 1983 report which has since been declassified.
“There is a sound and rational basis,” McDonnell writes, “in terms of physical science parameters for considering Gateway to be plausible in terms of its essential objectives.” On manifestation, he adds: “Since our consciousness is the source of all reality, our thoughts have the power to influence the development of reality in time-space … If those thoughts can be projected with adequate intensity.”
Since Covid lockdowns led to growing interests in yoga, meditation, and lucid dreaming, there has been a surge of curiosity about the Monroe Institute, often from people who want to meet dead loved ones or who have had near death experiences (NDEs) and wish to understand them better. A 2021 VICE article on the CIA report about the Gateway Tapes also boosted awareness about the facility.
“Our whole goal is basically what we call the global awakening of human consciousness,” says Citarella. “The core of what we do at Monroe is make it easy for people to access [psychedelic] states without having to use substances.”
Sheila Schwartz, a retired weight loss expert, says the Monroe Institute “saved her life.” She says she was on the brink of suicide after a lifetime of being misunderstood due to her ADHD and autism. She is now in the process of completing her 28th Monroe course. Through the program, Schwartz learned to access “deeply peaceful states” which helped her “rewire my thoughts, open my heart, and speak my truth,” she says. “It helped me reconnect to what I had always known at some level, that I am so much more than my physical body.” She is now in the process of moving to Virginia to be closer to the institute.
The subreddit r/gatewaytapes, with 83,000 members, provides an insight into why. As well as some tales of misfortune and confusion, people regularly tell of blissfully completing the meditation exercises and entering “theta” states, which are typically associated with deep relaxation and vivid dreams.
“The binaural beats synchronize the two hemispheres of the brain,” says Marina Weiler, an assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, who specializes in OBEs and is a member of the Division of Perceptual Studies research group. Beats at 100 hertz in one ear and 104 hertz in the other can push the brain into a theta state, she explains, although scientific research on the efficacy and safety of binaural beats is lacking. “That’s usually the frequency that people choose to achieve the out-of-body experiences.” People may experience other psychic phenomena and extraordinary experiences, but they do not always have OBEs, Weiler adds. “But they can, if combined with intention and a lot of practice.”
Joe McMoneagle has had a lot of practice; the former US Army chief warrant officer is known as “Remote Viewer No. 1.” In Vietnam he had an NDE and reportedly developed attuned suspicions of when his platoon was about to be ambushed. McMoneagle was recruited into Project Stargate, the US Army’s psychic intelligence unit—the inspiration for the 2009 black comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats—which declassified files suggest sketched the insides of Soviet manufacturing plants, found kidnapped generals, and even located the mystical Ark of the Covenant, though it was never recovered.
“My success rate was around 28 percent,” McMoneagle told the Daily Mail. “That may not sound very good, but we were brought in to deal with the hopeless cases. Our information was then cross-checked with any other available intelligence to build up an overall picture. We proved to be quite useful ‘spies.’”
McMoneagle became a speaker and trainer at Monroe, where he did his remote viewing training. “The military is interested in it if it works,” physicist Thomas Campbell, author of the My Big TOE trilogy, tells WIRED. In January he appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and discussed the institute, after helping Monroe create the tapes decades prior. (A study at the center last year to investigate how pilots can improve the quality of their sleep with Gateway was sponsored by a Department of Defense contractor, according to one nonmilitary participant.) “It’s a double-edged sword,” says Campbell. “All technologies and ideas and concepts typically can be used, and be abused.”
However the former army technical intelligence analyst is optimistic about the effect the Monroe Institute’s methods might have on the military. “It’s going to open their minds,” Campbell says.
During OBEs, people often feel like they are looking at their bodies from another perspective—even floating above with a bird’s-eye view. Whereas dreams do not always feel real, OBEs carry a sense that what is unfolding is indeed very real, and that there is more out there than we can usually perceive.
In his book, Monroe—who died aged 79 in 1995—tells of enduring “a severe, iron-hard cramp” across his diaphragm after first listening to the binaural beats in 1958. On one occasion he felt “shocked and frightened,” but over time the pain gave way to spontaneous OBEs. In addition to floating, he also once “experienced an overwhelmingly strong sexual drive and could think of nothing else. Embarrassed and irritated at myself because of my inability to control this tide of emotion, I returned back into my physical body.”
Over time he figured out how to control the process without being subsumed by sexual desires.
For people like Sarah, the road to nirvana can be equally disconcerting. “I had some extreme somatic jolts in multiple areas on my body,” she says in a Reddit post in r/gatewaytapes, trying to make sense of the scary experience. Then, “I was paralyzed, I tried to move my arms and legs and couldn’t.” Monroe’s cheaper at-home programs come without hands-on human supervision, even though they advise people to “ground” in nature and practice integrative exercises, with instructors on Zoom to provide support. Those like Sarah who do the tapes outside of a course are on their own.
Citarella acknowledges that playing the tapes alone at home can be particularly challenging. “Sometimes people don’t want their worldview changed,” he says. “It’s almost like Pandora’s box: Once you’ve opened it, and you have some kind of undeniable experience, you can’t close the box again.” He adds that, “It’s pretty rare that we see someone who really has become destabilized.” But he is mindful that “if you’re already struggling with [your] grip on reality and you’re changing your definition of reality, that can be not a good thing.”
Sarah cautions against people doing it alone without “a tether to reality.”
But she says that after “grounding” in a reiki energy healing session following three weeks of disturbance, she was left with “a deep sense of comfort that life is indeed meaningful.” She began curbing her drinking and binge eating. She also changed careers and left her corporate job. “It really forced me to take a look at all of the things in my life,” she says. “It gave me a better understanding of my purpose.”
That purpose, Sarah adds, is exactly the same as the Monroe Institute’s, “to uplift human consciousness.”
