Sarah wasn’t expecting to experience paralysis at 7 am on a weekday during a meditation at her home.

But in August, while listening to “The Gateway Tapes”—a set of guided meditations intended to help people reach new planes of consciousness—she says her limbs froze.

Sarah, who is in her early thirties and didn’t want her real name used due to privacy concerns, says the tapes—which she had been listening to on and off for months—took her on a roller-coaster journey of out-of-body experiences. “I was in and out of time and space,” she says. It felt like a bad trip, she says, despite the fact she was sober.

She recalls a subsequent three-week period of disorienting instability that veered from feelings of intense spiritual connection to fears that she may never again relate with others. Looking back, she is relieved she was not left “in a kind of a spiritual psychosis,” but she sees the events as part of an ultimately positive “awakening” process.

Sarah is not the only one to report baffling and petrifying experiences thanks to the Gateway Process, which has been around for over 50 years and has exploded in popularity since the pandemic. But, like many others, she also credits it with helping her calm her mind and make transformative life changes.

Developed by radio broadcasting executive Robert Monroe, the Gateway Process claims to be “a voyage of self-discovery” that can help people go “farther, deeper and faster into different dimensions of consciousness.” Monroe founded the Monroe Institute in 1971 in Faber, Virginia. Dubbed an American “Hogwarts” by one consciousness