The Construction of Reality in "Waking Life" and "Dreaming Life"

Stanley Krippner

Saybrook Graduate School

and

Ted Sichelman

Copyright authors and Journal of Integral Studies.

            Shamans were the first dreamworkers and the first to ask traditional philosophical questions.  They used (and still use) altered states of consciousness to travel into "dreamtime," obtaining power and knowledge to help and heal members of their communities -- the social group that awarded them shamanic status.  In psychological terms, shamans regulate their attention to obtain information not available to their peers, using it to reduce stress and improve the living conditions of members of their society.

            Over the centuries, Western scientists and philosophers have dismissed shamanic "journeying" as fanciful at best, and delusional at worst.  Julian Silverman (1967) postulated that shamanism is a form of socially sanctioned schizophrenia, and George Devereux (1961) took the position that shamans are neurotics and hysterics.  Roger Walsh (1990) has pointed out the fallacies in these arguments and, in recent years, scientific data, numerous case studies, and anecdotal reports have emerged supporting the beneficial use of dreams (especially lucid dreams), imagination, and imagery to treat disease, improve sports performance, and enhance creativity (Krippner & Dillard, 1988; LaBerge, Levitan, & Dement, 1986).  From this perspective, shamanic reports of "journeying" to the Lower World and the Upper World can be viewed as useful metaphors for the accessing of unconscious material and latent potentials. 

            A similar body of parapsychological literature, both anecdotal and experimental, supports the shamanic model of “journeying" backward and forward in time and space. These accounts are rejected by most established academic institutions, allegedly because they are flawed, fraudulent, or fabricated (e.g., Grey, 1994).  However, the French philosopher, Henri Bergson (1914), took the position that each person is, at each moment, potentially aware of all concurrent events as well as of his or her past experiences; to prevent being overwhelmed by this information, the brain acts as a "filter" to suppress all input except that which is relevant and practical.  Though accounts of shamanic "journeying" do not easily adapt themselves to the practical pursuits of the West, even if a small number of them had merit, shamanic philosophy would deserve to be reconsidered (Krippner, 1994).

            For the shaman, there were no rigid boundaries between "waking life" and "dreaming life"; both were regarded as "real” but full admission to the latter usually depended on training and discipline.  Malidoma Patrice Some' (1994), an African Dagara shaman, remarks, "Nothing can be imagined that is not already there in the inner or outer worlds" (p. 233).  This assertion echoes the Greek philosopher Parmenides' claim that "what is there to be said and thought must needs be: for it is there for being, but nothing is not."  Further, it has been observed that the fanciful travels Parmenides recounted in his poems resemble the "journeys" described by shamans (Kirk, Raven, & Schofield, 1983, pp. 242-243). 

            Before his initiation, Some's mentor had asserted, “The dream world is real....It's more real than what you are observing now" (p. 211).  During his lengthy initiation, Some' knew that this procedure would prepare him to live “as if I were in a dream in which worlds collided and different realities confronted one another....The contrast between this state of mind and what I had been accustomed to...was the same as the difference between liquid and solid.  It seemed to me that Dagara knowledge was liquid in the sense that what I was learning was living, breathing, flexible, and spontaneous.  What I was learning made sense only in terms of relationship.  It was not fixed, even when it appeared to be so....By contrast, I could see that the Western knowledge I had been given had the nature of a solid because it is wrapped in logical rhetoric to such a degree that it is stiff and inflexible.  The learning one gets from a book, from the canons of the written tradition, is very different from the living, breathing knowledge that comes from within, from the soul....Could one reality contradict another?  What kind of new reality was I being introduced to?  What is reality predicated upon?” (p. 185).

            Current efforts to train people to "dream lucidly," to engage in "shamanic journeying," and to "function psychically" can be seen as renewed attempts to enter what anthropologists have designated "dreamtime" so as to engage in activities deemed impossible in ordinary states of consciousness. They may also be considered attempts to obtain a deeper "truth" than is available to ordinary awareness.  Within the early Hindu religion, dream journeys were seen as intermediate states of the path toward divine truth (O'Flaherty, 1984, p. 15).  While the early Hindus saw both the waking and dreaming states as operating within "samsara," illustrating the propensity of human societies to decide what they opted to designate as "reality," some Indian philosophers felt that dreamtime contained fewer of these “mortal" distinctions (p. 18).  Parmenides' claims again seem relevant, namely his contrast between the truth in "changeless being" and the mere "mortal opinions" of most human beings. Reflecting on his dream research data, Harry Hunt (1989) has noted that while the dreamer's body remains inert, his or her "dream body" seems to operate on its own, traveling to distant places and engaging in exotic activities.

            There seems to be a perennial dichotomy between "appearance" and "reality," between one's perceptions of the world and the external world said to exist independently of that perception; this dichotomy has tilted in favor of "mortal opinions" and "samsara" in Western academia.  This tilt is exemplified by the fact that in 1994, Princeton University’s graduate program did not teach a single course on Eastern, African, or Latin American philosophy out of a total of 64 listed in their information booklet.  Princeton's course, "Philosophy of Religion," is described as providing "readings from contemporary analytical philosophy of religion, and from historical sources in the Western tradition."   Furthermore, the only philosophy course at Harvard University which explicitly mentions non-Western thought is entitled "Socrates, Buddha, Jesus," despite the fact that only Buddha qualifies as "non-Western."

The Rediscovery of Dreams in the West

            Plato's model of the "soul" strikingly resembles Freud’s model of the "psyche."  The "soul" was divided into three parts, "reason," "spirit," and "appetite," just as Freud's "psyche" was compartmentalized into "superego," "ego," and "id."  For Freud, "superego" was the supreme disciplinary force; "ego" was an executive force that interacts with the external world; "id" was an instinctive force associated with sexual and "animalistic” drives.  For Plato, "reason" was the awareness of a goal or value, "spirit" was the drive toward action (neutral at first, but eventually responding to the direction of reason), and "appetite" was the desire for things of the body.  Plato, in a vein similar to Freud's notion that dreams play out the fulfillment of unconscious urges, believed that "appetite" ran loose in dreams: “There are superfluous desires...that are awakened during sleep, when the rest of the soul, the rational and gentle and dominant part, is asleep; but the part that is like a wild beast and untamed, full of food and wine, leaps up and throws off sleep and tries to get out and satisfy itself.  Then he will dare to do anything at all, since he is set free from all shame and reason.  He will not shrink from copulating with his mother (as he imagines that he does), or with any other human or god or wild beast, and he will not hesitate to commit a polluting murder, and there is nothing he will not eat" (O'Flaherty, 1984, p. 40).

