In the spring of 1977, I was just getting started in the US Army’s secret counterintelligence remote-viewing operations at Fort Meade, Maryland. Seeking information on organizations and techniques that could benefit our military goals, I got in touch with The Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences. Because of the secrecy surrounding my military mission, I could not reveal the true nature of my inquiry at the Institute. I didn’t conceal the fact that I was a Military Intelligence Officer but stated simply that I had read Bob Monroe’s book, Journeys Out of the Body, and was curious about his research and facilities, and whether others could be taught his techniques. I was asked to leave a phone number. I asked to meet and talk with Bob Monroe. And in a day or two, much to my surprise, Mr. Monroe himself called back and provided me with directions from my base of operations in the Washington DC area to Whistlefield Farm, his Virginia home.
As I drove around the Washington DC beltway, west on Interstate 66, and south on US 29, I somehow knew I was headed for another of life's grand adventures. As I drove deeper into the rural Virginia countryside my thoughts drifted between expectations and daydreams. I wondered about this man. Others had written of their so-called out-of-body experiences but Monroe’s work was somehow different. Monroe went beyond reporting the trivialities of extra-corporeal visits to friends, neighbors, and distant places in the world. He wrote of visiting other dimensions, or as he put it, other locales—realms beyond the physical world reminiscent of my childhood understanding of a “spiritual” domain representative of our true nature. Of course, such thoughts extended beyond my official interest in Monroe and the possible application of his techniques for military remote viewing.
The further south I traveled on US 29 the more I noticed the oncoming spring. Trees seemed fuller, greener and some filled with blossoms. I stopped at a roadside fast-food restaurant for a cup of coffee. The waitress spoke with a placid southern accent that somehow graced the experience of springtime itself. As I drove south and west of Charlottesville the homes changed from apartments, townhouses, and real-estate efficient tracked houses to rural single-family dwellings surrounded by a proportional parcels of open land.
Beyond these modest homes there were working farms, hayfields, and grazing livestock until I approached the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here, the homes reflected an entirely different culture—or at least economic class. These Virginia estates, with their manicured lawns and carefully landscaped properties, had their own names. Apparently this long-standing tradition still persisted here in rural Virginia, something I hadn’t noticed the greater Baltimore-Washington corridor. As I whizzed by these elegant homes at fifty-five miles an hour I kept reviewing the driving instructions Bob Monroe had given me and wondering what I would find when I finally reached my destination.
The Whistlefield Farm homestead stretched across a broad open meadow in a receding valley hidden in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. It was quite elegant, containing a main house and several outbuildings, including barns for hay, horses, and tractors, a huge glass greenhouse, and guest quarters, which the family referred to as the Owl House. Near the property entrance was a building with the office and lab facilities for the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences.
When I approached the house, Nancy Monroe, Bob’s wife, met me at the door. Clearly, Nancy was a southern belle. Wearing a beautiful print dress, tasteful jewelry, and fresh nail polish she exuded a gracious, lady-like manner. She spoke with a gentle southern accent, a leisurely segue from word to word that mysteriously focused one’s attention and stirred the fires of the soul. Her eyes sparkled from within as though an inner bright light, a knowingness was somehow leaking out. With a broad smile, Nancy welcomed me into the house and guided me through various rooms and out to a small patio where Mr. Monroe was waiting. This patio area was part of the house, either screened-in or windowed, and perhaps a step or two below the main floor level.
Mr. Monroe, sitting on a divan in the patio, wore sweat pants, suspenders, slippers, and a partially unbuttoned coffee-stained shirt. His appearance presented an interesting departure from Nancy’s. As he brushed cigarette ashes off his shirt he looked up and calmly said, “Well, hello.” No southern accent here. No pretentious social niceties either. I thought—as a first impression—that perhaps he was more interested in who he was “out-of-body” rather than what I might think of him or how I might perceive him in the physical.
I introduced myself, telling him that I had read his book and was fascinated with his work. Nancy graciously offered me some iced tea then withdrew quietly into the main house and left us alone to talk. Thinking back, this was very typical and quite appropriate—for a proper southern lady raised in the mid-twentieth century.
