After all the dreams have been told and their commonalities discussed, the group formulates a hypothesis concerning the nature of the target person's question or concern and the general drift of the dreams' apparent guidance on that issue. At that point, the target person reveals his or her question by reading a statement that had been written out the night before. The target person responds to the individual dreams, noting resemblances to situations, patterns or themes in his or her personal life. The group then discusses the dreams in relation to how they may contain guidance for the target person. If there is time available, the dreamers also interpret their dreams in relation to themselves and see if the themes emerging in this interpretive work has relevance for the target person.

The target person, whom we will call Patricia, was an engaging, extraverted woman in her early fifties. Jumping ahead in our account, the problem she sought help for involved a career decision: should I pursue a different vocational path? It has been our repeated experience that intellectual questions of this type do not elicit any clear answers about vocational decisions, but instead the target person is provided with dream images that deal with earlier and deeper strata of emotional significance which presumably must be faced and dealt with before the target person can meaningfully evaluate any contemporary concerns. That is what happened in Patricia's group.

Six of the eight group members recalled dreams the morning after they had agreed to serve as dream helpers. When their dreams were shared, several recurrent themes were apparent. The most striking images literally dealt with striking activities. One dreamer, who claimed to almost never dream of violence, reported a dream in which he was repeatedly hitting someone over the head with a hammer until they were dead. Another dreamer reported a boxing match, two young men, stiff-arming each other, and some young accident victims from a car crash. One helper dreamed about a guide drawing a group's attention to a brick at a Roman ruins dripping blood and another mentioned "a gorey scene" from a film called "The Young Ones" about animals in the jungle. One of the other helpers awoke because she was horrified and disgusted by the image of rats running out of a cage. Animals also were present in one of the dreams of the "hammer murderer." He found some snakes in his back yard and then "I'm suddenly in about a foot of water with ducks in it. Many are dead and there are many ducklings." This last image later turned out to be very relevant for the target person.

Once the dreams are reported, the group quickly notices some common elements. It is the presence of commonalities among the dreams that encourages the helpers to accept the possibility that their individual dreams may be related to the target person.

From the dreams described so far, a strong case could be made that a theme of physical violence seems to be relevant for the target person. Besides the obvious images of blood, gore, murder, boxing, stiff-arming, and accident victims, the presence of so many animal figures also suggested that aggression might be involved. Bob has found, in a different research context, that aggression is more likely to occur in dreams when the incidence of animals characters in them increases.30

Several other sub-themes were woven into the helpers' dreams. One involved mother and child relationships. One male helper mentioned that, in his dream, when his mother arrived at a movie theater with a young boy, an argument developed when another young boy occupying one of their seats refused to give the seat up and the dreamer had to intervene. A female helper saw her mother and described her as "in one of her most superficial moods and out of touch with her real feelings and not in touch with how the other person thinks or feels because of her usual self-absorption and self-centeredness." Other comments by the dreamer denounced the mother's callousness and addressed how lonely and unloved the dreamer felt. Only two maternal figures were present in the helpers' dreams; when they appeared, either an argument ensued or the dreamer felt cruelly rejected.

In fact, with the exception of one kindly aunt, who was mentioned but not physically present in the dream, none of the adult female figures present in the helpers' dreams are cast in supportive roles. One of these women is "bossy" and "has no idea who or what I am really like," one is "upset," one makes the dreamer "unhappy" inItially because of her inappropriate behavior in buying movie tickets and when the dreamer later "protests" because the film has been changed, she explains that it has been changed for "a late night show that has received excellent reviews" (referring to the Dream Helper ceremony?) The dreamer subsequently is "put off even more" when he learns "a gorey scene" is involved. Another dreamer saw "a woman in a purple turban with her face completely covered, with the exception of her eyes." The dreamer thought the woman should "take that face covering off" but then awoke horrified when an image immediately appeared of rats running out of a cage.

Two other sub-themes will be briefly noted. The first involved the concept of mental imbalance; one dreamer awoke in panic when she stepped backward and "nearly lost her balance," another dreamed of "nuts" being cracked, and another helper was in a mental hospital. The second sub-theme involved dirtiness and disarray. One dreamer said it was "garbage day and a few full cans are nearby," another talked about "cleaning up the mess," and blood dripping from the brick in the ruins was noted earlier.