            The philosophers and theologians who followed Plato propounded a host of ideas about dreams; in the third century, St. Clement of Alexandria took the position that nighttime dreams could reveal a spiritual reality (Kelsey, 1974, p. 11).  However, the Platonic tradition of relegating dreams to appetite and images eventually won out, and by the end of the 19th century, the dream had lost its earlier reputation as a mediator between human and divine realms.  Theologians no longer regarded dreams as bona fide revelations, philosophers were only concerned with dreams' metaphysical implications, and literary critics focused on the way dreams were portrayed in literature (usually inaccurately) (Parman, 1991; Webb, 1990).  Hendrika Van de Kemp (1910) has reviewed the place played by dreams in American and British periodicals, both popular and professional, between 1860and 1910.  She discovered a steady increase of articles about dreams from 1860 to 1870.  Thereafter, articles in popular periodicals declined, while those in professional journals increased. In 1893, Mary Calkins had described the status of the dream literature of the 1890s. ”The phenomenon of dreaming has rarely been discussed or investigated in a thorough and in an experimental manner:  of description, of theory, of discussion, of poetic analogy and illustration there has been no end; of accurate observation almost nothing....The most scientific books...have been wholly and chiefly the results of the observations of abnormal subjects and in the interest more or less distinctly of pathology....The fullest discussion[s] of the subject...are largely compilations of the recorded dreams of other people.” (p. 311)       

            The time was ripe for a scientific discussion of the dreaming process and Sigmund Freud's theories provided the spark.  Freud's contribution was to place the dream squarely within the scientific domain while emphasizing its clinical interpretation.  Freud downplayed those dreams that had obvious spiritual implications and derided dream theories that were metaphysical in nature.  He also attempted to establish scientific criteria by which dreams could be distinguished from "waking reality"  (O'Flaherty, 1984, p. 42).  This was an important philosophical issue because both Plato and Descartes asked the question, "How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?" (Plato, 1871, p. 158).  Descartes (1952) felt he answered this question by appealing to the criterion of consistency. “For at present I find a very notable difference between the two, inasmuch as our memory can never connect our dreams one with the other, or with the whole course of our lives, as it unites events which happen to us while we are awake.” (p. 103)

            Freud concluded that dreams emerge from the dynamically repressed unconscious, but many of his predecessors had taken a more organic point of view.  In 1862, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer stated that while a person is awake, external stimuli impinge upon the mind and cause it to erect models of time, space, and causality in relation to the realities of the external world.  During sleep, by contrast, the sources of external stimulation decrease markedly, allowing internal stimuli to be remodeled into forms occupying space and time by rules unique to the brain itself.  Freud criticized this point of view, arguing that dream interpretation would be rendered practically impossible if the analyst had to trace dream content back to an obscure organic stimulus (Hobson, 1988, pp. 45-46). Nevertheless, Schopenhauer's perspective is echoed today by many researchers who emphasize the neurological substrates of the dreaming process, as well as by dream researchers who view the dream as more than a mere rearrangement of memories.

            I would define a dream as a series of images, reported by the dreamer in narrative form, that occurs during sleep.  The night's first period of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (from which most but not all dreams are reported) generally begins 90 minutes after a person falls asleep.  REM sleep continues to occur in regular cycles during the night.  J. Allan Hobson (1988) has constructed one of the leading psychoneurological models of dreaming, based on his laboratory data, a model that is widespread but not universally accepted.  According to Hobson, the neurons at the base of the skull periodically fire a random barrage of high voltage impulses, unleashing a cascade of potent chemicals that pour into the forebrain.  The visual and motor centers are stimulated, triggering memories that are presented and combined in original, vivid, and often baffling ways.  Immediately, the brain's mind creates a story that will make sense of these fragments, either providing a pre-existing script which serves as a template for the images, or producing a narrative on the spot that matches -- as best it can -- the stored memories that have been evoked (Krippner, 1990, pp.209-210).  Ernest Hartmann (1991) has commented on this connecting function of dreams:  Dreaming brings together thoughts, images, memories, wishes, and feelings that are usually kept apart, at least in wakefulness (p. 25).

            This model is provocative in terms of Bergson's theory of brain function.  It could be that the brain's "filters" shift their attention during dreaming, enabling the dreamer to become aware of memories, thoughts, feelings, and information not otherwise available during wakefulness.  If so, the dreaming process could serve to recall, to synthesize, and even to transform the evoked material.  But inner "reality" can not only expand, it can metamorphosize. 

            In any event, as it has been astutely noted by such philosophers as Norman Malcolm (1959), researchers do not deal with the dream itself but with a dream report; these reports take the form of narratives and stories.  Sometimes these stories reflect basic problems in living with which the dreamer has wrestled for years.  At other times they reflect the events of the past few days or hours, some of them trivial, some of them consequential.  And in other instances, as far as it is known, the mind's search for meaning produces little more than a jumble of disparate pictures and events. 

            Many psychotherapists, however, are convinced that their clients will benefit from an understanding of their dreams because, on reflection, dream activities frequently appear to be metaphors for the dreamer's waking concerns, and it is often helpful to find a metaphorical image or activity for a client's problem.  Some writers, artists, and musicians have made deliberate use of dream narratives and images in their work.  Other individuals have claimed that scientific, technological, or athletic breakthroughs resulted from dreams that were serendipitously recalled. 

            In the meantime, Hobson's theory has been bolstered by his experimental use of a device aptly named the "Nightcap." It fits over the dreamers' heads monitoring their brain waves in the privacy of their own homes.  This naturalistic research setting has advantages over the sleep laboratory which is an unfamiliar environment for most dreamers, sometimes producing aberrant brain wave patterns and atypical dream reports. According to Hobson, the neurons at the base of the skull periodically fire a random barrage of high voltage impulses, unleashing a cascade of potent chemicals that pour into the forebrain.  The visual and motor centers are stimulated, triggering memories that are presented and combined in original, vivid, and often baffling ways.  Immediately, the mind creates a story that will make sense of these fragments, either providing a pre-existing script which serves as a template for the images, or producing a narrative on the spot that matches -- as best it can -- the stored memories that have been evoked (Krippner, 1990, pp. 209-210).  Ernest Hartmann (1991) has commented on this connecting function of dreams:  Dreaming brings together thoughts, images, memories, wishes, and feelings that are usually kept apart, at least in wakefulness (p. 25). 

            The nighttime process of tale-telling and story-making in dreams is remarkably similar to what transpires when language is used while a person is awake.  Dreams can be thought of as a text employing a language that emphasizes feelings, persons, objects, and settings.  The mental and emotional processes involved in “dreamtime" are similar in many ways to the thoughts and feelings expressed during wakefulness.  People who were asked to make up a dream while awake produced accounts that judges could not discriminate from written reports of their nighttime dreams (Cavallero & Natale, 1988-1989).

            Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (19001\1965) was actually published in 1899 but his publisher gave it a 1900 publication date, anticipating the book's ramifications for the intellectual thought of the new century.  Even though the book only sold 351 copies in the first six years after its publication, Freud's publisher was eventually vindicated. By the end of the 20th century, consciousness researchers, psychotherapists, and neuroscientists were using several major vehicles to explore the vast reaches of the human mind -- meditation, hypnosis, drugs, biofeedback, fantasy, brain imaging devices, and -- of course -- dreams. 

            While many investigators consider dreams to be the most useful and amenable path to the exploration of consciousness, and have studied them quite extensively, there are still many unanswered questions about their origin, and their function.  Assuming that memory images may be evoked by the brain’s random neural firings, is there a point at which what we can call "the brain's mind" takes over and brings in other memory fragments to round out or expand the narrative?  Or could it be that the originally evoked images elicit entire trains of associations that are "schemas" and "personal myths" rather than memories?  These "schemas" and "myths" could be the guiding forces that direct the dreamer's behavior during wakefulness and that construct innovative scenarios during sleep (Feinstein &Krippner, 1988).  If these scenarios, as reported upon awakening, actually contain meaning, is it hidden or obvious? Is it deliberately obscure (representing the dreamer's defenses), or is the message accessible to those who will take the time to associate to those images, activities, and emotions that they have recalled? 

            Perhaps the dream sometimes creates meaning; the sleeping dreamer may pull material from his or her experiences, fantasies, and life issues, making the appropriate applications and incrementations to the evoked material.  If so, the dreamer is able to take an amorphous lump of clay (the collection of images evoked by neural firing) and create something meaningful from it.  In so doing, the dreamer does not merely combine his other memories in an unusual way.  Instead, a novel perceptual world is created -- and often is unlike anything that the dreamer has experienced (or even imagined) in waking life, such as the shaman's claims to travel in time and space, or to dexterously bridge "dream reality" with "waking reality."

            Some dream researchers (e.g., Llinas & Pare', 1991) have turned the dreaming/wakefulness paradigm on its head, defining wakefulness as a dreamlike state modulated by the constraints produced by specific sensory inputs.  If it is considered "normal" for one's attention to turn away from sensory input toward memories, then wakefulness becomes an aberration and dreaming becomes the standard to which other states of consciousness must be compared.  Nightmares, feverish dreams, and the like become to ordinary dreams what the work of the surrealists are to novels and fiction (States, 1992, p. 254).

            This point of view is in opposition to that of dream researchers who regard dream content as essentially meaningless, although a careful reading of their articles and books indicate that they have often been victims of stereotypes that do not do justice to their thoughts.  However, dream imagery that is randomly evoked could still be meaningful.  In his discussion of dreams, Bert States (1992) evokes chaos theory to propose "order and disorder" as a cleaner dichotomy than "meaningfulness" and "meaninglessness."  Even though some degree of orderliness is a precondition of meaningfulness, disorder may provide the type of chaotic activity which may prove to have an underlying meaning, or to eventually produce something of significance.  There may be no single, authoritative meaning to a dream (Globus, 1991, p.32), but over-determination and multiple interpretations have been part of dreamworking lore since the days of Freud.  For States, the crucial difference between waking and dream experience, regarding content, is that the dream is an imaginative condensation of experience.  "It is not better, more (or less) coherently, plotted than life; it simply is not constrained by what has happened, or is possible to happen, in the empirical world" (p. 253).

            Finally, the position that dream content is without meaning is difficult to maintain in view of the research data on the topic.  Rosalind Cartwright (e.g., Cartwright & Lamberg, 1992) has provided clinical evidence that dreams help clients understand events from the day, place their current situations into the context of past events, and suggest means for dealing with life problems.  She also found that dreamwork following a night in a sleep laboratory was beneficial as a preparation for clients who were at high risk for dipping out of psychotherapy. (Cartwright, Tipton, & Wicklund, 1980).  M.C. Cogar and C.E. Hill (1992) reported positive therapeutic effects of dream interpretation in brief psychotherapy. Clara Hill and her associates (Hill, Diemer, Hess, Hillyer, & Seeman, 1993), in an ingenious experiment, divided 60 college students into three groups.  One group interpreted their own dreams; one group interpreted dreams that had been reported by other students; the third group interpreted a recent life event.  At statistically significant levels, interpreting one's own dream was more effective in terms of subject-rated quality (of depth, insight, and emotionality) that interpreting other peoples' dreams or one’s own life event.  These results argue against the possibility that people benefit from dreamwork because they project meaning into images that are basically meaningless, or that they would gain more benefit by focusing on "waking life” than on "dreaming life."

            Another set of data not only undercut the notion that dream content is without meaning, but threaten the concept of “reality" upon which such judgments are based.  There are four collections of dream "stories" or "texts" that are enigmatic in nature.  Some of these "stories" are anecdotal in nature, while others come from controlled observations or laboratory experiments.  Specifically, they involve alleged precognitive dreams, telepathic and clairvoyant dreams, shared dreams, and dream "apports" (in which the dreamer claimed to bring a material object back from "dreamtime").  Some of these "stories" are more credible than others, but each of them is provocative, entertaining, and worth considering.

The Enigma of Precognitive Dreams

            Harrison, a graduate student at Saybrook Institute, was a middle-aged business executive who was nearing the end of his vacation in Cairo, Egypt.  One night he dreamed that he was crossing the street in Cairo near the hotel where he was staying, heading toward a Wimpy's fast food restaurant.  He noticed David Brinkley walking toward him, and said "Hello."  Brinkley smiled back and "bowed knowingly."  Harrison noticed that Brinkley had a shaved spot on the top of his head.  Harrison was surprised to see the newscaster in Egypt.  The next morning, motivated by his own curiosity, Harrison walked toward Wimpy's restaurant on the exact street that he recalled from his dream.  David Brinkley did not appear, but an event took place that was so "newsworthy" for Harrison that the newscaster might have served as an appropriate symbol.  While Harrison was crossing the street, a taxicab went out of control and headed toward him.  Before Harrison could dodge the oncoming car, it had struck him down and knocked him unconscious (perhaps symbolized by the shaved head in the dream). Harrison woke up in a hospital where he was informed that he had several broken bones and could not be moved. 

            Harrison eventually recovered, but his stay in Egypt was prolonged for several weeks.  Was this event a coincidence?  Was this a "precognitive" or "premonitory" dream?  Or did the dream generate "reality" in a highly unusual way?  It can be argued that Harrison was aware of the erratic traffic patterns in Cairo, and lost his usual caution due to his excitement about the dream.  The entire congruence can also be passed off as coincidence. Nevertheless, Harrison would never had gone to that particular street corner had it not been for his dream.

