Big ideas · 13 MIN READ · 8 SOURCE QUOTES
Out-of-body experiences
An out-of-body experience, or OBE, is the experience of being aware at a location apart from your physical body. Robert Monroe defined it as a state of consciousness in which you are distinct and separate from the body, by two inches or two thousand miles or more, yet still able to think, act and perceive. His own began in 1958, when he ran a New York radio production company and was neither particularly religious nor a student of Eastern disciplines; he and a psychologist friend replaced the era's label, astral projection, with the plainer phrase used today.
The first one came after weeks of a vibration that swept through his body whenever he lay down to sleep. One Friday night, waiting for it to pass while he thought about gliding the next morning, he bumped against his bedroom ceiling and saw himself in bed beside his wife. He panicked and dove back. Doctors found nothing wrong, so Monroe pointed the sound-research division of his company at the question. By his account, after about a year of experiments he accepted that the experiences were real. That private effort grew into Hemi-Sync, the sound technology behind Gateway, and into the Monroe Institute, founded in 1971, the year his first book, Journeys Out of the Body, appeared.
Monroe treated the OBE as a doorway rather than a destination. In his accounts it is a state you can learn to enter deliberately, unlike a dream, and it led him to larger ideas: phasing, nonphysical environments and a wider self. Gateway grows from that history but is not an out-of-body course. It begins with Focus 10 and includes only a few exercises aimed at separation. Researchers who tested Monroe, notably Charles Tart in the 1960s, recorded dreamlike brain activity but no conclusive proof that he saw distant places, and skeptics such as Susan Blackmore attribute OBEs to the brain.
Monroe's out-of-body experiences began in 1958 with the vibrations and led to the Monroe Institute; Gateway uses that territory without requiring it.
Key points
It began in 1958 with the vibrations
Monroe's first OBE followed weeks of an odd sensation: a vibration through his whole body whenever he lay down, sometimes with a feeling of paralysis. One Friday night in 1958, waiting for it to fade and daydreaming about gliding the next morning, he felt a bump against his shoulder and found himself floating against the ceiling. He saw himself asleep beside his wife, believed he was dying and scrambled back. More episodes and a round of medical exams followed before he began to investigate.
A year of testing before he believed it
Monroe said it took a full year of experiments before he was convinced he was neither hallucinating nor dreaming. He began with simple trips through the walls of his house and up into the clouds, then aimed at things he could verify. In one early test he visited his psychologist friend Foster Bradshaw, called Brad, who was ill at home, and watched him walk out with his wife. That evening the Bradshaws confirmed the time and their clothes, though neither had noticed Monroe.
What Monroe reported in the state
By his account the traveler keeps the senses: he learned to see, then hear and feel, but never to smell or taste. Solid objects feel like a cloud you can pass through, gravity barely pulls, distance is no obstacle, and he likened himself to a kite on a tether, with the cord leading back to the physical body. The second body starts in the physical body's shape and, with practice, becomes plastic.
Willful control sets it apart from dreams
Monroe insisted that the state as the Institute practices it is deliberate: you decide to go, to come back and what to do. Dreams do not normally work that way, and he said a lucid dream is only partly cut off from physical input, while in an OBE you are fully detached. He also held that everyone leaves the body in deep delta sleep, though most people do not remember it.
From leaving the body to phasing
In his late talks Monroe spoke less about a body leaving and more about phasing. Ordinary attention is fully in phase with physical time and space, daydreaming is a little out of phase, and at death the body stops working as a tuning device and you are completely out. In his 1992 videos he described consciousness as a continuum that does not stop at sleep, and the out-of-body state as learning to shift phase on purpose, with the payoff of knowing, not merely believing, that you are more than your physical body.
Later practice: the small-hours roll-out
In a 1987 talk Monroe said he no longer practiced out-of-body travel as such. He slept two or three cycles, woke around three in the morning rested and alert, and found it absurdly easy to roll out. With nobody awake to visit, he asked the part of himself that knows more than his thinking mind to do the driving, and said his whole pattern changed. Most of what followed he found unreportable, though he tried in Far Journeys.
Gateway uses the territory without requiring it
Gateway starts from Focus 10, mind awake and body asleep. A few exercises address leaving the body directly: Lift Off and First Stage Separation on the Freedom album, Point of Departure and Expansion on Odyssey. Monroe introduced Lift Off as a way to feel floating, not to get anyone out of the body, and leaders note that many Voyage participants who arrive hoping to leave their body find the program is about more.
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.