Patricia was rather startled to hear these dreams from her helpers. After they made a few preliminary efforts to weave these themes together, she volunteered to share some personal information about the "garbage" accumulated during her childhood. Her mother had suffered from significant psychiatric problems and Patricia perceived her as rather distant and aloof. Patricia often endured physical abuse from her and on one occasion her mother had actually tried to kill her by placing her in a tub of hot water. The dream helper who had reported suddenly finding himself in a foot of water with many dead ducks and ducklings seemed to have tuned into this tragic event. It was possible for Patricia to relate to the idea of feeling like a "dead duck," or an "ugly duckling" because of the rejection she so often experienced from her mother. Patricia said she had spent many years in therapy trying to overcome these traumatic experiences from her childhood years.

Time constraints limited the ability of the dream helpers to further explore the ramifications of Patricia's background for her current vocational concerns and the dream helpers were not able to examine the various aspects of their own background which would have created the personalized dream imagery that paralleled certain features of Patricia's underlying and apparently only partially resolved emotional issues.

On other occasions when time was not so limited, it was possible to utilize the fuller dimensions of the Dream Helper ceremony. By way of example, we will describe some of the results of a dream helper group, conducted by Henry, that was dreaming for a 21-year old woman, whom we'll call Mary.

There were nine people serving as helpers, but three people recalled no dreams. One helper dreamed of going to a supermarket. Another dreamed of going to a drugstore to purchase a "pocket shower kit," but encountered difficulty paying for it. This helper also dreamed of going to a library. Another dreamed of a "Jewish Mother" who never believed her child was well. Another helper dreamed of holding hands in communion with Mary, of going to a piano recital, and of a boy diving very deep into a pool of clear water. Another dreamed of being under water, emerging to fly over our retreat, where she saw Mary, and heard a doctor's voice declare, "her diet is too tight--water is very important." This helper also dreamed of being at a fashionable poolside party.

Henry was a helper in this group, and his dreams will be reported in more detail. First, he dreamed that he was lying on the deck of a sinking ship. The water level was rising slowly, but was beginning to enter his mouth. He began to choke, and woke up abruptly, with the inexplicable impression that Mary had been ill and almost died.

Second, he dreamed he was in his childhood home, and he heard "Mom" playing on the piano. He also saw her in the bathroom taking a shower. Then he saw her standing in the kitchen, dripping from the shower, talking on the telephone to someone about how her piano playing was always interrupted. He also saw "Dad" lounging in the living room in his pajamas. (Quotes are used around "Mom" and "Dad" because he said they didn't look like his parents at all.) Then he went outside to return a book to the library. On the lawn was his personal library--it was being soaked by a lawn sprinkler!

Those were the dreams for Mary. Before hearing from Mary the group tried to find common themes to form some hypothesis about Mary's problem: shopping, the library, mother, and piano were repeated images. But especially was the image of water repeated, often in conjunction with a health theme. Putting our dreams together to form a pattern that might suggest the nature of Mary's problem, we speculated that Mary's problem concerned health, for which water might be a critical factor.

Mary was obviously stirred by the dreams, and responded excitedly, saying something to the effect that the group was wrong about the problem, but otherwise more right than they knew. She read from her pillow letter how the problem concerned her recently cancelled wedding. None of the group's dreams reflected a marriage theme, but two did touch on matters which were involved in the breakup. Mary recognized the dream of the poolside party as the type of social function she frequently had to attend with her ex-fiancé and his family. She and he came from disparate social backgrounds, and this difference created problems for them. She said that the dream of the Jewish mother also reminded her of her ex-fiancé, for he had once been very ill, and his mother continued to treat him like a sick little boy. Beyond these two correspondences, she saw little in the dreams pertaining to her question about the cancelled wedding. Mary said that what so impressed her was to find so much in the dreams that was nevertheless directly related to many other problems that confronted her.

To the water imagery and health theme in the dreams, Mary responded strongly with an account of her medical history, a story she had not previously shared with anyone because of embarrassment. Mary had a chronic, epileptic-like condition, with seizure-like episodes brought on by tension. She said the themes of being under water reminded her of how she would feel "flooded" prior to a seizure, an image she had been concerned with during her stay at this A.R.E. camp retreat. She said that Henry's drowning dream was a good image of what had happened to her during a recent stay in the hospital. As an unexpected side effect to some medication she had received for her condition, she developed a temporary partial paralysis in her sleep. As a result, while sleeping on her back, her saliva was not swallowed, but instead filled her throat, choking her, and she almost died from suffocation. Henry's dream of going down with the ship seemed to be just the sort of nightmare of helplessness that might be provoked by an event in sleep such as Mary's. He wrote, "the resemblance startled me, because there was an unusual quality to my dream, and considering my impression upon awakening, I couldn't help but feel that I had somehow experienced Mary's hospital trauma." Be that as it may, we couldn't see how his dream could be of any help to her.