            A series of dream premonitions was reported by Tracy, a college student in Charleston, South Carolina.  At the time of her first dream, Tracy was looking for another student to share her apartment.  In her dream, someone rushed into a restaurant where she was working telling her that her apartment was on fire. Tracy's second dream also took place in the restaurant where she worked in waking life; this time it was her new apartment mate, Cynthia, who told Tracy her apartment was on fire.  In the third dream, Tracy was again interrupted at work by someone who told her the alarming news.  Rushing home, she found her apartment in flames but could not locate Cynthia.  A few weeks later, she began to feel nervous and anxious, and had an irrational urge to get out of her apartment.  She left town to visit her mother and pick up her car which was being repaired.  She remembers repeatedly telling her mother, "I hope my roommate is all right. “When Tracy returned to Charleston, she discovered that there had been a fire in her apartment.  Cynthia had been drinking and smoking in bed, had set the mattress on fire, and had died in the flames (Ryback, 1988, pp. 33-35).  Of course, it can be argued that Tracy knew Cynthia's smoking and drinking habits, but suppressed them because she needed an apartment mate so desperately; however, this argument does not explain the first dream.  Ultimately events in "waking reality" were mirrored in each of Tracy's three dream narratives.

            J.B. Priestly (1964) commented that precognitive experiences tend to be about either "terrible" or "trivial” events.  In contrast to these two "terrible" dreams is a "trivial" example, as told to Loyd Auerbach (1991). The dreamer reported a dream about his mother's friend:  "She had on a dark blue T-shirt and she held up a check, saying that she got her income tax return on a Monday."  The next day, the friend visited the dreamer's mother.  She was wearing a navy blue T-shirt, and it was Monday; she had just received her income tax check (p. 173).  For all we know, the check had been expected and the woman had a limited wardrobe; nevertheless, this is one dream (if correctly reported) in which the dream narrative was immediately confirmed, and in it directly matched the events in "waking reality."

            These are the types of dreams ignored by the writers of most academic books and articles about dreaming.  Sometimes, these dream enigmas herald a disastrous event such as Harrison’s accident or Cynthia's death.  At other times they represent a "sharing" of information between two or more people, or a "channeling" of information that would be unlikely for the dreamer to obtain in "waking reality."  None of these dream reports are welcome in most respectable academic and scientific circles in the West, yet their reported occurrence in various times and places shows no signs of diminishing. 

            In Western academic circles, the notion is promulgated that "knowledge is power."  However, Michel Foucault (1980) has pointed out that power (e.g., political, economic, ideological, or religious authority) determines what is considered to be knowledge (and, therefore, "reality") in any given temporal and spatial location.  The knowledge accumulated by parapsychologists about enigmatic dreams and other anomalous experiences (e.g., Edge, Morris, Palmer, & Rush, 1986) lacks a major power base; as a result it fails to become "legitimate" and to play a major role in mainstream scientific discourse.  H.M. Collins and T.J. Pinch (1982) have described how science is socially constructed, paying special attention to such fields of inquiry as parapsychology that lack an adequate power base for mainstream recognition. 

            David Hess (1992) constructed a typology of the mechanisms for disciplining "heterodox" scientists and used it to evaluate the utility of Foucault's framework.  Through correspondence and interviews with 20 U.S. academic parapsychologists, he documented instances of "direct intellectual suppression."  Of the 20, 13 reported cases of prejudicial action (e.g., denial of research funds, blocked advancement, limited job opportunities).  One interviewee reported that he requested permission to include a parapsychological condition in his dissertation research project but was told, "If you really imagine that you are going to get a parapsychology component through a dissertation committee, I think you'd better go back and do some very serious reality testing" (p. 231).  Another interviewee said that he had lost a departmental vote for promotion because several professors felt "that work in parapsychology was inherently disreputable" (p.233).  Another reported that he was told, during a job interview, that he could not publish any research involving parapsychology while another claimed that a hostile department chair surreptitiously destroyed parapsychology data on 5,000 subjects (p. 237).  These reports are compelling evidence for the case that Western academic circles are inhospitable, and even actively hostile, to reports of anomalous human experience, including enigmatic dreams.

The Enigma of Telepathic and Clairvoyant Dreams

            "Telepathy" is a word used to describe purported information obtained by one individual from another, supposedly through "mind-to-mind" contact.  It is one manifestation of the events that parapsychologists refer to as potential psi phenomena -- anomalous (enigmatic or unexplained) interchanges of information or influences that appear to exist apart from currently identified physical mechanisms.  Other manifestations of psi include clairvoyance (reported anomalous perception of information), precognition (reported anomalous perception of future events), and psychokinesis (reported anomalous influence on objects or organisms).  Considerable overlap exists, especially between telepathy and clairvoyance.  For example, Carlos claimed to dream of a gift that Maria, who lived overseas, had decided to buy him for his birthday.  Was this a possible instance of telepathy?  Or could Carlos have had clairvoyant knowledge of Maria's thought processes?  Or did Carlos know Maria so well that he correctly guessed the identity of his gift?  Or was it merely a coincidence?  

            A survey of more than 7,000 self-reported anecdotal telepathic experiences was tabulated by L.E. Rhine (1962); nearly two thirds of these experiences were said to have occurred in dreams.  These data support Freud's conjecture that sleep and dreams create favorable conditions for telepathy.  Carl Jung incorporated the concept of telepathic dreams into psychotherapy, using the term crisis telepathy to refer to instances in which a dream contains anomalous information about a loved one whose death is imminent or who has suffered an accident, assault, or any other life-threatening situation. 

            Anecdotal reports of telepathy in dreams are unreliable because one cannot easily prevent the possibility of coincidence, dishonesty, self-delusion, or logical or sensory clues of which the dreamer was unaware.  The Parapsychological Association, an international organization of professional researchers, insists that the term psi phenomenon be used only to describe events obtained under conditions in which all known sensor channels for anomalous interactions have been eliminated. 

            It was not until 1966 that telepathic dream studies using the monitoring of REM sleep were reported.  Designed by Montague Ullman and one of the present authors, with the assistance of several colleagues at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, these studies paired a volunteer subject with a "telepathic transmitter"; the pair interacted briefly, then separated and spent the night in distant rooms.  An experimenter randomly selected an art print (from a collection or "pool" of which the subject was unaware) and gave the print to the transmitter in an opaque sealed envelope, to be opened only when the transmitter was in the distant room.  The experimenter awakened the subject near the end of each REM period and requested a dream report. 

            We had these reports transcribed by a secretary who was never present on any of the experimental nights, then sent the transcripts to outside judges who, working independently, matched them against the pool of potential art prints from which the actual print had been randomly selected.  Statistical evaluation was based on the average of these matchings, as well as by self-judgings of the subjects following the conclusion of the experiment.  We contended that there was no way in which sensory cues or fraudulent subject/transmitter collaboration could have influenced the dream reports and statistical results.  The data showed an overall pattern of statistical significance supporting the telepathy hypothesis (Ullman & Krippner, with Vaughan, 1989).

