Nancy McMoneagle on the Origins of the Monroe Institute

This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman that gathers people working in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine to talk about the practical side of psychology. In this session, Lenderman welcomes Nancy McMoneagle, the President of the Monroe Institute, and asks her to walk through the group's background for anyone unfamiliar with it.

As Lenderman points out, the Institute has been at this for more than thirty years, and plenty of listeners may never have encountered its work or the name of its founder, Bob Monroe. He hands the floor to Nancy to fill in that history.

Nancy explains that Bob Monroe was her stepfather, and that before any of the research began he made his living writing for radio. Back in the 1930s and 1940s he built radio programs, worked his way to a vice president role at RKO in New York City, and put words into scripts for shows like The Shadow and The Green Hornet. Sound fascinated him from the start, long before he had any reason to study what it might do to the mind.

It was during those New York years that something strange began happening to him. One night, lying asleep in bed beside his wife, he felt himself knock against something he couldn't account for. His first guess was that he had tumbled out of bed. Then he registered that whatever he was pressing against seemed to be coming up out of the floor.

He turned over, opened his eyes, and looked down. What he saw, and at the time he took it for a dream, was his wife in bed with a man. Curious about who the stranger could be, he drifted down for a closer look and found that the man was himself. The obvious conclusion arrived next: he assumed he had died.

A single thought followed, that he needed to get back into his body, and with that he snapped back into it instantly. His next worry was that he might be losing his mind. The episodes kept recurring, and they grew more frequent rather than less.

Along with these experiences came another sensation. As he was drifting off to sleep, he would feel a current of energy moving up and down his body, and the whole thing carried a sound he compared to a freight train rolling past.