There was perhaps more help to be found in that other underwater dream, in which the dreamer emerged to fly over the retreat, see Mary, and hear a doctor comment on Mary's condition. Mary explained that her doctors had not yet diagnosed her condition to their satisfaction, and various treatment programs had been attempted. As a method of treatment, diet had not been explored. The phrase, "diet too tight" reminded Mary of a related component of her medical condition--fluid retention--and she wondered if perhaps diet might indeed be a potential mode of therapy. Since Mary was anxious to reduce medication, perhaps this dream contained a needed clue for her treatment.

There were other areas of correspondence. Mary said that the image of a library had recently been on her mind. It related to her ambivalence about going back to school, because her parents would have to bear the expense. She frequently wondered why she couldn't learn what she really needed by reading in a library. It was interesting that Henry noted that his personal library, the one being watered in his dream, was actually born out of just the sort of fantasy Mary had been entertaining. Concerning the piano theme, Mary said that everyone in her family was musical except her. She frequently went to piano recitals with her family. Her mother played the piano, but found the responsibilities of the home disruptive of her practice.

Mary's reactions to the dreams is typical of a target person's initial response. No obvious "answer" is perceived, but many correspondences to related critical areas in the target person's life are recognized in the dreams. The purpose of the ceremony, however, is to be helpful, not merely to spot isolated facts in a person's life.

Edgar Cayce consistently maintained that behind apparent psychic phenomena in a dream, there is always an immediate and important purpose being served for the dreamer.11 To discover this purpose, we drew upon the insight of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and a closet parapsychologist:

"I have often had the impression, in the course of experiments in my private circle, that strongly emotionally colored recollections can be successfully transferred without much difficulty. If one has the courage to submit to an analytical examination the associations of the person to whom the thoughts are supposed to be transferred, correspondences often come to light which would otherwise have remained undiscovered".⁵

Subsequent psychoanalytic research into parapsychological dreaming indicates that if an apparent telepathic dream is also interpreted from the dreamer's point of view, then the underlying meaning of the dream will help point to the purpose being served by the psychic correspondences.3 What purpose was being served by our dreams for Mary?

Henry began the uncovering process by sharing his personal feelings about his own dreams. In going over with Mary his dream of being back in his childhood home, they discovered that although their home situations had some commonalities, the dream depicted her home more than his. Both their mothers played the piano, and both complained about their playing being so often interrupted. The physical description Henry gave of the mother in his dream was unlike his own, but fit Mary's mother very well. In Henry's childhood home there was only one phone, in a vestibule; but in Mary's home there were several, of which her mother used only the one in the kitchen. Whereas his mother used the telephone only rarely, Mary said her mother was frequently in the kitchen talking on the telephone. Similarly, the description Henry gave of the father in the dream was unlike his own, but fit Mary's father well. The resemblance included his habit of lounging in the living room in his pajamas, something Henry didn't recall his own father ever doing. Henry's dream thus had the curious quality of being a literal representation of an aspect of MaryÕs home, but also portraying an emotional situation they both could recognize. If the literal details of the dream applied to Mary, we wondered if the emotional significance that might be revealed in the meaning of the dream might also be relevant to her. Henry therefore began to work on the dream relative to himself, to see if Mary would respond to any of his self-analysis.

The most salient aspect of the dream for Henry was seeing mother in the shower. This dream image recalled to mind an old childhood memory of walking in on his mother while she was taking a bath. He said he recalled her getting terribly upset, complaining about her lack of privacy, and making him feel very guilty about invading her life. This memory seemed to have a strong emotional connection with memories surrounding his mother's piano playing. Listening to her play, he said, gave him that "oceanic feeling of bliss." If she were to be interrupted, and get upset, he would somehow feel guilty, as if he were the source of her frustrations. He said that from the years he had spent in psychotherapy, he could recognize how such memories had been incorporated into his particular "mother complex." One aspect was an unresolved dependency which was both disguised and fed by guilt feelings about being the cause of mother's unhappiness. He related that it had been with the task of "watering his books," a metaphor for adding a dimension of feelings to his storehouse of thinking patterns, that he had been led to resolve this dependency.