            One example of a finding in an experiment that obtained statistically significant results occurred on a night when the randomly selected art print was "School of the Dance" by Degas, depicting a dance class of several young women.  The subject’s dream reports included such phrases as "I was in a class made up of maybe half a dozen people," "it felt like a school," and “there was one little girl that was trying to dance with me."  An examination of the dream reports and the matched art prints indicated a similarity in this process to the way that day residue, psychodynamic processes, and subliminally perceived stimuli find their way into dream content.  Sometimes the material corresponding to the art prints was intrusive (for example, "There was one little girl that was trying to dance with me"), and sometimes it blended easily with the narrative (for example, "It felt like a school").  Sometime it was direct, at other times symbolic.  Although these dream reports had presumptively telepathic characteristics, their construction and description did not appear to differ in significant ways from other dreams collected in laboratory studies (Krippner, 1993).

            A statistical meta-analysis of the Maimonides experiments was reported by Irving Child (1985).  He found that six of the fifteen studies attained statistically significant results and that data from one other study was nearly significant.  Including the latter study, statistical significance varied from the .06 level of probability (only 6 possibilities in 100 that chance was responsible for the results)  to the .000002 level (less than two chances in one million that the matches between dream report and art print were sheer coincidence).  Considering the significance of the data, the overall results of our experimental telepathic dream studies need to be seriously considered.  On the other hand, several critics (for example, Zusne & Jones, 1982) would not go this far and claimed that there were serious flaws in the procedure. In response Child declared that some of these criticisms were irrelevant and that others reflected actual misrepresentation and distortion of the original experiments.  Alack of reliable replication by other researchers is the most important criticism that can be made of these dream telepathy studies.

            Another analysis of the Maimonides data provided provocative results.  Michael Persinger and I (1989) examined the first night that each of 62 subjects in telepathic or clairvoyant dream experiments spent at the Maimonides laboratory.  We observed a significant difference between "high psi" nights and "low psi" nights: The former were more likely to occur in the absence of electrical storms and sunspots as measured by archival records of geomagnetic activity.  These data may indicate that the telepathic and clairvoyant capacities of the human brain are sensitive to geomagnetic activity.

            If a hallmark of "reality" is that its information must be amenable to sharing, and if these studies can be replicated under rigorous conditions, support would be found for the old shamanic claim that distant information can be obtained in "dreamtime."  At least a modicum of the information in dreams may come from a person geographically distant from the dreamer, from a geographically distant location, or from a temporally distant situation.  Indeed, we studied precognitive dreams at Maimonides as well, obtaining statistically significant results with a subject who almost consistently was able to dream about an event that was randomly devised for him the following day.  One morning, after the subject had awakened and left the soundproof sleep room, he was taken to an office draped with sheets to resemble snow.  While he inspected a photograph of an Eskimo wearing a parka hood (the target word selected just one hour previously utilizing a random number table), an assistant dropped an ice cube down his back.  During the previous night, this subject had dreamed about ice, a room in which everything was white, and a man with white hair (Krippner, Ullman, & Honorton,1971).

The Enigma of Shared Dreams

            Heraclitus maintained that "those awake have one ordered universe in common, but in sleep every man turns away to one of his own" (in Stumpf, 1988. p. 15).  Although Heraclitus' intent was most likely metaphorical, his statement is quite applicable to how dreams are conceptualized today.  However, if "reality" needs to be consensual, several dream reports -- if valid --suggest that some dreams have the potential of sustaining a "separate reality."  Indeed, if dreams can "sustain" what seems to be a "reality," it might be inferred that ordinary waking "reality" might be "sustained" in a similar fashion.  As a matter of fact, A.R. Manser (1967) has taken issue with such philosophers as Descartes who provided criteria for discerning dreams from "reality," observing that some dreams are sufficiently similar to "reality" such that a person could not immediately tell the difference.  Manser concluded, "Philosophers have sought for some mark or test that would solve this problem, but there is none available" (p. 415).  Centuries earlier, the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (369-286 BC) awakened and "did not know whether I was Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was Chuang Tzu."

            Recent investigations into lucid dreaming have demonstrated that, with training, a subject can tell whether he or she is dreaming within one or two minutes and sometimes can sustain lucidity for an hour or more.  Highly reliable "reality tests" include reading lines of text twice (the words usually change), or attempting to defy the laws of physics by flying or walking through walls (LaBerge & Rheingold, 1990).  In this context, the central question is not whether a person is dreaming he or she is a butterfly, or a butterfly is dreaming it is a person, but whether the perceptual and experiential differences pinpointed by "reality tests" actually signify a fundamental ontological difference between the waking world and the dream world.  In the meantime, lucid dreams rebut Jean-Paul Sartre's (1940/1960) insistence that reflective consciousness does not occur in dreams, and that if it did, the dream would be destroyed (p. 233).

            Carlos Castaneda is a controversial figure in anthropology and has little if any standing in parapsychological circles (see Fikes, 1993).  Nevertheless, in 1993, he devoted an entire book to the topic of extraordinary dreams.  In this book (Castaneda, 1993), he describes how the purported training practices of the alleged sorcerer don Juan Matus allowed him and another adept to share a dream, finding themselves in the plaza of a small town.  Castaneda grabbed several people in the street, recalling "They were as real as anything I consider real....Everything seemed real and normal, yet it was a dream."  His companion pointed out, "Those people out there are so real that they even have thoughts" (pp. 239-240).  For some readers, this account is pure fiction; for others, it is a metaphor.  But for some, it represents the untapped possibilities of dreaming that Westerners, to their peril, adamantly deny. 

            In 1975, an anthropologist challenged Castaneda to demonstrate dream-sharing to him.  Castaneda asked the anthropologist to select seven individuals known to him, write down their names, and to share the list with only one other person.  Sometime later, Castaneda asked the anthropologist to contact these individuals and ask them if they had recalled any unusual dreams.  Each of the seven people recalled dreams about small animals or fish.  Castaneda claimed that he had performed a ritual enabling several of his animal "allies" to appear in the dreams of these individuals -- even though he was unaware of their identities.  One of the dreamers, a clinical psychologist, is known to me personally.  Her dream was about a toilet bowl "in which there are two rodent-like fish, or fish-like rodents." There is "something repulsive about them.  They look half cartoon-like, with pink bodies, black ears, and long blacktails."  The psychologist told me that she could understand the presence of a toilet bowl in her dreams, because of recent life events, but that the fish/rodents made no sense to her until the anthropologist revealed the nature of the experiment (in Krippner & Villoldo, 1986, pp. 177-178).

