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.

According to Web MD: “The ability to create mental images exists on a spectrum. On one end, are people who can create extra-vivid mental images. Most people are somewhere in between.” On the other, those with complete (or total) aphantasia are unable to conjure up any kind of mental imagery. Though they are able to dream because dreaming is involuntary. 

My aphantasia was and is, total. Like many people with aphantasia, I grew up thinking that everyone was like me and that the ‘image’ in imagination was a metaphor.

 But there was one "psychic" advantage to my condition. I couldn’t deliberately make up a vision if I tried.

So when I began to see visualize spots of color during a guided chakra meditation I was overjoyed.  As the meditation progressed, a distinct circle of violet light appeared, and I felt as if I was looking through this circle of color into another space. 

Then, very abruptly, I found myself surrounded by color. 

A bright endless blue. 

It was almost as if a giant curtain had fallen or a bright blue screen had blinked into being and wrapped completely around me. 

For a moment, I panicked. Thinking that I was having a seizure or even a stroke, I opened my eyes to an ordinary room. But when I shut them again, the color was waiting. This continued for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I decided to keep my eyes open and get on with my day.

Later, when I sat down to record my experience in The Mystic Review, I remembered the swirling spectrum of blue I’d seen in the Spirit Dream. While the blue I’d seen in meditation was only a single shade, it had reminded me of some kind of screen. 

Thinking about it now, I think it was almost as if my attention was being drawn away from my New Age interests, and back to the dream.

UPDATED: 2024

I will be returning to this experience in a future post and wanted to update the original with an updated version.

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The update to this post is excerpted from The Spirit Dream © 2024 All Rights Reserved

Photo by Mateusz Suski on Unsplash

Today marks the one year anniversary of a good friend's passing. And I have been thinking of him even though our friendship ended many years ago.

We said goodbye apparently for good in 1984 when he was making plans to leave the area and I was making plans to marry someone else.

Naturally, a great deal has happened in the intervening years.  So it's not surprising, or in anyway indicative of my feelings, that it had been a long time since I'd thought of those days at all.

But three weeks ago, I had a dream.  And my friend Tim was the leading character.  He was young and handsome in the dream and taller than I remembered.  There was a remarkable brightness about him.  And I know that kind of brightness.

He looked different but I recognized his energy.  Sensing it as if I was standing next him, stepping back in time to re-experience the soul vibration of a person I once loved.

In the dream, we met by chance.  I was living alone in a big sunny apartment and he was working at a nearby market.  We bumped into each other at his work and he asked if he could see me. Later on, standing in my dream apartment he told me he'd wanted to contact me before but that he was afraid that doing so would stir up old half-forgotten feelings. 

And then he explained what he had felt so very long ago and the hows and whys of what he did, and didn't, do.  The information was new  but surprisingly coherent, fitting in neatly with events I had wondered about but not fully understood at the time.  Seeing our history in this new light changed things.  I no longer felt responsible.  My old remorse lifted. 

I see that Tim has a child with him, maybe 10 or 11, so the three of us set out together on a wide boardwalk with long strings of golden lights on either side. There was some kind of festival happening around us and I was happy in a way I'd almost forgotten.  I told him that he was right about the emotion.  "I can feel it," I said. "Can you?"

He didn't answer or if he did, I don't remember.  There was a knowing that our time was ending and that he had brought me back to where I was supposed to be.  When I woke up and considered the brilliance and the clarity of the dream, I knew that he had passed. 

I pulled my laptop into bed and found the obituary online.  Tim's picture showed the same beautiful smile I'd loved so long ago.  I saw that he had died in a hospice at the age of 52.  I was sad that I didn't know,  but glad to think that he'd made it through okay.

This dream was one of a series of what I believe to be true visitation dreams. Each dream in the series was evidential in nature, suggesting things I couldn't have otherwise known. All of these dreams occurred over a period of a few months in 2012. Although I’ve had many wonderful, even life altering dreams since, this series was the last of its type. ~ February 2025