The Gateway Process is a series of audio exercises developed by the Monroe Institute, and Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process is a 1983 military report that tried to explain why those exercises might work.
The report is the reason most people have heard of it. It circulates online as proof that the intelligence services secretly validated out-of-body travel. That is not what the document is, and the real story is more interesting than the version that spreads.
Two things that get confused
Almost every argument about the Gateway Process comes from mixing these up.
The Gateway Experience is a product. A set of audio tapes, now recordings, produced by the Monroe Institute in Virginia and sold to the public since the late 1970s. They use Hemi-Sync audio and are organised into “Waves”, each containing exercises that take the listener through numbered “Focus levels”.
Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process is a document. Twenty-nine pages, written in 1983 by Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell and addressed to the Commander of the US Army Operational Group, INSCOM. It was declassified and released in 2003, and it sits in the CIA’s CREST archive - which is why it is universally called “the CIA Gateway document”.
That last detail matters. It is an Army report that ended up in CIA archives. It was not a CIA research programme, and no agency ran experiments on it.
What the report actually is
Read it expecting a study and you will be confused, because it contains no study.
There are no subjects. No experiments. No measurements, no control group, no results, no findings. McDonnell was not testing whether the tapes worked. He was writing a theoretical rationale - an attempt to assemble, from the physics and neuroscience available to him in 1983, an explanation of how they might work if they did.
In structure it is closer to a literature review with a conclusion attached than to research. It is one officer’s synthesis, written for a military readership, and it should be read as that.
This is why the popular framing collapses under inspection. “The CIA investigated astral projection and found it was real” describes a document that does not exist. What exists is an Army officer arguing that a commercial meditation programme had a plausible theoretical basis.
The argument McDonnell made
His reasoning ran roughly like this.
Consciousness, he suggested, might be understood on a holographic model - an idea he took from the work associated with neuroscientist Karl Pribram and physicist David Bohm, in which information is distributed throughout a system rather than stored in one place. If the brain works something like a hologram, then in principle it could interact with a wider field of information.
To connect that to the body, he leaned heavily on Itzhak Bentov, whose Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977) proposed that rhythmic bodily motion - the heartbeat driving standing waves through the circulatory system and skull - could produce resonance affecting brain states. Bentov’s model is the source of much of the report’s physiological argument.
The Hemi-Sync audio then supplies the mechanism: by presenting slightly different frequencies to each ear, it is said to drive both hemispheres toward a synchronised state, making these effects accessible deliberately rather than by chance.
It is an ambitious chain of reasoning. Each link is also contestable, and the report treats several speculative ideas as settled in a way that most physicists would not accept then or now.
Hemi-Sync and binaural beats
The underlying audio phenomenon is real and old. Present a tone of 100 Hz to one ear and 104 Hz to the other, and the listener perceives a 4 Hz pulse that is not present in either signal. It was first described by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839.
That the perceptual effect exists is not disputed. What is disputed is what follows from it. The claim that binaural beats reliably drive brainwave frequencies, synchronise the hemispheres, or produce specific states of consciousness has been studied repeatedly, and results are mixed and generally modest. Some studies find small effects on anxiety or attention; others find nothing; methodologies vary widely.
The honest position: binaural beats are a genuine auditory phenomenon with an unsettled evidence base for the stronger claims made about them. If you find the audio helps you relax into the state, that experience is real. It is not the same as the mechanism having been demonstrated. Our guide to binaural beats for astral projection goes into what people report using them for.
Robert Monroe and where this came from
None of it starts with the military.
Robert Monroe was a radio and television executive who, from the late 1950s, began experiencing episodes he described as leaving his body. He documented them in Journeys Out of the Body (1971), the book that put the phrase “out-of-body experience” into general use.
Monroe’s interest was practical. Coming from broadcasting, he approached the problem as an audio engineering question: if particular sound patterns accompanied these states, could sound be used to induce them? That question produced Hemi-Sync and, eventually, the Monroe Institute.
The Focus levels in the Gateway tapes come from his framework. Focus 10 is described as “mind awake, body asleep” - the same threshold state that nearly every astral projection technique is trying to reach by other means. Later levels describe progressively further-removed states.
The missing page 25
For years the scan in circulation was missing page 25, and the gap generated a great deal of speculation about suppressed content.
The page was subsequently made available. It continues the same theoretical discussion as the pages surrounding it. There is no revelation on it.
This is worth knowing because the missing page did more for the document’s reputation than its contents ever did. A gap in a declassified file invites the reader to imagine what would justify the secrecy, and imagination outperforms a dense paragraph about holographic models every time.
What can reasonably be concluded
- Documented: the report exists, was written in 1983 by Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell for US Army INSCOM, was released in 2003, and is held in the CIA’s CREST archive. The Gateway Experience tapes exist and are commercially available. Binaural beats are a real auditory phenomenon.
- Argued, not demonstrated: McDonnell’s holographic model of consciousness, Bentov’s resonance mechanism, and the claim that Hemi-Sync produces hemispheric synchronisation with specific effects.
- Not established: that the Gateway Process produces out-of-body travel, that consciousness leaves the body, or that any government agency concluded that it does.
- Misleading: every framing that begins “the CIA proved”. The agency archived an Army officer’s theoretical paper. It did not endorse, replicate or test it.
The document is a genuine historical curiosity - a serious attempt, inside a military bureaucracy, to take an unusual claim seriously and reason about it. That is interesting on its own terms. It does not need to be something it isn’t.
Common questions
Is the Gateway Process a CIA programme?
No. It is a commercial product of the Monroe Institute. The report about it was written by an Army officer and later declassified from CIA archives, which is where the association comes from.
Where can I read the document?
It is in the CIA’s public CREST reading room as Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, and a transcription is hosted on Wikisource. Both are freely accessible.
Does the Gateway Process actually work?
It depends what “work” means. Many people report deep relaxation and unusual states using the tapes, and that is a real experience. Whether it produces out-of-body travel has not been demonstrated, and the 1983 report does not test it.
Do I need the official tapes?
No. The underlying approach - relaxation, sustained awareness at the edge of sleep, an audio anchor - does not depend on any particular recording.
What is Focus 10?
Monroe’s term for “mind awake, body asleep”: physically asleep while awareness continues. It is the threshold state most projection techniques aim for.
Is this connected to the Stargate Project?
They are separate. Stargate was the long-running US remote viewing programme. Both sit in the same declassified archive and both concern unusual mental states, which is why they are often mentioned together, but the Gateway report is not part of it.
Sources and further reading
- McDonnell, W. M. (1983). Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process. US Army Operational Group, INSCOM. Declassified 2003; held in the CIA CREST archive.
- Monroe, R. (1971). Journeys Out of the Body. Doubleday.
- Bentov, I. (1977). Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness. Dutton.
- Dove, H. W. (1839). Original description of binaural beats.
If you want to work with the Gateway material directly, we cover the tapes and what they contain in our review of the Gateway Experience. That page contains affiliate links; this one does not.