            An extraordinary instance of shared dreams has been reported with some patients with "dissociative identity disorder” whose "alter" personalities recall dreaming the same dream on the same night, often with minor but intriguing differences.  Deirdre Barrett (1994) reports the case of a patient, Sarah, who told her therapist that she recalled a dream from the previous night in which she heard a girl screaming for help.  Later, during the same session, an "alter" personality, 4-year-old Annie, remembered a nightmare of being tied down naked and being unable to cry out as a man began to cut her vagina.  Another "alter" was Ann, supposedly aged 9; she recalled a dream of watching this scene and screaming desperately for help.  An adolescent "alter," Jo, said that she had dreamed of coming upon this scene and clubbing the little girl's attacker on the head; he fell to the ground, dead.  In Ann's and Annie's dreams, the teenager had appeared as well, striking the man to the ground; but he arose and renewed his attack.  Sally, another 4-year-old "alter," dreamed of playing with her dolls happily, noticing nothing else. Both Ann and Annie had recalled a little girl playing obliviously in the corner of the room. 

            Psychotherapists are divided in their concepts of dissociative identity disorders, a few holding that they represent intruding "spirits," others believing that they are merely figments of the patient's imagination, and still others taking the position that they are the residue of a shattered psyche.  In any event, Sarah, Ann, Annie, Jo, and Sally all told the therapist that these dreams had occurred on the same night, making them noteworthy in the annals of shared dreams.  In fact, this remarkable dream may represent the host personality’s repression of the traumatic experience.  Sally happily plays with her dolls while the unfortunate Annie is being violated.  An older alter, Ann, has regained enough of her strength to scream for assistance, and enough mastery has been recouped for the adolescent alter, Jo, to strike her attacker.

            Shared dreams are reported by any number of people who are not known to be students of sorcery or to suffer from dissociative disorders.  Barbara Shor (1992) has developed a program for dream sharing, working with volunteers.  Her dreamers attempted to use preset meeting places, both real and imaginary, because past experience had demonstrated that a specific time and place for the attempt needed to be extremely clear.  Even then, the meeting site often changed unexpectedly.  Shor recalls, "We began dreaming spontaneously of meeting each other in an auditorium with an exquisite dome inlaid with lapis lazuli.  On the night we officially tried to meet there, however, we ended up in a vast columned lobby of black marble. We met in the same place all right, but it was the same wrong place" (p. 37).  Some of her dreamers exchanged photographs, yet never met in person; even so, they reported dream meetings in such sites as the crown room of the Statue of Liberty and the grand staircase in the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

            Shor's group felt that there were developmental stages in dreaming together resembling a group "hero's journey."  During “the call," dreamers often reported dreams interpreted as initiatory and cleansing rituals.  During the "separation" stage, dreams reflected a reexamination of dreamers' personal lives and of familiar events and institutions.  This led to other stages, i.e., "finding our paths," "being challenged by the new," "becoming the other," "victory and defeat," "transcendence,""confession," and "owning the shadow."  Shor has not presented a research hypothesis or methodology, but her pilot work could be reformulated into a project with appropriate controls.

            Many members of Shor's dream sharing group began to question their notions of "reality," and because of this questioning, their personal lives often changed as well.  Shor recalls, "As we examined our relationships in new ways, some people felt threatened, and old silences were no longer tenable. Some relationships grew and prospered; others ended; new ones appeared.  Jobs, even entire career paths, changed.  Dearly held long-term goals became irrelevant as our understanding of ourselves, of others, and of our world shifted dramatically" (p. 38).  Nevertheless, many dreamers reported enjoying the new intimacy afforded by shared dreams, and even proposed that the perspective on reality it afforded could help heal troubled families, develop creative business projects, stimulate research on consciousness, and assist in dealing with global issues (Magallo'n & Shor, 1990).

The Enigma of Dream Apports

            The most enigmatic dream reports are those in which apports (i.e., physical objects that reportedly appear with no discernible source) are purportedly brought from "dreamtime" into the dreamer's waking life.  Most Western philosophers and scientists would reject these reports outright.  O'Flaherty (1984) has discussed the manipulation of dreams in Tibetan Buddhism which led to a technique "by which the dreamer could make the object of his dream materialize when he woke up" (p.27).  This special technique was employed during what Western scientists call the "hypnopompic state," the junction between sleep and wakefulness or the "liminal moment of dangerous transition between the two worlds."  To prepare for this phenomenon, a master and his student sleep near the initiation fire; since they have the same consciousness at that time, they have the same dream.  In this way, the dreamer could purposely dream about something that was shared by his teacher; this would create "an objective material thing that had not previously existed except in his mind" (Ibid.).  In this instance, shared dreams are said to produce "realities" that resemble those in the waking world to such an extent that they persist once the dream is over.  A similar differentiation is made by Castaneda (1993) between "ordinary dreams" and the "second attention."

            The African shaman Some' (1994) recalls that at a crucial period in his initiation, he and his companion “began to speak about the location of our specific assignments.  Each one involved entering a cave....I went that way, jumping from rock to rock till I reached the entrance to the magical cave....It felt like a womb.  The floor was sandy and dusty and I noticed with surprise that the walls were perfectly carved out of red granite.  There were animal footprints everywhere....The space seemed custom-made to fit me.  My fire went out....The blackness closed in.  I closed my eyes in an effort to blot out images of what would happen if I had to back out. When I opened them again, I could see something that looked like a light a little distance ahead of me....It grew bigger and bigger, and soon I realized that...I had reached the other side of the mountain!  The cave must be, I thought, a tunnel that pierced straight through the mountain....{So this is the elders' idea of the underworld, I thought....Writing about what came next is an extremely difficult task.  What I have been able to convey so far of my experience in the underworld seems very limited, sometimes insignificant compared to what really happened....The underworld is not under our world and probably not above it either. It is a world all by itself.  Where I was, nature was beautiful, much finer than in the world I had left behind....I saw a tree that distinguished itself from the others by its unusual size....Under the roots of the tree was a bluish-violet stone that glowed as I looked at it.  It had a very bright center whose light increased and decreased, making the stone seem as if it were breathing.  I have never seen its likes before....As I grasped the stone and brought it out through the opening in the roots, it began to glow fiercely....When I stood up and opened my hand, it would not fall off, but clung there, stinging me. Against my will I closed my fingers around it.  My hand was shaking, and so was my whole body.  Just as I could not stop holding the stone, I could not stop looking at it....My hand had taken on a violet color as if the irradiation of the stone were infectious.  The violet glow spread slowly from my palm to my fingers.  It was so powerful that I could clearly see it shining through the back of the hand stuck on top of it....Soon I felt as if I were in the middle of a huge violet egg that had no shell. Inside the egg there was a whole world, and I was in it....In that moment of awareness, I had an epiphany, that the light we encounter on the road to death is our being in the act of coming home to itself....The light is where we belong....So we leave the light to go and experience the need for light, and thus come back to it anew. Then it was if I were seeing a series of my own past lives, beginning very far back in time....[Then] I realized I was standing back under the enormous tree, still holding the stone in my hands....I could remember the entire experience I had just lived through, but it bore the aftertaste of a fantastic dream. Actually, I felt more like myself that I had ever felt before.....I had lost track of the hole where I had exited from the mountain....Suddenly, out of nowhere, I saw a girl....Though I wanted to inquire about this region and her business in it, Instead found myself asking her for directions.  She looked around at the four directions..., and said pointing west, "You see those mountains over there?...Go to the...one in the middle, and cross to the other side of it.  There is a cave there.  That is your way home."   I found the cave the girl had told me about and ran in.  It became dark as soon as I reached its interior....I could see the stony ceiling two or three feet above me.  I had crossed back through the mountain almost instantaneously....How had all this happened?  Looking behind me, I realized that this cave was like any other cave, as black as...my dream, with no suggestion of a light existing on the other side of it....Something bit me inside my hand.  It was the blue stone, my only proof that what had happened had been real.” (p. 244 ff)

