Example:41 dreamt my sister was attacking me with a pair of scissors. She backed me against a wall and stabbed me. During the day after the dream my sister phoned me at work and said she’d had an awful dream in which she stabbed me with scissors’ (D).
The Poseidia Institute of Virginia Beach, Va., have run a number of group ‘mutual dreaming’ experiments. Although the Institute suggests very positive results, a critical survey of the dreams and reports reveals a lack of hard evidence. Like other areas of ESP dreaming, it can seldom ever be willed. But the dreams did show themes related to problems regarding intimate meeting. Also, some of the dreams were directly about the goal of dream meeting, as in the following example.
Example: ‘I find the group of people I am looking for. There were maybe six or more people. They were asleep on mattresses except for two or three. These were awake and waiting for me, and wearing small pointed hats such as Tibetan Lamas wear. In the dream I realised this meant they had achieved sufficient inner growth to remain awake in sleep. We started to communicate and were going to wake the others’ (Tom C).
See Also: dream as a meeting place.
the dream as extended perception Even everyday mental functions such as thought and memory occur largely unconsciously. During sleep, perhaps because we surrender our volition, what is left of self awareness enters the realm where the nine-tenths of the iceberg of our mind is active. In this realm faculties can function which on waking seem unobtainable.
For example:
1- Extending awareness to a point distant from the body, to witness events confirmed by other people. This is often called out of body experience (OBE), but some of these experiences suggest the nature of consciousness and time may not be dualistic (having to be either here or there).
See Also: out of body experience.
2-Being aware of the death or danger of a member of family. Kinship and love seem to be major factors in the way the unconscious functions.
See Also: dead people dreams.
3-Seeing into the workings of the body and diagnosing an illness before it becomes apparent to waking observation. Dr Vasali Kasatkin and Professor Medard Boss have specialised in the study of such dreams. In a recent dream told to me, a man looked back into a bedroom and saw a piece of the wall fall away. Waves of water gushed from a main pipe.
The dreamer struggled to hold back the piece of broken pipe. Within two weeks his colon burst and he had to have a major operation.
See Also: meditation.
4-Access to a computer-like ability to son through a massive store of information and experience to solve problems. These dreams are often confused with precognitive ability. Prediction does occur from these dreams, but it arises, as with weather prediction, from a massive gathering of information, most of which we have forgotten consciously. Monon Schatzman, in a New Scientist anicle, showed how subjects can produce answers to complex mathematical problems in their dreams.
See Also: dream process as computer; creativity and problem solving in dreams.
5-Tapping a collective mind which stores all experience, and is sensed as godlike or holy.
See Also: dream as spiritual guide.
It seems likely that before the development of speech the human animal communicated largely through body language. Some dreams suggest we still have this ability to read a person’s health, sexual situation, intentions and even their past, through body shape, posture and tiny movements.
See Also: postures, movement, body language.
See Also: Cayce, Edgar; collective unconscious; wife under family.
See Also: hallucinations.
[1]