An artistic interpretation of Robert Monroe’s Gateway Experience — Wave I: Discovery
For this installment of Illustrating the Dreams of Others, I’m exploring a slightly different kind of imagined experience. Rather than illustrating a conventional dream, I’ve constructed a photographic interpretation of a guided visualization from Robert Monroe’s Gateway Experience.
The Energy Conversion Box is one of the first techniques introduced in Wave I: Discovery. It asks participants to imagine a container in which they can temporarily deposit the worries, responsibilities, and distractions of everyday life before continuing their exploration of consciousness.
I was particularly interested in translating this intangible mental exercise into a physical scene using miniature objects and practical lighting.
The Gateway Experience, Wave I: Discovery
One of the first exercises introduced in Robert Monroe’s Gateway Experience is the Energy Conversion Box, a visualization technique intended to help participants temporarily separate themselves from the worries, responsibilities, and distractions of everyday life.
The exercise is relatively simple, but I found its imagery particularly interesting.
We are asked to imagine a large, sturdy box with a heavy lid. This container can take whatever form we choose. It might be an elaborate wooden chest, a metal container, or something entirely abstract. The important thing is that we can imagine opening it, placing things inside, and securely closing it.
Into this box, we are instructed to place anything that might interfere with our ability to focus on the experience ahead.
Our worries, anxieties, fears, physical concerns, responsibilities, and other distractions are temporarily deposited inside.
These concerns can be visualized as physical objects, allowing us to symbolically separate ourselves from experiences that ordinarily exist only within our minds.
Financial worries might take the form of a wallet or a stack of bills. Professional responsibilities could become a computer or a collection of documents. Other anxieties might appear as objects whose significance is understood only by the person imagining them.
Once everything has been deposited inside the box, we close the lid and turn away.
We leave it all behind.
A Temporary Separation
What I find particularly interesting about the Energy Conversion Box is that the exercise doesn’t ask us to eliminate our problems or pretend they no longer exist.
Instead, we are temporarily setting them aside.
The contents of the box are still there. We simply choose not to attend to them for the duration of the experience.
In this sense, the box functions as an imagined boundary between our ordinary waking concerns and the state of consciousness we are preparing to explore.
The exercise is introduced early in Wave I: Discovery and becomes a recurring element of the Gateway process, providing a familiar mental tool for setting aside distractions before subsequent exercises.
Whether considered a relaxation technique, a form of directed attention, or an exercise in symbolic visualization, the Energy Conversion Box offers an intriguing premise: that imagining a physical action might help us change our relationship to otherwise intangible concerns.
And, of course, I wanted to photograph it.
Visualizing the Energy Conversion Box
As I worked through Wave I, I began imagining how I might translate the Energy Conversion Box into a physical scene.
I envisioned a translucent human figure standing beside a glowing container, having deposited the burdens of everyday existence inside.
The figure would be turning away from the box, one hand still near the lid, captured at the moment of separation.
I wanted the box to emit an intense, warm light, suggesting that its contents were something more than ordinary physical objects.
I also imagined light passing through the figure itself, giving it an almost spectral appearance.
Rather than depicting a conventional person interacting with an ordinary storage container, I wanted the scene to occupy a space somewhere between a physical environment and an imagined psychological landscape.
The challenge was finding a way to achieve this effect using miniature objects and practical lighting.
Constructing the Scene
For the figure, I used a clear 1:18-scale action figure from Boss Fight Studio’s Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S. line.
The transparent plastic was particularly well suited to the image I had in mind. With the right lighting, the figure could appear illuminated from within, allowing me to suggest something intangible without relying entirely on digital manipulation.
I constructed the Energy Conversion Box, floor, and background wall from cardboard.
To illuminate the box, I used a battery-operated LED tealight with its upper portion removed. Positioned inside the cardboard container, the modified tealight produced a warm yellow-orange glow that spilled outward into the surrounding darkness.
Creating the glow within the figure required a different approach.
I cut holes into the cardboard floor and positioned a light pad beneath the scene, allowing light to pass upward through the openings and into the transparent plastic figure.
The two light sources created different effects.
The tealight illuminated the box with a concentrated, fiery glow, while the light pad caused portions of the figure to shine against the dark background.
The resulting contrast helped create the otherworldly atmosphere I had envisioned.
What appears to be a strange exchange of energy between a human figure and a glowing container was constructed from cardboard, a miniature action figure, a tealight, and a light pad.
I find that transformation of ordinary materials into an imagined environment particularly satisfying.
The Energy Conversion Box
The Energy Conversion Box — A photographic interpretation of the visualization exercise introduced in Wave I: Discovery of the Gateway Experience.
Materials: Boss Fight Studio Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S. clear 1:18-scale figure, cardboard, modified battery-operated LED tealight, and light pad.
The Moment of Letting Go
What interests me most about the resulting photograph is the moment it captures.
The figure has finished placing its concerns inside the box and is beginning to turn away.
The light remains.
The box remains.
Whatever has been deposited inside still exists.
But the figure is no longer attending to it.
I wanted to represent that brief transition between carrying the burdens of everyday life and temporarily setting them aside.
The translucency of the figure adds another dimension to the image. Its illuminated body suggests something less substantial than an ordinary physical form, as though the familiar boundaries of the body are beginning to become less important.
The photograph is not intended to depict a literal transfer of energy or a scientifically established process. Rather, it represents the subjective imagery associated with the exercise and my own artistic interpretation of that experience.
There is something fascinating about the way visualization can transform abstract experiences into imagined physical interactions.
Worry becomes something that can be picked up.
Responsibility becomes something that can be contained.
Anxiety becomes something we can imagine placing outside ourselves.
And through a simple act of imagination, we can turn our attention elsewhere.
Translating Consciousness into Photography
As I continue exploring the Gateway Experience, I’m becoming increasingly interested in the relationship between guided visualization and the images that emerge from it.
Some of these images appear spontaneously while I’m listening to the recordings. Others, like the Energy Conversion Box, originate from the exercises themselves and evolve through my attempts to interpret them visually.
In this case, the construction of the photograph became its own experiment.
I was taking a deliberately imagined object, building a physical representation of it, and then using light and perspective to make that construction resemble something intangible.
The process moves from imagination to physical form and back into an image that suggests an imagined reality.
I find that relationship particularly compelling.
The Energy Conversion Box is meant to help us temporarily set aside the concerns that occupy our attention. My photograph attempts to capture the instant in which that separation occurs.
Not as an escape from reality, but as a momentary decision to leave its burdens behind.
The box will still be there when we return.
For now, however, the figure is walking away.
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