            Rohanna Ler, an Indonesian shaman living in Ujung Padung, Sulawesi, told me a similar story.  Although her ethnic heritage was Torajan, Rohanna had been happily married to a devout Muslimwho ran a successful automobile repair shop.  Rohanna's domestic bliss was shattered in 1973 when one of their sons began to lose his sight.  Desperate, they sought both Western and traditional medical advice, but nothing helped.  Inexplicably, their son’s eyes began to bleed.  Close to utter despair, Rohanna had a powerful dream.  An elderly man appeared, telling her that it was her nasib (fate) to become a dukun or traditional healer.  The first client she would treat would be her son, and if she rejected her "call," her son would go blind and never recover his sight.  The visitor picked up a stone from the ground and placed it in her hand.  Upon awakening, she found a stone in her bed.  She placed the stone on her son's eyes and before long he had fully recovered.

            Rohanna's description of the elderly man resembled Puang Matua, the "Old Lord" or "Lord with Gray Hairs" who is the supreme god or Aluk Todolo in the Torajan tradition.  During the origin of the world, Pang Matua created humankind on a bellows using as his raw material gold gathered from the "Region of the Setting Sun."  Here we see the completion of a cycle: gold is secured from the land of death (the setting sun) to initiate life.  Among the human creations of Puang Matua were six pande or craftspeople including the guardian of medicine, Indoq Belo Tumbang, and five priests.  Pande is also a title for a metallurgist who forges swords.  While her dream and the subsequent cure of her son had convinced Rohanna to become a healer, she still had to seek the approval of her husband.  He attributed their son's recovery to other causes and refused to allow Rohanna to follow her call, stating that he would be embarrassed to have a dukun in the household.  Furthermore, he insisted that no devout Muslim would become a dukun -- a practitioner whose grounding was in a "pagan" tradition.

            Rohanna went on with her life.  She took pride in her royal Torajan lineage and the traditionally designed Torajan house which she had persuaded her husband to build in Makale, the village of her birth. However, there were still regrets as Rohanna knew she had not fulfilled her mission.  In 1976, Rohanna had what she now calls "a dream-like vision."  A young man and a young woman appeared, asking her why she had not followed her call to heal.  She told them that her husband had forbidden it.  They took her outside and she witnessed an enormous fire which threatened her husband's body shop.  This, they said, would be the consequence of her refusal to follow the call.  The young couple gave Rohanna a ring.  Indeed when she returned to her ordinary state of consciousness, a strange ring was in her hand. 

            When Rohanna shared this news with her husband, he was understandably alarmed.  It took several years of pleading and persuading, but in 1981, Ler reluctantly allowed his wife to follow her call.  But there were two conditions:  Rohanna must never refer to herself as a dukun and she must give all the money she earned to charity.  Rohanna was overjoyed and accepted both conditions quickly. 

            Her first client was a man with an infected leg; his physician’s advice was an amputation but after Rohanna's treatments, the amputation was unnecessary.  Her fame began to spread and soon clients were arriving not only from Ujung Padung but from other parts of Sulawesi as well (Carpenter & Krippner,1993).  In this account, the "fate" and "destiny" of a woman clash with the "will" and "custom" imposed by a man.  The woman’s “destiny" persists.  It refuses to be "sublimated" into a powerless folklore or "filtered out" in favor of more habitual activities.  

            Reports of dream apports are not limited to shamans.  Stanley Krippner and Bruce Carpenter (1993) interviewed a Balinese artist, I Wayan Ariana, who had used his dreams as source material for his drawings and wood-carvings.  Two years before their 1984 interview with Wayan, he had been involved in a house-building project with a foreigner who eventually withdrew from the project.  This placed Wayan in a difficult spot because he was perceived as wealthy enough to build a house when, in actuality, he was in debt.  To make matters worse, the site for the house was located along a canyon that had never been the site of human habitation.  Because he was short of money, Wayan had been unable to afford the traditional Hindu cleansing ceremony where he would make offerings and ask permission of the local deities and spirits to live there.  One night he slept in the unfinished house, taking the precaution of making offerings to several gods and spirits, because it was the night of a full moon and a day in the Balinese calendar considered to be auspicious for the operation both benevolent and malevolent magic. 

            The next morning Wayan recalled a dream; his report read, in part, “I had fallen asleep about midnight when I thought I saw a bold black-skinned giant....He awakened me with a great yelp....Being very tired, I went back to sleep. Again he returned and I awoke.  But this time I got up and started to sweep the floor....Picking up [an] offering to examine it, I noticed that a coin fell out -- a coin that I had definitely not put in the offering. It was black and dirty.  Without thinking, I put it in my pocket and went back to sleep.  Again the giant came to me....He said that this land was suci [holy].  I was destined to own in and must therefore never sell it because the land would bring me kesaktian [power]....The giant revealed to me that the coin I had found in the offering had magical powers and that it was his gift to me.  He said that he gave it to me because he felt kasian [compassion] for my poverty and bad luck....He told me that I must never give my coin to others and must always carry it on my person.”

            During the interview, Wayan displayed the coin.  It resembled the old Chinese bronze coins with square holes in the center that are often used in Balinese ceremonies.  These coins are often mentioned in studies of Balinese magic.

Implications and Interpretations of Anomalous Dreams

            Some philosophers believe that anomalous dreams, and psi in general, have no important implications for philosophy (e.g., Flew, 1953), while others consider the data to support "psychophysical dualism," a "common unconscious," a "subliminal self," or a number of other brain/mind models currently out of fashion (e.g., Price, 1949/1967; Smythies, 1967).  C.M. Mundle (1967) makes the case that since philosophy attempts "to supply a coherent set of concepts and principles which shall cover all regions of fact" (p. 57), it must take account of parapsychological data.  Even if the data supporting anomalous dreams are found unconvincing by philosophers, there remains the indisputable fact that people have been reporting stories about them for millennia; these anecdotal reports comprise a large body of evidence and represent the most "replicable" phenomenon in parapsychology, appearing in a variety of cultures and time periods (Krippner, 1989). In the meantime, the veridical evidence supporting these reports appears to violate certain "basic limiting principles" around which Western concepts of "reality” are constructed (Wheatley, 1977, p. 152).

