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When psi researcher René Warcollier studied deliberate waking telepathy, he used picture drawings as targets. He also created experiments that involved several participants. Time after time, he found cases when the official target and the telepathic response were barely related. Instead, one person's response was remarkably similar to...the response of another person. I've discovered the same effect in dream telepathy. However, dreams are not limited a simple one-to-one correspondence. Oh, no. They are part of a much wider network. And sometimes I've been able to get a glimpse of that net while tracking experiment results. In 1992, two magazines were scheduled to host my dream telepathy experiments. One was supposed to follow the other: *American Psychic Magazine* in April and *FATE* in June. However, *American Psychic* was disappointed by the low turnout from its readership. So I agreed to "re-send" the same target a couple of months later and the number of responses did increase. In one of those synchronicities of fate, *FATE* magazine had scheduled their experiment for the weekend just before the second sending of the *American Psychic* target. So I was preparing to send two targets out into the telepathic "airwaves" during the same general period of time. Furthermore, some people knew about both experiments and were planning to participate in each. I fully expected some dreams to shift over and show up on the other magazine's target dates. I'd seen such cross-connections so many times before. As anticipated, some dreamers did use the experiments to try out interactive dreaming. For instance, CB reported that, a few days before the *American Psychic* target date, she and her daughter had experienced almost identical dream images on the same night. Based on that incident, both had decided to dream for the experiment, although CB was by far the most successful. But not for the *American Psychic* experiment. Her dreams didn't resonate with it at all. It was the dreams she sent in for the *FATE* dream telepathy experiment which showed the most correspondence to the *American Psychic* target. Conversely, RS was trying to dream for *American Psychic* when she "hit" the *FATE* target; HL's dreams did the same. And it's to the *FATE* target we must turn to learn the full import of "the lady with the wide brimmed hat." Between the two experiments, a total of four people dreamt up that special image, beginning with Teri Reedy and her friend Carol. On the first *American Psychic* target date, April 4th, Teri reported the following: "I received (the) notice on Friday, April 3rd, and barely had time to prepare myself for the experiment. I called my best friend and we decided to give it a whirl. I awoke this morning feeling that I had failed to get anything pertinent. What I did get were the words "peach blossoms" and a visual image of a woman all dressed up in a tailored suit, wearing a wide brimmed cream or light colored hat and she was holding a mirror or a magnifying glass in her right hand and looking at papers, a book, or a magazine. The lady's clothing seemed to be from the 1940's. I remember being handed a flowering tree branch. I called my friend and she was able to bring back much detail. I was delighted to hear that she awoke smelling peaches!" Teri and Carol's co-dreaming made no sense in terms of the first magazine's target (a volleyball game). But I knew that the second experiment was coming up, so I waited to see those results before I leapt to any conclusions. The target I finally chose for *FATE* magazine was an old photo of myself in my twenties. In it, I am leaning against a giant 35-mm camera, one of the props at Universal Studios in Southern California. My arms are partially encircling the focusing ring. My husband, Manny, is taking the picture and his image is reflected in the curved lens. Both metaphorically and literally, the glass lens was a mirror, magnified in size many times. Teri's dream of the woman holding a mirror or magnifying glass would seem to resonate with that target. But the clothing didn't fit. When I sent the photo out into the airways that June, I telepathically beamed a message for folks to go "through" the lens of the camera, to make an Alice-through-the-looking-glass trip into wonderland. Of course, when you can see "through" a mirror to the other side, it's become a window. This is the dream of Teri's friend, Carol: "I had wonderful dreams that seemed to last forever. I could smell peaches but never could see any. There was a lady with a large brimmed cream colored spring looking hat. She was looking through a large glass. As I got closer to her, she looked up with an expression of delight and said, "You really should look through the windows." "The first window I looked through was like looking out through space. The planets and stars moved faster than I thought...As I turned away from the window, there was another lady coming in behind me. The lady that showed me the window was talking to the second lady saying, "Here's the window if you wish to be in this circle." I went to the next window I liked and I could see myself and how I had gotten this far in life and why she wanted me in the