People & places · 12 MIN READ · 8 SOURCE QUOTES
Charles Tart
Charles T. Tart is the psychologist who studied Robert Monroe in a laboratory in the 1960s. He met Monroe in the fall of 1965, after taking a research post at the University of Virginia Medical School in Charlottesville, and between December 1965 and August 1966 he brought Monroe into the hospital's EEG lab for eight late-night sessions. After moving to the University of California at Davis he tried a long-distance experiment with Monroe and, in 1968, recorded him again during an afternoon session in a proper sleep laboratory.
Tart came to Monroe already known for studying altered states. He had edited the widely read 1969 anthology Altered States of Consciousness, and his work with a young woman he called Miss Z, who named a hidden five-digit number after a night in his lab, was the best result he ever got on out-of-body experiences. With Monroe the picture was more mixed: the recordings showed a prolonged, deliberately held drowsy state, somewhat like dreaming, and a few intriguing hits, but nothing clear enough to prove that Monroe perceived distant places.
Tart's role in the story goes beyond data. He put Monroe's stalled manuscript in front of an editor at Doubleday, which published it as Journeys Out of the Body in 1971, and in Far Journeys Monroe credited him with popularizing the phrase out-of-body experience. He served for years on the Monroe Institute's board of advisors and, in a 2015 talk at the Institute, spoke of Monroe with obvious affection. His verdict has stayed consistent: the experiences were real and worth studying, and the evidence that they involved true perception at a distance was suggestive but never conclusive.
The psychologist who put Monroe in an EEG lab in the 1960s, found a dreamlike drowsy state but no conclusive proof, and stayed his friend for life.
Key points
How they met
Tart says he first heard of Monroe in the summer of 1957, while working at a laboratory in Maine, as someone in Virginia who had out-of-body experiences. Years later, after a postdoctoral fellowship in California, he took a research position at the University of Virginia Medical School and met Monroe in the fall of 1965. Monroe was having OBEs regularly by then but had not yet developed Hemi-Sync. Tart was struck that Monroe questioned his own experiences rather than being carried away by them.
Eight nights at the University of Virginia
Between December 1965 and August 1966 Monroe came in for eight late-night sessions at the hospital's EEG laboratory, since his OBEs usually began from sleep. The lab was not built for sleep work and Monroe was uncomfortable on the cot, so most nights produced nothing. On the eighth night he reported two brief OBEs. In the second he said he saw the technician away from her machine talking with a man; she did have a visitor, though her notes say Monroe might have heard the man cough during a break.
What the brain recordings showed
During the reported OBEs Monroe's EEG showed stage 1, a light, dreamlike sleep pattern, with some alpha-like activity and, in one case, rapid eye movements. It resembled Miss Z's pattern without matching it. In an all-night baseline when he was not trying to leave his body, Monroe slept normally and did not call his dream periods OBEs; he sharply distinguished the two. Nothing in the recordings looked like a body near death.
The psychic beacon experiment
After Tart moved to California, he and his wife tried to guide Monroe across the country by concentrating on him at a randomly chosen time, 11:00 PM California time. At 11:05 the phone rang. It was Monroe, who had felt himself pulled from his body within a minute or two of their start. But his description of the Tarts' home was wrong: too many people in the room, and actions they had not done. Tart counted the timing as striking and the content as a miss.
One afternoon at UC Davis, 1968
When Monroe briefly visited California in 1968, Tart recorded him in a functioning sleep laboratory at the University of California at Davis. In a two-hour session Monroe reported two brief OBEs and woke within seconds after each, so the recordings could be lined up. The first came with a borderline hypnagogic EEG and a sudden fall in systolic blood pressure lasting seven seconds; the second, using a different technique, showed no clear cardiac change. Again there was no clear-cut ESP result.
Controlled drowsiness and Hemi-Sync
Tart's summary was that Monroe's OBEs came during a prolonged, deliberately produced hypnagogic state, the borderland of sleep, which is rarely seen in the lab. He noted that the theta rhythms and slowed alpha resembled reports from advanced Zen meditators, and said that if he were still researching he would train people to produce that controlled drowsiness. That, he wrote, is the sort of thing Monroe developed with Hemi-Sync and described as putting the body to sleep while keeping the mind awake, the idea behind Focus 10.
