Suppose you want to dream along with another person. You try to meet each other asleep and look for evidence in your own dreams. Exactly how will your partner look to you if his image appears in your dream? Just like he looks in waking life? Just as he seems to himself in his own dream of the night? We dreamers usually assume that the image we convey to another person is as fixed as our bodies in physical reality. All our partner needs to do is peer in our direction to see it, just as he would see our material body using open eyes. This idea is borrowed from the out-of-body experience. The OBE is often called "traveling clairvoyance" and clairvoyance is psychic-seeing-at-a-distance. It presumes there is only one thing to see: one body, specifically one surface of a body.

However, a dream is not an OBE. Mutual dreaming is not based on clairvoyance; it's based on telepathy, on mental contact. In a mutual dream, as you attempt to connect with your partner, you are not limited to the surface of reality. You don't just "see" him; you "read" him. Psi perception picks up the hidden, even the unconscious. As you reach out mentally towards your partner, you may well perceive bits of information not obvious at the surface of reality. Now even at the surface of dream reality. Thus, it doesn't matter if your partner is awake or asleep. How you perceive him is not necessarily how he seems to himself at the surface of one of his bodies. Your dream psi can delve deeper than that.

In the mutual dreaming projects I facilitated, there were, indeed, participants who could pick up the outer appearance of one of their team members, even though they had never met, never seen a photo, never received a written or aural description of the individual. But these "psychic hits" came at the beginning of the projects, not at the end. It seemed that, instead of getting better, we got worse. Why? The conventional explanation at the time was that we all suddenly realized how intimate an endeavor mutual dreaming could be and we all withdrew, turned inward, put up defenses. Well, that may have been true for first-time players, but the phenomenon continued even after people got to know each other (most projects went on for months; a couple lasted for years). What happened to the mutual dreamers? Why couldn't they be found as easily as they had been first identified? Where did they go?

During the same period, I was holding dream telepathy experiments, too. Unlike complex dynamic human beings, picture targets are simple and frozen in time. The correlation between picture and dream is fairly easy to discover. I quickly found out that very few people were having literal "hits" using pictures, either. Again, I wondered, what was wrong? Thank goodness for remote viewing. After stringent lab and government scrutiny, the reality of deliberate psi experimentation was being revealed to the public. And guess what? Even the top psychics could get results that would vary from their targets. Sometimes, quite a lot! However, there were certain constants that did shine through their perceptual productions. Eventually, I discovered these parameters were the same for dreams. One of the constants was shape or form. For instance, using ESP, a remote viewer might not be able to determine that a building was a school or hospital, but he could perceive its rectangular dimensions very well.

It's as if the psychic self is like a kid with a coloring book. Figure outlines can be perceived acutely, but the child fills in the details with elements drawn from his own memories. Now, this "coloring in" is considered to be a bad thing. Since the result is not clear and literal clairvoyance, it's dismissed as a sort of "static" that interferes with pristine perfection. And, the static is all supposed to come from the dreamer, himself.

Now, it's true that we can plaster our own presumptions atop the bare form of being. Projection is rampant, even encouraged by some types of dream interpretation. The dream is treated as an ink blot that inspires our free-flowing imagination. However, some of our so-called "projections" can be very accurate, just not literal. I may dream of brunette Sue as a redhead, then discover that she's planning to tint her hair. I may think of Sam as a big, cuddly teddy bear, and it turns out that he thinks of himself as a teddy bear. Since I know Sam, I've probably read subliminal clues correctly. If I don't know Sue, it could be that I picked up her intention telepathically, then converted that idea into a picture. My picture of Sue is my own mental artwork, but it's based on viable information, nonetheless. This isn't static, it's a sort of "x-ray vision" that sees beneath the surface of physical reality. The structure, shape, form of the mundane manifestation may still show itself in my dream. In my dream, I see Sam as a teddy bear, but he's the same size and walks with the same rhythm as his waking self. Sue appears as a stranger, but her hair is the same length and degree of curliness as her physical version. I can identify her by paying attention to her silhouette.

It wasn't until I started working with 3-D targets that the other important constant revealed itself. This constant is motion and all its components: speed, direction, gesture, plus the tactile sensation of movement. As a "sender" of a dream telepathy target, I can swing an object from side to side and you may see a swinging object in your dream. Or you may swing in your dream, a very empathic reaction that places you in the middle of the action. There are various body movements (like jumping up and down) that can transfer from waking state to dream, even dream to dream. But the most dramatic in terms of unusual form and motion is dream flight. There were many mutual dreaming participants who could fly in their dreams. But could their partners see them fly?