Bob spoke freely and openly about his book and his personal experiences. At times, an occasional glance from his penetrating blue eyes seemed as though he was seeing beyond my overt military persona and speaking directly to my soul. I felt uneasy about this; somewhat vulnerable as the official purpose of my visit was considered classified.
Bob asked me to walk around outside with him in the sun-warmed spring air so that we might enjoy the picturesque and fragrant spring blossoms. He showed me the greenhouse and the gardens and we eventually settled down to continue our talk on a grassy slope near his laboratory and offices. Sitting there at the base of a flowering fruit tree, I found myself thinking about my own out-of-body experiences that I remembered from childhood. Bob encouraged me to share my thoughts with him.
I started by telling Bob about my earliest remembered out-of-body event, which had to do with the fact that I was a bed wetter until I was about ten years old. I don’t remember my parents or my sisters ever ridiculing me or teasing me about bed-wetting. They would casually remind me to go to the bathroom before going to bed. If I had an accident at night I just told my mom, who would tell me to take a shower or bath and she would change my bed or ask me to put my bedding in the laundry so it could be washed. Even though I was not criticized at home there was talk at school about bed-wetting and I knew enough to keep this bed-wetting thing a secret.
As I grew up I began to have fewer and fewer
bed-wetting incidents, but each time it happened it made me angrier. I became
more and more frustrated. I didn’t like wetting my bed and I didn’t like that
funny brown rubber mat Mom always put under my sheets to protect the mattress.
One final time I woke up wet, yelled out in frustration, and began to cry.
Mom came running into my room and asked what was the matter. I showed her my wet pajamas, sheets, and blankets and began to scream at her, “I went to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom.” She told me to calm down and tell her exactly what had happened. I told her that I knew I needed to go to the bathroom and I went in there and sat on the toilet. But when I started to pee I woke up in my bed and I was all wet. Standing there in my wet pajamas, my crying subsided only to be replaced with fitful anger.
Mom reached out to me and gently put her hand on my shoulder, smiled, and said simply, “Oh!” I wiped away my tears and asked her what had happened to me. She said that when I went into the bathroom I must have forgotten to take my body with me. I asked her what she meant and she explained that I only spend part of the time in my body and that when I had gone into the bathroom I probably just went without it. Somehow, this made sense to me and I never did wet the bed again.
Bob smiled and asked if this was the only time that I remembered being out of my body. “No,” I said, and went on to tell him that after my mom had told me about being apart from my physical body when I wet my bed, I began to pay attention to what happened when I went to sleep at night. I noticed that I attended some kind of “night school” with others who I recognized. If I didn’t focus too much on this “night school” I could travel out-of-body and go play with neighborhood friends.
When I got a little older, these nightly sojourns changed. I visited school friends and approached people (girls especially) outside the confines of an adolescent social structure that severely limited my interactions with the opposite sex.
I became particularly interested in a blue-eyed girl with curly auburn hair named Kathy. I found out where Kathy lived by following the school bus to her stop and then casually riding by on my bike while she walked to her house. She lived further from school than I did but in a familiar area. At the time I had a paper route and delivered the town paper throughout her neighborhood.
From then on I could always find her house at night when I traveled out-of-body. Late at night I would float in the air outside her house and hope that she would come out. A couple of times I drifted through the house trying to find her. I never did.
I went on to tell Bob that as I moved deeper
into my teenage years and fantasized about living apart from parental oversight,
I began to have nocturnal out-of-body sojourns to a particular house in a
forested area. I explained to Bob that would always approach the house from an
altitude and was able to see it surrounded by trees on a forest-covered
mountainside. As I swooped down to ground level and moved closer to the front of
the house I noticed that it had board-patterned siding (i.e., not stucco or
cement blocks) and was nestled into the woods.
