The Healing Potential of Telepathic Dreams

During the summer of 1975 there was an opportunity to try out another variation of a dream telepathy project. A month- long Atlantic University session on dreams was being held for a group of about 20 people in a large farm house in Rural Retreat, Virginia. Dr. Henry Reed and I decided to explore whether telepathic dreams could be used to facilitate problem solving. Rather than utilizing a target picture, the task for the percipient would be to try to dream about the nature of a target individual's problems and to offer some solution for that problem.

A discussion was held with the members of the dream workshop one evening and information was presented concerning past research on dream telepathy. We explained our interest in a new experimental approach where telepathy would be used to help another individual toward some form of growth experience.

We then asked for volunteers to serve as target persons. The only requirement to be a target person was a willingness to acknowledge the existence of some personal problem about which he wished to gain some insight or guidance, but he was not to reveal this problem that night. Four individuals volunteered to be target persons and the remainder of the participants agreed to serve as dream "helpers." Helpers were free to choose the target person they desired to work with, although they were encouraged not to select anyone who was very well known to them or whose problems would be familiar.

Before retiring that night, each target person and his four or five helpers went off to some relatively secluded spot for a brief period of meditation together. The target person loaned each helper some personal item such as a watch, piece of jewelry, or an article of clothing that the target person wore or carried with him and which could serve as a "linking" object for the helper. One at a time, each helper silently held hands with the target person for a few minutes and tried to utilize this contact for personal attunement and rapport with the target individual. After returning to their bedrooms, each dream helper slept with the target person's "linking" object under the pillow or wore it on the body.

The following morning each of the various groups reassembled and the dream helpers described their dreams to their target person. Then they attempted to discern whether there were any recognizable themes that ran through their individual dreams that might point to some issue of possible relevance for the target person. It would be impossible to convey the intricate network of overlapping associations  and