“Back in 1958, when it first began to happen to me, it was called astral projection. The label felt uncomfortable to a psychologist friend and to me too. [It] seemed too occult, [too] 16th century, so we began to call it the out-of-body experience, or OBE. It fit better in the doublespeak of the late 20th century. No respectable researcher or scientist would be caught fooling around with astral projection, but just maybe out of body might slip through.”
“But it turned out that, in a little more closer look, I realized with a shock, very much of a shock, that the person lying in bed with my wife was I. I was the one in bed. And with a great scrambling fear, I said, I'm dying. I'm bouncing against the ceiling and I'm dying. And with that frantic, panic-stricken effort, I swam through the air and dove at my physical body.”
“And that is that consciousness [is] a continuum. It does not stop. When we lose consciousness here, if we are not conscious here, we are conscious there, whatever there is. I don't pretend to say what that definition of there is. But we are there. So that means very simply, when [you go] to sleep here, you don't lose consciousness, you just shift along the spectrum of consciousness to another kind of wakefulness.”
“One, the out-of-body state as we have practiced it and work with it is certainly one that willful control is used, where one decides to go and one decides to come back and one decides what they're going to do in the out-of-body state. Dreams don't usually fall in that classification. We also take the position that everyone goes out of body during sleep, exactly for what reason again is yet to be determined.”
“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.”
“I said, well, there is a part of me, there must be, I hope there's a part of me, that knows more what to do with this than I do. Than this left-brain mix that I had. So I thought, well, I'll give it a try. So I rolled out at that three o'clock in the morning stage, just: all right, where do we go? What do we do? You're the boss, you're doing the driving. And with that, my whole pattern changed immensely, tremendously.”
“I've never heard of that. There are so many reasons that one would have to get back into their body that I don't, in my own experience anyway, feel I've ever had any such problem, because there's a very simple, what we call a panic button system, that in turn, if you use that, brings you back to your body instantly.”
“You come here to the Gateway Voyage, and you say, I want to get out of my body. And you find out that isn't what this program is about at all.”
Important things to consider
Fear is the first obstacle
Monroe called the fear barrier the greatest problem, and his own first reaction to leaving the body was terror. He said that once the fear went, curiosity replaced it. People who feel the vibrations or a sense of lifting and then freeze are repeating his early pattern. Go one calm step at a time.
Experience first, explanation second
An OBE report tells you what someone perceived. A second body, a phase shift, Tart's simulation view and the brain-based view are explanations added later. Write down what you experienced before choosing a label.
Verification is the hard part
Monroe's visit to Brad checked out, but he found many other trips only partly confirmed, and his description of Tart's home was largely wrong. Tart noted that even a genuine OBE can carry distorted perception. Treat impressions of distant places as experiences until something independent confirms them, and write them down first.
What skeptics say
A host of the Chasing Consciousness podcast, recapping an earlier interview with the skeptical psychologist Susan Blackmore, says she describes an OBE of her own in the 1970s, explains such experiences as brain science and physiology, and says no one has met her challenge, posted for over 40 years, to read numbers and words kept above her refrigerator. Experiments have also induced OBE-like illusions in healthy volunteers using cameras and virtual reality. Neither settles what any one person experienced.
Safety as Monroe saw it
Monroe called the fear of not getting back a great misconception, said he had never heard of it happening, and described a simple panic-button method that returns you at once. He rated the idea of another presence entering an empty body as highly overrated, while allowing that drugs or other mind-altering conditions might raise the possibility. These are his views, not clinical findings.
Health caution
This is an exploration practice, not a treatment. The publisher recommends talking with a medical professional before using the Gateway audio if you have a medical condition, a tendency toward seizures, an auditory disorder, an adverse mental condition or take medication that affects your ability to relax. If vivid or frightening experiences leave you distressed, ask a clinician.
What is and is not established
The experience is well documented as a report, and the Institute says studies show that about one adult in four remembers a spontaneous OBE. That anything actually leaves the body is not established. Tart's best result came from a different subject, a young woman who named a hidden five-digit number on one night of four; she then moved away and the work could not be extended. The Institute says anyone can learn the state with preparation, yet Tart found people who manage it almost on demand very rare, so do not treat an absent result as failure.
Common questions
What is an out-of-body experience?
An out-of-body experience is the experience of perceiving from a location outside your physical body, with a sense of being separate from it. Robert Monroe defined it as a state of consciousness in which you are distinct from the body, whether by two inches or two thousand miles or more, and can still think, act and perceive. Researchers such as Charles Tart add that the person feels located elsewhere, believes they are in their ordinary state of mind, and feels no contact with the physical body. Some happen spontaneously, in sleep, serious illness or accidents; the Institute says studies show about one adult in four remembers one. Others are practiced deliberately, which is what Monroe's work was about.