            Gordon Globus (1987) proposes that "dreaming life" and “waking life" share more similarities than differences, and that both are "thought" into existence in a manner not unlike the way in which the Upanishads described how Vishnu "dreamed" human beings and their world into existence.  In the case of "waking life," environmental information passes freely across a person's sensory receptors; if they match the "tunings" of the neural filters, they help form that person's life world.  In "dreaming life," information from the preceding days, and from earlier life experiences, become reoperative.  But the dreamer creates a specific life world out of many possibilities; "dreaming life is our own formative creation" (p. 173).  Again, Globus echoes Hindu scripture's description of dreaming sleep as an opportunity for human beings to create "as the gods create, by emitting images" (O'Flaherty, 1984, p. 237).  However, Hindu philosophy used a divine artisan as its model, while Globus's (1987) mechanism is "a possible world machine" that creates by selection from a plenum of enfolded possibilities that includes genetic predisposition, life experiences, and -- indeed -- randomness (p.174).  Alan Watts (1961) adds that Zen masters seem to "take the world and its sufferings as if it were just a dream"(p. 134), and that when their students -- or psychotherapy clients -- stop identifying themselves with the image of themselves that society has forced upon them, they are on their way to liberation (p. 161).

            During waking hours, the available information swamps the brain, usually overwhelming any number of subtle signals that could yield information.  The dreaming brain, however, is virtually shut off from the external data field.  Not only can it pay more attention to subtle signals, but it does not consider them any more unusual than other dream creations.  Fred Wolf (1994) remarks, "During dreams we reexperience the wholeness of the events of our lives."  If human consciousness exists not only "under the skin" but also "out there," it should not be regarded as unusual that dreamers can share dreams or obtain information in ways they would tend to reject while awake (pp. 204-205).

            Wolf describes "events" as being specific, geographically and temporally locatable, and requiring some form of object-subject distinction to result in a personal experience. Something becomes an "event" when it is noticed.  The term “quantum" refers to the specific way in which possibilities are changed into actualities; a possibility becomes an experienced “event" (i.e., an actuality) when it is an observed "event."  Two "events" may be related to each other simultaneously in space and time; in this model, the experiencing self exists "out there" in a space-like network of all "events" capable of being correlated. Human consciousness encapsulated by the skin does not represent the limits of conscious awareness.  Eventually, a type of consciousness may develop that requires quantum physical correlations.  This extended awareness can be developed in many ways, including dreaming. 

            Wolf states, "Limited self-awareness...is incapable of correlating with stimuli outside the skin.  To go beyond this limit, we dream.  Paradoxically, we shut off the outside world to correlate with the universe" (p. 188).  Shamans did the same thing; they utilized dreams and other altered states of consciousness to visit other "realities" in order to assist the survival and growth of their community and its members. Mindell (2000) suggests that the shamanic challenge is to develop a worldview that does not simply favor "dreaming life" and other "altered" conscious states over "waking life," but sees both as aspects of one and the same world. For Mindell, this "way of looking at things is the long-awaited paradigm shift into a unified worldview" (p. 161).

            Both Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and Western social constructionism describe how the "individual self" is socially constructed.  These "selves" are manifestations of the "filtering" process described by Bergson, but during dreams the “filters" often collapse and humans are opened not only to the subtle signals described by Wolf but to new conceptions of being such as the "wholeness of the events of our lives."  Ullman (1979) has viewed "species connectedness" as a basic property of consciousness that characterizes "dreaming life" more frequently than it does "waking life."  In ordinary consciousness, it appears as if our being is centered in our brains and bodies; but dreams attest that one's being is centered not in one's self but in the relation between one's brain and others.  Some of this feeling can be retrieved by group dreamwork and dream sharing during wakefulness.  For Ullman, the history of waking consciousness is a history of fragmentation and separation, but the dreaming self reflects another "reality" -- the dreamer as a member of a single species.

            This notion is foreign to Westerners, as are anomalous dreams.  But if even a few of these anomalies have merit, they challenge the Western notions of the individual self, the mind/body "problem," as well as traditional ideas about "freewill" and "determinism."  Virtually all members of humankind know the differences between "waking reality" and "dream reality,” even though those dissimilarities have been constructed in varying ways in different cultures. Skilled lucid dreamers can answer the question "Am I dreaming?" within a few seconds.  Most others can answer the question "Was I dreaming?" upon awakening.  If the answers are so obvious, why are the questions so persistent?  Perhaps the attempt to distinguish "dream reality" from "waking reality" is part of a larger program, one that -- in the West -- typically distinguishes object from subject, science from myth, intellect from body, reason from intuition, modernity from postmodernity, the normal from the paranormal, humans from nature, men from women, monotheism from paganism, technology from "spirit" --basically, the established order from the "other."

            Therefore, it should come as no surprise that dreams should be linked with myth, intuition, postmodernity, the paranormal, the dominion of nature, the demands of the body, the domain of women, the rituals of paganism, the realm of the “spirit," and all aspects of the "other" that can only be treated by Westerners safely as "object" lest they slide through the “filters" that Westerners have erected to protect their "reality."  Perhaps there are aspects of "dream reality" and” species connectedness" that pose a vibrant threat to a worldview that has exploited the environment, violated women, persecuted minorities, belittled other ways of knowing, and maintained a patriarchal approach to politics, economics, warfare, and the social order.  

            In 1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked the question, "If you could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to you as a pledge that your soul had really been there, and if you found that flower in your hand when you awoke...What then?"  This question is more than poetic fantasy.  The enigma of precognitive, telepathic, clairvoyant, and shared dreams, and of dream apports, may yet force Westerners to revisit shamanic traditions, asking questions outside of their frame of “reality" and -- perhaps -- obtaining answers that will require a revision of that framework.  Just as dreams often provide explanations and solutions to personal problems, the social and global problems of "waking reality" may one day be resolved if “dreamtime" is entered and explored.

Abstract

Enigmatic, anomalous dream reports challenge the Western philosophical worldview, hence they are ignored or derided by most mainstream philosophers and scientists.  Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence from parapsychological research that at least some of these reports have consensual validation and waking life consequences.  Shamanic models of "reality" (which reflect shamanic philosophies) also have been ignored in mainstream academic circles.  They provide anecdotal evidence, congruent with parapsychological data, and need to be reconsidered by the dominant Western academies because these models encompass anomalous dreams, and because they furnish provocative data.