Again, the answer could be yes, but it was very rare to make a literal identification of an unknown partner, and that usually happened at the beginning of the project. Another failure? I ignored the blatant imagery and looked for anything airborne. Some were still human, but seemed to be strangers to us. Birds and insects were seen. So were man-made conveyances like gliders, airplanes, helicopters and hot air balloons. Even flying cars and flying cats! Of course, I didn't look just for evidence of flight. I found other correspondences to lend weight to the idea that, even if we perceived ourselves flying in human form in our dreams, our airborne images could be seen by our dream partners in any number of guises.

Were these alternate appearances a case of contamination or static? Certainly some projections were our own personal "stuff," involving the most recent or most intense flying images in our memory banks. Other guises were what I call "social perceptions." As with teddy bear Sam, these are not psi, but accurate peripheral or subliminal clues personified.

But there were psychic "x-ray" perceptions, too. A dreamer could be seen as a cartoon character if that's how he saw himself in his imagination. A team member could be perceived with hawk wings if that's how her dream psyche pictured her in a dream unknown to her partners. And then there was something else.

Once, I was flying along in a lucid dream and I began to wonder ­ what holds me up? I reached down and felt a force field. Then I reached outwards and felt it surrounding me. It was invisible to sight, sensible to touch. It seemed to be an ovoid enclosure with the feel of what I can only call a "membrane."

Several years later, I saw the sci-fi movie "Contact." When the character, played by Jodie Foster, arrives at her destination in the distant cosmos, she finds herself surrounded by a picture-scape that looks like a seashore drawn from her past. She is very aware that this beach scene is an illusion created from her memories. However, when she looks upward, she can see a night sky sparkling with far more stars than can be viewed from Earth. We are led to believe that the stars are actual perceptions of her physical location, while the seascape is a personal projection. But there's no way to tell where one ends and the other begins. This is very true of mutual dreams: the seamless melding of projection and perception.

Then Jodie reaches skyward, and touches something virtually invisible. It gives like gelatin and quivers like the ripples in a lake. Déjà vu. It was just like my dream! Jodie's seascape appeared as if there was plenty of physical space between herself and the horizon. But the invisible edge of the dream scene was actually quite close. It was curved to surround her and felt and acted like a membrane. A perfect hologram of distance created in a small, personal, ovoid space.

When we sleep, what surrounds us? Our own dreams, of course. Our own private telephone booths, capable of taking in information and converting it to picture. Within this hologram, flying is an illusion. Within the hologram, I don't think our dreaming body goes anywhere; it just seems that way. But the dream enclosure itself, ah, that's another story.

I'll admit that when I began to research mutual dreams, I had the same inner conception as everybody else. In a shared dream, we'd be in astral bodies within a fixed space that not only looked like the waking version, it acted like the waking version. Dream space would be as pre-existing as physical reality. However, most of the mutual dreamers I was working with had heard of a rather revolutionary idea. Dream space, shared dream space was something that you could actually build. Create your own reality. There were no plans for construction, so the mutual dreamers used what structure they had. And what they had was very novel.

This was the era of new beginnings, new energies, new ideas and new fads, if you will. One of the most important was lucid dreaming. This, plus the more general intent associated with dream incubation, meant something different was afoot. Beforehand, most attention had been focused on ESP, or extra-sensory perception, with a fairly passive approach to that side of psi. Now, certain dreamers were engaged in deliberate dreaming. Such intentional energizing is actually a form of PK or psychokinesis, the other side of the psi equation. When magicians of old tried to manifest the ethereal, they created thought forms. Not airy-fairy illusions hanging in the smoke, but thought with organization, structure and density. Thought with an edge to it. Tactile thought. Any lucid dreamer knows how tactile the dream can be. Of course it is ­ we put out a lot of energy to maintain it! I believe concentration of incubated energy beefs up our thought forms. Especially the one that's closest to us, our aura, the thought form that surrounds us. It's our private space, virtually invisible to us when we are awake. But asleep, we change channels so we can see this invisible world, and deliberate focus makes it more substantial. Intentionality makes the screen on which the dream movie plays more opaque. The egg in which dreams are hatched is no longer ethereal. Now it has a translucent turtle shell.