circle... "At the next window, it was like seeing old friends...My friend Teri, was there and she had on a beautiful white blouse with black, pleated slacks, and a black pearl necklace. I was to see which one should be there and I was to pay real close attention. "As I went back to find the lady with the hat, there were four other people with her. I didn't know any of them and they all turned and stared at me. The lady with the hat stepped out and asked me if I wanted to look on or slow down one of the other ladies that was staring at me. (This other lady) looked like she was full of fear and I remember saying to myself, 'Why is she so fearful up here, out of the world? There is nothing to fear, but the fear you bring with you, yourself.' The lady with the hat said, 'Not all people have experienced your level of seeing some of the greatness you've seen. Now that I have slowed you down, do you want to look through the last window again?' "I did and it was like going back 200 years with beautiful wooded areas that were once a place of peace with a clear stream to look into." Carol also reported this hypnogogic imagery the next morning: "I saw a picture of a wooded area with a stream so clear that I could see right through it. There were fruit trees along one side and the lady with the wide brimmed hat was there. She had on a long white dress like the ones they wore in the 1800's. Her hair was long and dark and her complexion had no blemishes anywhere. The fruit trees were in full bloom and smelled like peaches." Okay, Carol and Teri had similar imagery on the same night. Mutual dreaming. Teri and Carol picked up my telepathic message to focus on the lens, 2 months before I sent it. Precognitive dreaming. That's just peachy. :-) But did the two of them get the target picture? Not literally. I wasn't wearing a tailored suit or a long white dress. Nor a hat. But they weren't that far afield. My friend and fellow colleague, Jill Gregory, was the third dreamer of the bunch. She had sent notices of the experiments to both Teri and Carol. The two sent copies of their *American Psychic* dreams back to Jill who then forwarded them to me, along with her own dream of April 10th. Towards the end, she dreamt: "The scene then changed, as well as my dream body. I was myself of twenty years ago, wearing a tan dress, carrying a wide brimmed hat and walking along the beach with my husband." Spontaneous telepathy most often occurs among people who know one another well. So it's not unusual that a special symbol would be shared among three correspondents, two of whom were friends with each other and one of whom was a friend of mine. But it is intriguing that all three were co-dreaming ahead of the target date. Fast forward to the *FATE* experiment. When the dreams came in, it was obvious that this interactive dream game had picked up a fourth player, Shirley Richardson, who none of us knew. Shirley wrote me this note: "The attached sketch represents a 'dream' or sort of vision that came to me as I drifted off to sleep the night of June 17th. I don't know if it represents your picture or someone else's (!), but it was very clear and I awoke right after it appeared. This experience was not all like my regular dreams, which are usually filled with lots of action in which I am involved. In this "dream," I was not involved. I saw a young dark haired girl, dressed in white or light pink walking slowly along a beach, much as the representation in the sketch." Yes, Shirley had drawn her image. It was the lady with the wide brimmed hat. Now I had a picture to compare with the target photo. Where did that persistent wide brimmed hat come from? Psi and subliminal researchers have discovered that the dreaming mind is like a kid with a coloring book. The kid-id is allowed to fill in the picture however it wishes. But the book's lines and shapes remain the same, no matter how creative the coloring gets. Similarly, the dream's metaphoric imagery acts like a vine on a wooden trellis. Its organic growth meanders around a fairly fixed framework of form and line. In this case, the tailored suit, the blouse and slacks, the long white, pink, tan dress were the flexible ornamentations. But there was also a shape so stable that four people actually called it the same thing. How does a picture's main forms become evident? Well, try squinting your eyes and blurring your vision. At a certain point, the details go away, but the outlines remain. This seems to be the usual focus of dreams and psi - a little vague, but with prominent general features. So, finally, that's what I did, squint my eyes while looking at the target photo. As you may recall, I was leaning against a giant 35-mm camera with my arms around the circular lens. Actually, there are several circles to be seen: the lens, the focusing ring and the aperture selection ring. My arms look like they are holding onto the innermost ring. My head looks like it is resting against the outermost ring, as if it were surrounded by the outermost ring. So what's a circular ring on the head, that extends far beyond the size of the head? Something that can also be carried in your hands? If you didn't know, I'd bet you'd guess that it was a hat. A light, spring hat with a very wide brim. |