Over the years I visited this location over and over again. Several times I drifted into the house and discovered that it had an antique-looking desk downstairs at the foot of the staircase. There was also a greenhouse attached to the side of the house. I thought I saw two small sets of stairs leading to the greenhouse from the main structure.[1]
Having taken considerable time telling Bob about
these and some other childhood out-of-body experiences, I felt I had said enough
and wanted to get on to the purpose for my visit, which because of military
secrecy, I could not fully disclose. I started thinking about how I could turn
the conversation.
We sat in silence, which felt awkward to me, for
a minute or two. Then Bob began to explain that he had developed a sound
technology, a stimulus that allowed people to have experiences under laboratory
conditions—experiences that were similar to what he had written about in his
book and to those I had been talking about myself. He said that many of these
people could talk about or report their experiences while they were happening.
I couldn’t imagine how this could be done, given
the memory of my own childhood out-of-body experiences. I asked how it was
possible, and Bob replied, “Well kid, I guess we’ll just have to show you.” And
with that, Bob invited me into his laboratory and offices.
We had not yet visited this building and I had
been wondering why he had not taken me there during our walk around the
property. As we worked our way up the slope toward the building, I thought,
“Maybe he’s going to show me an out-of-body experiment in progress. There must
be an ongoing experiment in the lab and he’s going to let me observe.”
As we entered the building I said a polite hello
to the receptionist and followed Bob down a hall, passing a room with a lot of
recording equipment, switching panels, and audio-mixing boards. We turned into a
small room with a bed. Bob told me to lie down in the bed and that he would play
some sounds for me. I was startled by his suggestion and looked quickly around
the room.
It was a plain, very plain room without windows
or any regular furniture. The bed did not stick out into the room but was
seemingly built into the wall. It was recessed back into the wall surface so
that it did not take up any floor space in the rather small room. I moved
towards the bed and ask hesitantly, “Do you want me to lie here?” He told me to
lie down and put on the stereo headphones that were on the pillow.
As I complied, I asked what kind of sounds I
would be hearing. He said that he would first play some music for me so that I
would be comfortable. As I reclined with the headphones on, I noticed something
hanging down in front of my face. I asked what this was and he told me not to
worry about it, that it was a microphone so that he would be able to hear me in
the other room. (Meaning I guessed, the room with all the equipment we had
passed going down the hallway.) He asked me if I was comfortable, turned out the
lights in the room, and closed the door.
Within a minute or so I heard music through the
headphones. This wasn’t any music that I had heard before and I thought it
rather strange. (I learned later that the music was from a composer named
Tomida, who became well known for his baroque, new-age music.) I relaxed a bit
and after a while the music faded into the sound of waves crashing on the beach.
Bob, speaking through my headphones, said, “This
is the sound of the surf. It represents the natural power of sound and is a
symbol here at the Institute.” I liked the surf sound. It reminded me of the
beach and of happy times in California where I grew up. I imagined the waves
crashing up on the sand and receding back into the sea, and I thought I could
even hear the popping hiss of bubbles in the beach sand when the water receded.
The sound of the crashing waves faded, leaving a
warm hiss reminiscent of the gentle whoosh of bubbly foam as it soaks into the
beach sand. I waited, thinking there might be another wave, and I began to sense
an unusual auditory sensation, a slow rhythmic pulse. I couldn’t tell where it
was coming from. It seemed to be in the background, behind or underneath the
warm hissing noise. At one point I was sure that the pulsing was actually coming
from inside my own head.
But I quickly forgot about the sound and my
thoughts began to drift—until I noticed that the bed seemed to be moving up
towards the ceiling. The sensation of movement was unmistakable but I couldn’t
hear the mechanism working to raise the bed. This was really interesting.
I assumed that Mr. Monroe had control of the bed
from the room with all the equipment. I thought the mechanism must be like the
hydraulic lift that mechanics use on cars when they do an oil change. But I
still couldn’t hear an air compressor or any other mechanical noises. I wondered
how such a device could have been installed at a private residence, and thought
maybe someday I could have such a device in my garage. As these random thoughts
dissipated, I discovered that I was traveling.