Initially, this is a disadvantage to the psychic dreamer. Psi perception requires thin boundaries, not thick-headed ones! Through visualization, lucid dreaming, dream incubation and other expressions of deliberate will power, we can create thought bubbles so firm that they lock out clear perception. We see through the glass darkly, if at all. The reality we create within truly is ours alone. When we shift intent to communication and connection with other people, we may still retain the opaque movie screen, but now some psi information gets through. This is the "psychic" explanation of the dream and out-of-body experience: it's all our world; we take outer information and convert it into pictures based on our own memory-associations. And, in many cases, I think this conception is quite accurate.

But when we try to limit our projections and attempt to perceive other folks instead, the inward reflecting surface of the ovoid membrane begins to loosen its silver backing. Instead of a mirror, it shifts towards transparent glass. We begin to "see" more of what's "out there" to see. At first, our perceptions tend to act like our agreements in physical reality. They become socially equivalent (this means we talk as if we see things the same, often without doing detailed reality checks to determine if the pictures in our "minds eye" actually are the same). Then, like Jodie Foster, we begin to perceive what's "out there" as well as what's "in here."

This is just fine if what's "out there" is something we expect to see. But, if we have no physical reference, we must fall back on our own resources. And they may not be enough. Jodie Foster encountered an alien who took on the appearance of her father. Often, mutual dreamers will paint a familiar face on a stranger, to attain a degree of comfort about the encounter. However, before Jodie's alien took on human form, it was but a conglomeration of morphing shapes. It appeared closer to its actual form, but not one that Jodie could see clearly, because it was so very alien. Viewed from within our dream bubble, an unknown presence may look very strange indeed. Our dream psyche is doing the best it can to present information without us realizing that what we see is not the reality of the physical. At first, we force the morphing shapes into private pastels: something we can recognize, label, detail and embellish. Later, deliberate attempts to see clearly and not to leap to conclusions and confusions can result in less elaborate dreamscapes and more bare outlines of objects.

So, what did we mutual dreamers see as we tried to squint through our dream membranes? Strange objects in the sky. Curved, like a flying mushroom or cereal bowl. Not a human form, that's for sure. Something more ovoid. Often, we labeled them "UFO's." Again, I ignored the overt labels and looked for similar shapes. I found them on the ground, too. There, they were close enough to recognize as forms surrounding human bodies, specifically, our fellow team members. On the ground, the picture looked like prone bodies rolled up in cocoons, in sleeping bags or in various cylindrical coverings. The dreamer, asleep. Or people might be seen upright, dressed in puffed pants like a belly dancer, or a balloon dress, space suit, diver's suit ­ anything around a person so that the human form wasn't evident, but the ovoid shape was. Clearly, we were trying to picture something alien as best we could, using objects we already knew. This attempt to render the unknown in familiar terms is not limited to dreams or psi. We do the same thing in waking life.

So where were the missing mutual dreamers? Well, they might be as absent as we first surmised, doing their own thing far from the group. Or they could be up close and personal, but having to communicate through our very opaque dream-surround, with their images appearing however we painted them, based on telepathic information. Or they could be attempting to "go" where the rest of us were, and seemingly not accomplishing that feat, since the focus of their attention was turned inward towards their own holographic worlds and their world-edges were so opaque. However, when the outlines of opaque dream-worlds were seen through a more translucent membrane, the dream enclosures at a distance would become UFOs flying past/through/into a seemingly private sky.

Identifying a dream partner isn't always easy! Given that painted and labeled appearances may be misleading, is there any guaranteed way to know if a partner is truly "there" in your dream? Well, let me put it this way. Let's say it's the first time you've turned on a television. Can you tell the difference between a live news cast, a delayed news cast, a commentary, a documentary, a commercial or infomercial, a fictional story, a spontaneous video clip or a preplanned "reality show"? Hmmm? Distinguishing between truth and fiction, real or imaginary, is a learned skill with lots of opportunity to correct mistakes through quick contrast and thoughtful reflection. None of us has the same degree of experience in the dream state. In the waking state, virtual reality is becoming so "real," that it's getting hard to tell the dividing line between a live shot and a computer-generated graphic. Our own personal virtual realities already have the capacity to present seamless information. And they do.

The only accurate way to tell if psi is operative is to verify it when you wake up. Granted, as you gain experience with mutual dreamers, you can improve your ability to distinguish subtle differences between their "stuff" and your "stuff" (a dream journal is invaluable). Sometimes it's possible to recognize a person by their "feeling tones," but this is, at best, a neophyte art and science. For gosh sakes, talk to your partners! Feedback is crucial. Interview them. Interview someone who knows them. How else are you going to learn the difference between projection and perception?