Photo by Илья Мельниченко on Unsplash

Thanks to my recent Rhine Education Center course, Dreams and Altered States, I've been thinking about dreams and how they communicate information. This post shares some of my thoughts on the language of dreams. 

Information Sources 

As explained in our Dreams and Altered States course text, Psychic Dreaming, dreams reflect sensory, psychological or psychic input. Some examples follow. 

• Psychological input might be traced to the stress of the day or worries buried deep in our subconscious. This may lead to disturbing dreams or nightmares.
• Light or sound that bleeds into our sleeping awareness are examples of sensory input that can be incorporated into our dreams.
• Psychic input has an unidentified source that may be defined in different ways by different people. 

My Favorite Theory

In addition to different kinds of input, there are various theories about how information (as listed above) becomes a dream. 

Psychic Dreaming shared several such theories, but the one I liked best was that of neuroscientist J. Allen Hobson. According to Hobson: 

1. A stimulus or input (or information source) causes neurons to fire. 
2. The resulting neural impulses are translated into images. 
3. The subconscious mind makes the images into a narrative (dream). 

This process of creating a narrative is a lot like the process we use to make sense of information we receive when we're awake. But I find the idea that we do it in our sleep interesting.

Especially when it comes to psychic or spiritual dreams which I believe to be received.

Received Information

In one of his books or talks, biophysicist Rupert Sheldrake shares an analogy. 

Imagine that you know nothing of radios and that you assume that the sound is generated by the radio itself. To test your theory, you open the radio and remove some of the parts. When you see that the radio no longer functions, you may assume that you have understood how a radio works. But you would be wrong.

This, according to Sheldrake, is how many scientists approach the brain. And it is how a lot of them approach dreams as well. The parts do matter, obviously, but they are not the source of the message.

Some studies, such as those done with Faraday cages, indicate this analogy isn't valid for the communication of electromagnetic signals. (Though in my view, the mind is still a receiver in a way we don't yet understand.) 

In dreams the mind isn't just a receiver, however, it is also a translator—as Hobson theorizes and dream studies seem to suggest.

Dream Communication Studies

In 1962, American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) researcher Montague Ullman opened a sleep laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center. Experiments used a sender and sleeping receiver. 

• The sender attempted to communicate an image. 
• Receivers were monitored via EEG in order to be awakened at the end of each REM and report their dreams. 
• Results were judged to be "hits" or "misses" with hits being statistically significant, indicating, that telepathy does in dreams. 

Survey studies by Louisa Rhine and others reinforce the Maimonides Dream Telepathy Study findings. According to these surveys, most (65% or higher) psychic experience happens in the dream state.

Of special interest to me was that, while the Maimonides Dream Telepathy study hits were obvious hits, they were almost never an exact replica of the original image. 

What This Means to Me

I have received to much evidential information in dreams to doubt that such communication is possible. I have also always known that we created the symbolism present in ordinary dreams. 

Psychic and spiritual, however, seemed different me and for most of my life I believed that they symbols they contained were directly communicated. This impacted the way I interpreated my dreams.

Now, thanks to what I learned in Dreams and Altered States, I feel that I'm looking at dreams in a more discerning way.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that dream images are never directly communicated, but it seems likely that w'e translating the information we receive most of the time. To me, it is not a closed system, but I am realizing that we play a much bigger part in our experiences than I imagined.

I will still use the same resources for dream interpretation (Christian / Catholic sources, cultural symbols, personal meaning and experience, etc). But the idea that the images themselves are (probably) my translations will definitely impact my dream work going forward.  

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Psychic Dreaming (affiliate link), written by our professor Loyd Auerbach, is available through Amazon and elsewhere. Please note: if you buy Psychic Dreaming via my Amazon affiliate link, I may receive a small commission at no cost to you.

To ask Professor Auerbach a question live on YouTube, check out his channel at YouTube.com/@AskProfessorParanormal

For more on about the Rhine Research Center and their wonderful online classes, please visit RhineOnline.org I am not taking Intro to Parapsychology and plan to share some of what I learn in an upcoming post.

I like science and don't spend nearly enough time thinking about it. It surprises me that so much of it is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word. Here are a few very basic facts on the frequency of color:

1. Frequency refers to the number of times light passes a given point which can be thought of as vibration. Colors with long wavelengths have a low frequency. Colors with short wavelengths have a higher frequency.
2. Red has the longest wavelength and lowest frequency of any color in the visible human spectrum. It has a low vibration or frequency and less energy than other light. Red represents earth and courage and the life-force. It is associated with the root chakra.
3. Redder than red refers to a red whose wavelength is too long for us to see. Infrared light exists beyond the color we perceive as red.
4. Violet has the shortest wavelength which translates into a very high frequency. This color contains the shortest waves we can see. It also contains the most energy. Ultra-violet is a very high vibration violet not visible to the naked eye.
5. Color exists which has a higher frequency than violet. It is invisible to humans and known as bluer than blue. It interests me that blue corresponds to wisdom, spirituality and communication. Blue is significant to me personally, as is red so that made the outside the human spectrum stuff interesting to me. For more on my personal dream experience with color symbolism please see the following entry: The Spirit Dream
6. There are many other wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum that which aren't visible to humans. The chart above illustrates this fact as well as all others mentioned.