My
kinesthetic sense of motion (like the feeling you get when flying in an
airplane) was accompanied by a strange visual perception. I seemed to be moving
through a white tube or tunnel, its walls lined with crystalline forms. My
impression was that I must have been flying down the middle of a Flavor Straw[2].
I was going quite fast. In Star Trek
terms I would estimate about warp
seven.
Bob’s voice came to me over the earphones.
“What’s happening?”
“I seem to be going
somewhere.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
By this time I had forgotten all about the room
and the strange bed. My journey through this passageway continued for what
seemed to be a long while. Eventually I sensed that I was coming to the end of
the Flavor Straw and I arched my
back, following the upswing curve of the tube. Above me I could see a vast open
white area.
Just as I began to exit the tube my perspective
switched, and suddenly I was standing in the boundless white space watching
myself emerge from the end of the Flavor
Straw. At almost the same moment—knowingness, a revelation, filled my mind.
I had come all this way only to discover that I was already there.
Realizing this, I must have uttered an expletive
like, “Oh!” or something similar because Bob immediately spoke to me through my
headphones asking, “What happened?” His voice startled me. I had forgotten all
about him. For a moment I thought he must be in this white space with me
somewhere. I regained my composure and answered by saying, “I’ll have to tell
you later.”
I explored this white space for some time but
today I do not consciously remember much of what I found there. I am sure it was
meaningful in some way but I cannot recall the
particulars.
Bob startled me again. He said that it was time
to get some lunch and that we should finish up. The very concept of “lunch”
seemed strange to me in the vast white space. But then he changed the sound
patterns and I became aware of being back in the room in the building in the
Virginia countryside. I felt myself, or perhaps the bed, being lowered back
down. Again the sense of motion was obvious but it was very gentle and I
couldn’t perceive any mechanical noise or vibration. I wondered how a hydraulic
lift could be so smooth.
The lights came on in the room and I felt
disoriented. For a moment I couldn’t quite figure out where I was. Then Bob came
into the room and started urging me to get up and move out into the sunshine. I
sat up, turned, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and rested my feet on
the floor. I bent over and raised the blanket that was draped over the edge of
the bed, and looked under the bed. There was no lift mechanism, just a floor.
The bed frame was actually rather crudely built out of 2 X 4 framing lumber and
a sheet of plywood.
Seeing me bent over, Bob asked if I had dropped
my wallet or watch on the floor. I looked up at him and told him that I hadn’t.
Again he urged me to stand and walk outside. As we went down the hall towards
the exit he kept asking me what I wanted to eat for lunch. At the time, his
voice seemed loud and somewhat annoying. I told him that it didn’t matter to me.
Secretly, in my mind I was thinking that if I could get a six-pack of whatever
had just happened to me, I would take that for lunch.
We ate at a restaurant a few miles from
Whistlefield on top of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Bob explained that I had
experienced a sound technology he had developed and patented. He called this
technology Hemi-Sync®[3]
because the two halves of the brain worked together or in synchrony to enable
the auditory beating or pulsing I had experienced. He said that many people had
been able to experience a wide range of expanded states of consciousness with
this technology.
When I told him about the sensation of rising up
to the ceiling he smiled and assured me that the bed did not move. Recognizing
only then what had really happened to me, I asked if everybody had out-of-body
experiences with this Hemi-Sync sound. He said that not everybody remembers or
reports such experiences and that the Hemi-Sync sounds only encourage a “mind
awake—body asleep” state, not necessarily an out-of-body experience. He said
that the experiences people have in this state depended on their intent and
motivation and can be limited by their fears and belief systems.
At the time I didn’t understand all he was saying and I wondered why I had floated out-of-body so easily. I asked Bob if the Hemi-Sync sounds he had used with me in the laboratory were special in any way. He said that the sounds weren’t special and that he suspected that I would be able to get out-of-body rather easily based on what I had told him about my childhood experiences. He went on, “From what you told me, you must have been in contact with or guided by something greater than your physical body for some time now. Surely, you have a sense of self that is greater that your physical body? Children intuitively know this until such awareness is subdued by social conditioning. Apparently this knowing, this awareness of a greater self was not discouraged during your upbringing.”