For the past twelve weeks, three friends and I have been conducting an informal dream telepathy experiment.
We structured the experiment as such: Three of us acted as dreamers. One acted as an arbiter. Each Friday, one person would be sender (we simply rotated) and the other two would be receivers. The sender would try to telepathically send a word/image to the receivers. In the morning, the dreamers would email their dreams to the arbiter. The sender, of course, would send the target word/image, and any dreams he/she had including the target or the other two dreamers.
With the arbiter we agreed that a direct hit (on the part of the receivers) would only be deemed to have happened if the target word itself appeared in the receivers’ reports. We were concerned with contexual directness too, but didn’t know exactly how to gauge it. By “contextual directness” I mean, for example, if the target word/image were “horse,” a contextually direct hit would be the dreamer, say, specifically noticing a field with horses or riding a horse. A contextually indirect hit would be something like “I drove through the country. There were cows and horses and sheep around.” So, context, for our purposes, had to do with how much the object captured the dreamer’s attention.
We further agreed that an indirect hit would occur if the image appeared in the receiver’s report, but not the exact word itself. We decided at the beginning of the experiment that the target words would be limited to concrete nouns. Senders were forbidden from telling receivers what the word was until the arbiter sent his email out with results.
We aimed only for dream telepathy, not for lucid dream telepathy, but some lucid dreams were reported on experiment days.
I’m waiting now on the results of week 12, but here’s a summary of what happened in weeks 1 through 11. Bear in mind, this was an informal experiment among friends with a lot happening in their lives. On one week, the sender forgot to send anything. And more than once, the receivers had no dream reports. That said, however…
We had one direct hit, at least, by our aforementioned standards.
On week 8 of the experiment, when I was sender, I sent the word “snow.” Myself, I remembered no dreams of the receivers, but the receiver had this dream:
She was lucid in this dream, and focused on finding me. When she found “me,” she asked me what the target word/image was. “I” refused to tell her, saying:
Also, in her lucid dream, when she found “me,” “I” was:
On that same night, I reported this short dream:
Furthermore, on this same week 8, J., the other receiver reported this dream:
…while I also reported this dream for week 8:
So, all on this same night, I sent the word/image of “snow” and H. had a dream that specifically featured snow; H. dreamt of me digging in soil, while I dreamt of gardening; and, J. and I both dreamt of pools with furry creatures surrounded by housing.
On the night that J. was sender (week 6), but forgot to send something, I was actually lucid, and had this dream:
When I asked to see J’s target image, the dream seemed to fall into complete chaos. I’ve never had a lucid dream experience like that and my report doesn’t do it justice. Everything above seemed to happen in a matter of mere seconds. I was hardly able to stay lucid, as I was bombarded by a rush of images and changes of location. I went from seeing an indistinct image on a “screen” to being inside the imagery, which blurred and shifted around me wildly.
Needless to say, I had no clear idea what J’s image was supposed to be—at that time not knowing that he hadn’t actually tried to send anything.
One of our more fascinating connections, though, happened in week 1. It wasn’t a direct hit, or related to the target, but it was fascinating to us nonetheless.
J. hardly remembered any dreams, but reported this:
…while H., the sender on that week (with a target of “dragonfly”), also had a dream of a woman with a mohawk. We discovered this after the arbiter sent out dream reports. H. didn’t include the report of the mohawk woman because she didn’t think it was relevant. After that we began sharing more.
On week 4, H’s target word/image was “tree.” The word “tree” didn’t appear in anyone’s dream reports, but I had—and reported to the arbiter—this hypnopompic experience:
We called this a borderline indirect hit, since I reported specifically noticing trees (juniper trees), but didn’t write “tree.”
On week 7, the target word/image was “fruit,” and I had this brief dream:
I mention this experience because, writing the dream down, I was certain that the target was related to my dream of berries. I don’t particularly like berries. I eat blueberries, but rarely eat raspberries or blackberries because I find them too acidic. The dream was out of character for me.
On a non-experiment day, both H. and I had lucid dreams of each other, but didn’t report them to the arbiter since it wasn’t an experiment day. We both had dreams of being abused. She was being abused by a woman from her past. I was being abused by a strange man. She became lucid and called out for me. I appeared behind her and grabbed her hand. She woke up. I became lucid, ran away from the abusive man, and called out for her. She appeared and we had a little adventure.
Twice, becoming lucid, I tried to change dreams to find H. and J. Both times, I ended up in very dark dream areas. In the case of seeking out H., the dream got brighter the longer I was there (I didn’t affect it by imagining light—the scene simply became clearer as time passed). In the case of seeking out J., I had to leave for another dream area to improve the lighting. I was unable to talk to H., though I found her. Another DC prevented me from talking to her by attacking me. I never found J.
Also during this experiment period, I slept a night in my girlfriend’s grandmother’s sick room. Her grandmother was near-coma at this point and non-verbal. During the night, I had a dream in which I thought I heard A. (the grandmother) talking. I got out of bed (there were two in the room—it was a nursing home) and walked over to A. A. greeted me and thought that I was somebody from Texas. In the dream, I thought that she was confused because of her dementia. (It’s rather severe.) I woke up. Later, at breakfast, I told this dream to my girlfriend and her sister and they told me that A’s fourth husband had been from Texas. To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t know this beforehand. In fact, as long as I’ve been with this partner, her grandmother has been disabled and hardly able to speak. I’ve never had a coherent conversation with her. I knew that she was married more than once, but all the husbands are dead and I’d never met them. A. died a few days later.
So, long story short, I’m motivated to keep investigating the possibility of dream telepathy. I didn’t share all of the connections we experienced by comparing our dream reports, but shared many of the striking similarities—and hits.
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. I meant that both a receiver and the sender being lucid (with a high level of control and good memory of the outer world) would probably increase the chances, since the receiver would remember to look for the sign and the sender would remember to send it.