How did Robert Monroe's first out-of-body experience happen?
In 1958, while running a radio production company in New York, Monroe had been feeling a vibration through his body whenever he lay down to sleep. One Friday night he was waiting for it to pass, thinking happily about gliding the next day, when he felt a bump against his shoulder and found himself against the ceiling. Looking down, he saw himself in bed beside his wife. Convinced he was dying, he swam back through the air and snapped into his body. Doctors found nothing wrong. A psychiatrist friend suggested he might be conscious dreaming, then admitted he had made the term up; a psychologist friend suggested ten or twenty years in India. Monroe set his company's research division on the problem instead.
Is an out-of-body experience the same as astral projection?
In practice the two names point at the same kind of report: awareness located apart from the physical body. Monroe deliberately moved away from astral projection. He and a psychologist friend found it too occult, and he told Art Bell it had too much of a mystical flavor. They chose out-of-body experience as a plain alternative that scientists might tolerate. In his first book he also avoided the word astral, preferring second body and second state for the part that travels.
Do I need an out-of-body experience to get anything from Gateway?
No. The publisher describes the Gateway Experience as a home training series for developing and applying expanded states of awareness, starting with Focus 10 and moving through problem solving, patterning and other states. Skip Atwater, a longtime Institute leader, has said people come to the Gateway Voyage wanting to get out of their body and find that is not what the program is about, and an Institute trainer told Art Bell the programs are more about personal exploration than OBEs. Exercises such as Lift Off and Point of Departure are there for those who want to explore separation, but nothing requires it, and many listeners never have one.
Is it dangerous, and can you get stuck outside your body?
Monroe called the fear of not getting back a great misconception. In a 1987 interview he said he had never heard of it happening, and that the work includes a simple panic-button method that brings you back to your body at once. In 1985 he told a caller that the idea of another presence taking over an empty body is highly overrated, though he allowed that drugs or other mind-altering conditions might change that. These are Monroe's views from decades of experience, not medical findings. The publisher advises anyone with seizure tendencies, auditory or mental-health conditions, or medication that affects relaxation to consult a professional before using the audio.
Has science shown that out-of-body experiences are real?
Science has documented the experience but not settled what it is. Charles Tart recorded Monroe in eight late-night EEG sessions in 1965 and 1966 and for an afternoon in 1968. Reported out-of-body moments coincided with a drowsy, dreamlike brain pattern, not the profile of someone near death, but Monroe's attempts to read a target number or describe Tart's California home gave no proof that he saw distant places. Tart's best result came from a different subject, a young woman who named a hidden five-digit number one night. His own view in 1998 was that OBEs vary: some may involve the mind being partly elsewhere, some are simulations informed by ESP, and some are pure simulation, and all three can feel the same from inside. Skeptics such as Susan Blackmore hold that brain processes account for them. Monroe's own early check, the visit to Brad, is a reported case, not a controlled test.
In Monroe’s books
Summarized in our own words; the books are not reproduced on this site.
Journeys Out of the Body. Monroe recounts the vibrations, first separations, doctors' exams and early experiments, then sorts his travels into three Locales: the ordinary physical world, a nonphysical environment shaped by thought and emotion, and a physical-seeming world with different conditions.
Far Journeys. Published in 1985, it widens the picture beyond travel: Monroe describes handing his exploration decisions to his total self in 1972, the Explorer team's laboratory work, and a ring-shaped map of nonphysical territory.
Ultimate Journey. Published in 1994, it describes a larger self Monroe calls the I-there, which he meets as many personalities with their own life experiences, and it gives phasing its own section.
Keep exploring
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PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Watch and listen
Conversations and presentations connected to this topic. Each speaker brings their own experience and interpretation.
Podcast ·
Research and Out-of-Body Experiences with Robert A. Monroe
Tom Campbell
Expanding on Consciousness · Monroe Institute
A collaborator’s recollections
Campbell recalls meeting Bob Monroe, their early sound experiments and his own out-of-body experiences. Hear a collaborator’s account of the work behind the later programs.
YouTube video ·
Remembering Robert Monroe and Journeys Out of the Body
Tom Campbell
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove
A collaborator’s recollections
Campbell reflects on Monroe’s life and their years working together. Follow the interview into its existing transcript to compare his recollections with the archive.
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