Miss Z, the benchmark
Tart's best out-of-body result came before Monroe, with a young woman he called Miss Z, who reported frequent out-of-body experiences at night. Over four nights in his lab she tried to read a five-digit number on a high shelf. On the fourth night, after seven minutes of ambiguous EEG at 5:57 AM, she called out 25132, which was correct. Tart always thought ESP was the best explanation, but admitted the design could not rule out telepathy from his own mind.
Getting Monroe's book published
Tart says Monroe's manuscript had sat with a New York agent for a year without a single publisher showing interest. Having read it and thought it wonderful, Tart passed it to an editor he knew at Doubleday, who was handling the paperback of Tart's Altered States of Consciousness. Doubleday published Journeys Out of the Body in 1971. Tart recalls Monroe considering a pseudonym before deciding to publish under his own name.
A friend and adviser for decades
Tart called Monroe his dear friend and described him as an archetypally normal businessman drafted into the field by his experiences. The Monroe Institute's journals of the early 1990s list Tart on its board of advisors. In 1978 an Army Gondola Wish assessment noted that Tart had studied Monroe in the laboratory and recommended the Institute to anyone who wanted to learn about out-of-body experience.
In their own words
Quotes are checked word for word against the recordings and documents they come from. Bracketed words correct transcription errors; “…” marks an omission.
“I met Monroe in the fall of 1965 when I took a research position at the University of Virginia Medical School in Charlottesville. He was having OBEs regularly by then, although he had not yet [developed] the [Hemi-Sync] techniques he later used to train others. [Monroe] was as curious about the nature of OBEs as I was and also able and eager to question his own experiences, rather than be [dogmatically] swept up in them.”
“In general, then, Monroe's OBEs seem to occur in conjunction with a prolonged, deliberately produced hypnagogic state (stage 1 EEG). Such prolonged states are not normally seen in the laboratory.”
“Again we have that frustrating pattern of my research with Monroe of no ESP results clear enough to be conclusive, but not results so clearly inaccurate that I would feel comfortable saying nothing at all happened.”
“If I were still actively researching this area, I would try training people to produce theta and slowed alpha rhythms, [controlled] drowsiness, as it were, and see if this helped them have OBEs. This is the sort of thing that Monroe worked on developing with his [Hemi-Sync] procedures at the Monroe Institute, which Monroe often conceptualized as putting the body to sleep while keeping the mind awake.”
“Overzealous critics have pounced on this statement as saying that I did not think there were any [parapsychological] effects in this study. I have always thought that some form of ESP was the best explanation of the results.”
“Anyway, when I got to Virginia, Bob and I got, got to know each other well, and he had already written up his first book and sent it to his New York agent, and a year had gone by and the agent had not contacted him once about any publisher whatsoever interested in publishing Bob's book. And I thought, that's ridiculous. I mean, I'd read the manuscript of Bob's book and said, hey, this is wonderful stuff. I said, okay, I know an editor at [Doubleday] who's doing the paperback version of my Altered States of Consciousness book, let me talk to him.”
“Oh, and to add a personal note to that: after I die, I'm really kind of hoping Bob will show up and say, "Well, it's about time you got here. Let me show you."”
“[He] has conducted investigations of Monroe under laboratory conditions and is convinced of the validity of Monroe's experience. Dr. Tart recently [recommended] that anyone wanting to learn about OOBE should contact MIAS, as they were the most knowledgeable in the area.”
Important things to consider
Small studies, honest limits
Tart's Monroe work amounts to eight nights in an ill-suited lab, one long-distance trial and one afternoon session. That is enough to show what Monroe's body and brain were doing during his reported OBEs, and not enough to establish what, if anything, he perceived. Tart himself says so plainly, and later writers who cite the studies as proof of leaving the body go further than he did.
Convinced of the experience, not of the mechanism
When the 1978 Army report says Tart was convinced of the validity of Monroe's experience, read it as the experience being genuine and worth studying. In his own writing Tart stays careful about mechanism: he thought ESP the best explanation for Miss Z's result and found Monroe's results tantalizing but inconclusive. He did not claim to have shown that consciousness leaves the body.
Partial hits can still be real
Tart argued that a genuine OBE could still deliver distorted perception, as ordinary perception often does. Monroe's psychic-beacon trip had striking timing and wrong details. You can read that as chance, as distorted psi, or as something else, but Tart's point is that a mixed result is not automatically a failure or a success.
Who coined "out-of-body experience"?
In Far Journeys Monroe credits Tart with popularizing the phrase, while one Institute speaker credits Monroe's 1971 book with coining it. Tart's own 1960s paper titles use the longer form "out-of-the-body experiences," and the shorter OBE spread through Monroe's book and later research. The safe statement is that the two of them made the neutral term popular in place of astral projection.
