Dream Influence Study

Here are a couple of quick examples of dream influence studies. Robert Va de Castle, in his book Our Dreaming Minds, recounts an informal telepathy experiment he did with a group of readers of his “Dream Network Bulletin.” He had a target picture that he concentrated on during a specific night before he went to sleep, and he asked his readers to send in their dream impressions for that night. During the night, while he too slept, he had three personal dreams and woke himself to record them. His readers were able to pick up details of the target picture he had concentrated on before sleep, but to his astonishment, several people also picked up details from his personal dreams. For example, one woman sent in a description of the dream she had that night in which she was on the deck of a ship and a whale’s head was being mounted for ritual or ceremonial purposes. Then the whale’s head turned into a man’s head, and his face was reddish-brown. Van De Castle’s first personal dream of the night had been of being on boat. A man he was with caught two flounders, which someone else on the boat insisted he gut. Van de Castle used a razor to do that, and as he did the fish’s face turned into a man’s face, which was bleeding. Van de Castle writes, “The odds against two strangers on the same night dreaming of being on a boat and cutting open a fish and having the face of the fish turn into a bloody man’s face are astronomical. . .” (435).  

In controlled studies, dream ESP is a reality as well. The Maimonides Medical Center at one time had a Dream Laboratory where well-controlled psi dream studies were carried out over more than a decade. Their findings were that images can be intentionally sent to a sleeping person’s mind such that the person’s dreams incorporate those images. Stanley Krippner, PhD, was part of the Dream Lab research team, and he and his colleagues have written books about that research, such as Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP. Intrigued by the research using single “senders” and “receivers,” Krippner once decided to try a mass dream experiment. It was done at a Grateful Dead concert. Click here to read about it.

Back to Human Influence on Other Humans