I have several Sheldrake interviews on MP3 and I was listening to his New Dimensions interview with my son this week as we traveled back and forth between our present home and our new one. We were both very impressed by the research Sheldrake referenced and the points he made. 

One highly well constructed research study was very consistent with Sheldrake's ideas about Morphic Resonance as well as metaphysical ideas regarding cosmic consciousness and telepathy.

The study involved word recognition and was conducted by Gary Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Yale University: 24 common 3-letter words in Hebrew and 24 rare ones were selected. All were taken from the Hebrew bible and written in Hebrew script. For each word, Swartz created a scrambled word for each of the original 48 words(as, in English, one might do by scrambling "cat" to spell "tca") creating an additional 48 false or meaningless words. 

Scwartz then displayed each of the total 96 Hebrew character words (half real, half fake, a quarter rare, a quarter common) one at a time, in a random order, to subjects who did not know Hebrew. The subjects were told only that they were viewing Hebrew words and were asked to guess the meaning of each word in English by writing down the first English word that came to mind. They were then asked to estimate, on a zero-to-four scale, how confident they felt in each individual guess. 

Professor Schwartz then excluded all subjects who guessed any word correctly on the grounds they may have known some Hebrew and analyzed the confidence ratings from subjects who remained. Schwartz not only found that confidence ratings were significantly higher with the real words guesses than with the false, but that subjects were more confident about their ability to guess common words than they were about their ability to guess the rarer. 

Finally Schwartz repeated the experiment, this time telling the subjects that half the words were real and half were false and asked them to guess which was which. The results of this test were purely random showing that the patterns recognized unconsciously, could not be recognized consciously. 

This study may show, Sheldrake said in the interview, that these subjects were somehow able to resonate with millions of Hebrew speakers and scholars the word over.

That this phenomena is unconscious is strong evidence, in my opinion, for a different way of knowing and very consistent with ideas about morphic resonance and biomorphic field theory. 

Another study mentioned by Sheldrake involved a bird called the Blue Tit (pictured above). In the 1920s in Southampton, England, the Blue Tits began to discover that they could tear the tops of milk bottles on doorsteps and drink the cream at the top of the bottle. Soon this skill showed up in Blue Tits over a hundred miles away - significant because Blue Tits are home loving birds who rarely fly further than 15 miles from the place of their birth. 

Amateur bird-watchers caught on and traced the expansion of the habit. By 1947 the habit was not only widespread in Britain but had spread to Blue Tits in Holland, Sweden and Denmark. When the German occupation cut off milk deliveries in Holland for eight years (five years longer than the life of a Blue Tit) observers were stunned to find that within months of deliveries being reinstated Blue Tits all over Holland were drinking cream, a habit that had initially taken decades to develop.

Why was learning so much easier that time around? 

It seems obvious to me, as to Sheldrake, that a invisible field of energetic information is available to both animals and humans. It also seems likely that this field operates by way of resonance as like breeds or beings are able to access like information. In other words, the behavior of milk drinking was communicated only to other Blue Tits, not to crows or sparrows. 

Whether these energetic fields are to some degree subject to locality or proximity (the spread throughout England and then to Holland) or subject to degrees of resonance we do not yet understand is not clear to me. It does seem however that in documented incidences of parallel discoveries, for example, that distance is not a factor.

Either way it is amazing evidence for the existence of what is essential an invisible reality. 

Another point which Sheldrake made in the interview, and which I found very compelling, related to the laws of nature or (one could extrapolate) science. These laws were worked out when science believed that the universe was largely mechanistic, basically no more than a machine, running according to set rules. 

This static preexisting order implies an eternal law maker, says Sheldrake, which is notion that is traditionally theological as well as a political metaphor - a carryover from the days of established religion and monarchical rule.

If however the universe is not a machine but constantly evolving (as evidenced by the big bang) laws must be evolving as well. In other words nothing is fixed, neither from age to age, or in my world view from dimension to dimension. The laws of nature and of physics are not written in stone but mutable and capable of true evolution. 

I am thrilled to see brilliant and reasonable scientists such as Rupert Sheldrake, William Tiller and the late David Bohm at the forefront of open-mindedness and progressive thought. May there be more like them!

For more on the work of Rupert Sheldrake please check out his website @ Sheldrake.org.