Miss Z is not Monroe
Online summaries sometimes merge the two studies. The five-digit number read correctly from a high shelf belongs to Miss Z, not Monroe. Monroe's laboratory results were physiological recordings and a few partial confirmations.
The state matches what Gateway teaches
Tart's finding of a held, drowsy, borderline-sleep state lines up closely with the Institute's description of Focus 10, mind awake and body asleep. That is consistent with Monroe building his training around that state, but the 1960s recordings came before Hemi-Sync existed and do not test the tapes.
Read the 1998 review first
Tart's 1998 paper Six Studies of Out-of-Body Experiences, in the Monroe Institute's research files on the Internet Archive, summarizes all of this in his own words, including his 1957 and 1970 hypnosis studies. It is clearer than the scattered secondhand accounts in videos.
Common questions
Who is Charles Tart and what is his connection to Robert Monroe?
Charles T. Tart is an American psychologist known for research on altered states of consciousness and parapsychology. He edited the 1969 anthology Altered States of Consciousness and later taught at the University of California at Davis. He met Monroe in 1965 while at the University of Virginia Medical School and studied him in the laboratory, recording his brain waves during reported out-of-body experiences. He also helped get Journeys Out of the Body published by Doubleday, and he served for many years on the Monroe Institute's board of advisors. He called Monroe a dear friend.
What did Charles Tart's lab studies of Monroe show?
They showed that Monroe's reported OBEs happened during a prolonged, deliberately held hypnagogic state, a light stage 1 sleep pattern somewhat like dreaming, with theta and slowed alpha rhythms Tart compared to advanced Zen meditators. Monroe slept normally on a baseline night and distinguished his dreams from his OBEs. One session at UC Davis showed a brief drop in blood pressure during an OBE. The studies did not show conclusive evidence that Monroe perceived distant places: a seen visitor might have been heard, and a long-distance trip had good timing but a wrong description.
Did Tart prove that Monroe left his body?
No, and Tart never claimed he had. He described a frustrating pattern: no ESP results clear enough to be conclusive, but none so clearly wrong that he could say nothing happened. His studies were small, from eight nights in an EEG lab poorly suited to sleep, to one long-distance trial and one afternoon session in California. What they established was the physiological state in which Monroe's experiences occurred. Whether consciousness actually left the body remained, in Tart's own judgment, an open question.
Who was Miss Z in Charles Tart's research?
Miss Z was a young woman who said she often floated out of her body at night and had already tested herself by memorizing a number during those experiences. Tart studied her for four nights in his sleep laboratory, placing a random five-digit number on a high shelf she could not see from the bed. On the fourth night she called out 25132, which was correct. Tart wrote cautiously that the result was not conclusive, but he has always thought some form of ESP was the best explanation, while admitting the design could not rule out telepathy from his own mind. She then moved away, and Monroe became his next subject.
Did Charles Tart coin the term "out-of-body experience"?
Not exactly. In Far Journeys Monroe credits Tart with popularizing the term during their 1960s work together, while one Monroe Institute speaker credits Monroe's own 1971 book with coining it. Monroe disliked old terms like astral projection because of their occult baggage and adopted the plainer phrase. Tart's own research papers from the 1960s use the longer form "out-of-the-body experiences," and the short form OBE spread through Monroe's books and later research. It is fair to say Tart and Monroe together made the neutral, descriptive term standard.
How did Charles Tart help publish Journeys Out of the Body?
Tart says Monroe's manuscript had been with a New York literary agent for a year with no publisher interested. Tart had read it and thought it was wonderful, so he passed it to an editor he knew at Doubleday, who was handling the paperback edition of Tart's Altered States of Consciousness. Doubleday published Journeys Out of the Body in 1971. Tart also recalls Monroe considering a pseudonym before deciding to put his own name on it, expecting only a few readers.
What did Charles Tart think of Monroe and Hemi-Sync later on?
He remained a friend and supporter. In his 1998 review he called Monroe his dear friend and wrote that the controlled drowsiness he had recorded was the kind of state Monroe went on to cultivate with Hemi-Sync, putting the body to sleep while keeping the mind awake. He said he found some Hemi-Sync results intriguing but had not followed them closely enough to analyze them professionally. He served on the Institute's board of advisors for years, and in a 2015 talk there he joked that he hopes Monroe will greet him after death.
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