Shared Dreaming, Shared Responsibilities - or- In Telepathic Dreams

Dreamer: Jean, 34, American

Parapsychology - or- Dream Telepathy

My own personal experiences with what for some has been labeled as parapsychological  phenomena like telepathy has always been viewed with caution. While I agree, that phenomena such as telepathy in dreams exists, such abilities must be exercised with great ethical restraint. Telepathic dream experiences are usually very personal and intimate. The dream interpretation posted at the IIDR website "Dream Yoga" attests to this idea. With shared dreaming, comes shared responsibilities.

What we learned from the film "Inception",  are the depth psychological dangers of not being able to separate out fantasy, dream and reality. A film that shows us the psychic dangers of telepathic dreaming is "In Dreams". Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) begins having visions about a missing child which turns out to be her own daughter who is kidnapped and murdered. Claire then has dreams about the murderer (Robert Downey Jr.). Using this psychic connection Claire makes it her mission to stop him from killing other children.

Below is a dream from Jean who asks whether such dreams are common.

Jean, 34, American

Has anyone ever heard of 2 people having the same dream on the same night? A long time ago I had a scary dream, in the dream I wanted my best friend or my boyfriend to find me. The next morning we all talked and we both dreamt of him searching for me. Anyway, I have had the same dreams as my sister in childhood and every so often I dream the same dream as another person who is close to me. Are these kinds of dreams common?

Mr Hagen's Reply: Spooky Action at a Distance -or- Quantum Psychic Connections

Phenomena such as intuition, Extrasensory Perception (ESP), telepathy, remote viewing and pre-cognition all point to something called psi. Psi is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and has reportedly been designated by British parapsychologists to label psychic experiences.

There are I believe such things as telepathic dreams, although no one quite knows how they work. Freud believed that a scientific explanation for telepathic dreams would be found in the future. Most larger libraries have material on this phenomenon. For example, see Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner's "Dream telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP". In popular culture, the "Jedi" of Star Wars fame have telepathic and psi abilities. Vulcans and Betazoids of Star Trek mythology are telepathic races.

Another way of looking at this type of experience is called "lucid dreaming", although it is qualitatively different from telepathic dreams, I believe they share close psychological connections to one another. Stephen LaBerge is an expert on lucid dreams and has a web-site on the net, otherwise there are lots of sites on the net that discuss lucid dreams. Another person who was interested in such phenomena of course was the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Jung's concept of "synchronicity" attempts to show the existence of acausal psychological connections. Albert Einstein would call the synchronous phenomena of quantum entanglement "spooky action at a distance". Usually telepathic dreams are generated by a strong emotional bond between people, although other motives can exist.

Some further literature that might be of interest:

  • Pamela Ball, "Lucid Dreaming: And the Art of Dreaming Creatively"
  • Dale E. Graff, "River Dreams: The Case of the Missing General and other Adventures in Psychic Research"
  • Robert Moss, "Dreamgates"
  • Charles Tart, "Body Mind Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality"
  • Fred Allan Wolf, "The Dreaming Universe"
  • Patricia Garfield, "Creative Dreaming"
  • J.W. Dunne "Experiments in Time"
All material Copyright 2006 International Institute for Dream Research. All rights reserved.