Waking Up To Psi

When two people compare their dreams, they may well uncover telepathic links. Here, one ESP researcher, Joe Friedman, tells of his experiments in this area.

There are few examples of a sustained telepathic link between two people. One is the telepathic link between the American novelist Upton Sinclair and his wife Mary, a link that was tested in a series of ESP drawing experiments, subsequently described in detail in Sinclair's book Mental Radio. This book, published in 1930, so impressed Albert Einstein that he wrote an introduction to it.

In the late 1970s, I myself was involved in a sustained and well-documented series of dreams that were telepathically linked to those of a close friend and former student of mine. Most of these dreams took place between May and December 1979. There were more than 20 in all, equally distributed between the two partners.

Dave Ashworth first became a student in one of my parapsychology courses, held in London, in April 1978. Aged 23, he had been interested in the occult and psychical research for some time. He was also deeply aware of his dream life, often remembering and recording several dreams a night. After a class that I held on telepathic and precognitive dreams, Dave came up to me and said that, though he had been writing down his dreams for some time, he had never had one that he considered to be precognitive. I told him confidently that he would have such a dream the following week. In saying this, I was partly trying to bring about the desired result - but I also felt a genuine conviction that Dave would indeed have a precognitive dream.

The following week, however, he told me of the failure of his attempt. He had remembered and recorded 13 dreams during the week, but none of them had proved precognitive. I asked him to tell me just one. After looking through his dream diary, he recounted one in which, he said: 'The brat next door comes into my room. I am very hospitable and feed him, but he acts boorishly, as if he owns the place. He opens the wardrobe and, to my amazement, there is another door in the back of the wardrobe, which leads into the attic next door... '

I then told Dave he had just had his first telepathic dream. I had been intending to lead my class in a guided fantasy that evening: they would be urged to have a dream in which they opened their wardrobe door to find that there was another door in the back, a door that opened magically for them.

This experience inaugurated a telepathic dream series that was to last over two years and that was marked by an all-important factor - that of selection.

In this case, Dave chose the psychic dream from a total of 13 that he had recorded during the week. He could hardly have picked out the 'right' dream by pure chance; so he must have had some awareness that this dream was precisely the psychic one for which he was looking. Later in the series, this awareness became more explicit, so that each of us became better able to pick out his own psychic dreams.

In March 1979, Dave joined a dream group that I was leading. We met fairly regularly, sometimes as often as once a week, for a period of a little more than a year. It was during this period that most of the psychic dreams occurred.

Often, Dave and I would dream of similar topics, themes or metaphors on the same night. In one such spontaneous coincidence, I dreamed of visiting a friend who lived in Colliers Wood in south London. In part of Dave's dream of that night, most of which involved eating at my flat, he dreamed of a picnic in a forest. As he recounted: 'All around are people in orange clothes... some single, some in groups. They are either walkers or miners... There are stones and stone circles ... I stand in one circle and am aware that this is a place of power. I touch my forehead to a tree and then wonder if I am emitting psychic power.'

Could those in the forest, possibly miners, be a reference to Colliers Wood? Whether or not this is so, the dream is important for other reasons. In it, Dave seems to have had an awareness that it was connected with me - he dreamt of eating a meal at my flat - and that the dream was psychic because he dreamt that he might be emitting psychic power.

Many psychoanalysts who have studied psychic dreams have encountered this sort of 'tracer' - an indication in the dream itself that it will prove psychic. Indeed, I have found that most people who have regular telepathic dreams have some sort of tracer in them. Psychic dreams also often have a peculiar quality of vividness. On other occasions, they might have a distinctive 'feel' to them. In Dave's psychic dreams, a grey cat often appeared. In other people's dreams, the tracer is to be found in the fact that the dream is set in a certain place of power.

Sleeping dialogue

Many of the dreams in our telepathic series contained such tracer elements. Their presence indicated that both of us were becoming more aware of the dream dialogue that was gradually developing between us.

Another sort of psychic dream may involve a reference to an event occurring in the waking life of the other person in the friendship. In one such dream, I had gone to a park with a friend of Dave's and mine called Laura. According to my dream diary, while I was preoccupied with listening to some music that was being played in the park:

'A youth started to remove my bike. I rushed over to him and started pushing him around, really enjoying myself, saying "What are you doing with my bike?" While I was doing this, the boy's father came and got on my bike and started to ride it off. I realised that I had allowed myself to get carried away... '

Shortly before I dreamed this, in the evening, I later learned that Dave had left his bike outside a friend's house during a visit. While he was inside, his rear light was stolen, for the second time from this location. On the way home, Dave fell to daydreaming of leaving his bike outside this house and hiding, waiting for the thief to come. He then caught the thief and gave him a good beating. His daydream continued with the boy's father coming to his friend's house and asking for the person who owned a bicycle.

I did several forms of informal experiment with Dave. In one, I bought a postcard of a fantasy scene that I thought would be a good target and sent it to him while I was on holiday in the United States. I wrote on the back: 'Dear Dave, This card was your precog. target for last night - did you dream about it?' In fact, Dave's dream on the night before he received the card did have a resemblance to the target. It was as follows:

'At Joe's, seeing him for the first time after the break. He tells me of some sci-fi film - did I see it? I didn't, but it seems Roy [Joe's flatmate] did. They talk about it. Joe then mentions a series of sci-fi fantasy films, but I have seen none of them.'

On another occasion, Dave picked up a photograph I was 'transmitting' to another group with which I was involved. On the night of this transmission, of which he had no knowledge, Dave dreamed:

'In a street I come unexpectedly upon Jeff [a friend] - he looks absolutely amazing, dressed in a yellow safari suit ... with a butterfly net in one hand, stalking butterflies... There are many brightly coloured butterflies, large furry ones, yellow ones and somewhere amidst them all is one which is very special.'

The photograph showed a dance troupe which included a number of people wearing wings - they did indeed look like butterflies.

These are a few personal, well authenticated examples of dream telepathy. They certainly seem to suggest that two, or more, people who are open to the possibility of the paranormal can radically increase the amount and quality of ESP occurring in their lives by making a practice of remembering, recording and sharing their dreams.