Mary responded very intently to his self-analysis. She explained that her mother's frustrations were a frequent source of friction in the home. Mary realized that she too, like Henry, assumed that she was somehow to blame for her mother's unhappiness, and the discord between her parents. Mary also now realized how her guilt feelings paradoxically inhibited any tendency to leave home and begin a life of her own, thereby prolonging that dependency. Mary indicated that recognizing the relationship between her guilt feelings and her emotional dependency was a new realization for her.

Three other dream helpers supported this analysis by finding similar guilt and dependency themes reflected in their dreams. For example, the helper who dreamed of having difficulty paying for the pocket shower kit at the drugstore discovered that the theme of "paying for what you get" was exactly how she had to deal with her own difficulty in outgrowing her dependency on her mother. Mary responded to her by indicating that the library theme, which this helper had also dreamed about, represented the same type of problem for Mary, as she had not been able to face up to the responsibility of paying for her own education.

What emerged from the discussion was a definite pattern, reflected in the collection of dreams, revealing a hypothesis that Mary found very meaningful. Besides the possibility that diet might be a contributory factor in her medical situation, there was also a suggestion that there might be a psychosomatic component as well. Her feeling image of being flooded, prior to seizure, echoed her style of dealing with emotional tensions, especially conflicts associated with guilt. Fantasies of guilt concerning her mother perhaps served to help Mary avoid assuming the responsibility for resolving her need for dependence upon her mother. Further discussion revealed that Mary's ex-fiancée had a similar dependency conflict, a commonality with Mary which seemed to have played a strong role in the breaking off of their engagement.

The case of dreaming for Mary provides a good example of what can happen in one of our experimental Dream Helper ceremonies. Besides helping Mary, the helpers also felt that they had been helped. They received a new appreciation of the potentiality they possessed to be of service to others. Also present as by-products for the dream helpers were some fresh insights into their own problems. Since their dreams were dedicated to Mary, they worked very hard to recall them for her. It was as if they were guarding her personal property--they wanted to make sure that her proprietary dream rights were protected. By so completely disowning these dreams, it enabled the helpers to be much freer to let come through whatever was pressing for expression, and often they discovered that this was material pertaining to their own problems. But now that this previously suppressed material had been tricked into revealing itself, they had received some bonus items to work with in their own quest for better self understanding.

The group discussion takes on a definite therapeutic tone. Although the original intent of the dreaming was to help the target person, the emotional sharing reveals how the dreams are relevant both to the target person's critical situation and to unresolved aspects of the dreamers' own lives as well. It is as if before going to sleep, each person engages their instinctive, projective empathy to intuit that aspect of the target person's undisclosed problem that corresponds, naturally, with an unreconciled issue within the person's own life; then, having been reminded of that issue, the person's dreams perform their usual work of reconciliation, using both the person's own experiences and images telepathically received from the target person's life. In such a manner, the group's dreams collaborate on a common problem as perceived from individual perspectives.

Not all ceremonies, of course, result in such a clearly demonstrated confluence of what we might call "telepathic counter-transference."  Because of time constraints, the group often does not process the dreams so completely as to ascertain the counter-transference meanings in the dreams, but focuses primarily on what the dreams mean to the target person. Yet even at this level, where not all of the possibilities of transpersonal interactions can be revealed, the ceremony provides meaningful material for the target person's concerns.

We have found what we believe to be a workable approach to this dilemma. If there are enough people present at a ceremony, we can divide them into two groups, each dreaming for a different target person. We can then compare the dreams between the two groups. The occurrence of distinct commonalities in the dreams of one group, as contrasted with the other group, suggests that the dreams are in fact being focused on something specific to each target person.

In Mary's group, for example, several of the dreams contained the image of water. Water is a very common dream image, so we might expect it to occur in several of the dreams. However, at the same time I was involved with Mary's group, Bob was involved with another group, dreaming for a different woman. In that group's dreams, the image of water did not appear even once! Instead, that group had several dreams containing the theme of black vs. white and of related polarities. As it turned out, that target woman was concerned about a bi-racial romance. There were no black-white or polarity themes in the dreams for Mary. Although both women were concerned with relationship issues, the common dream themes for each woman were definitely distinct and different.

We have learned that when two groups of Dream Helpers are conducted simultaneously, it is easy to see how the dreams are focused and specific to the concerns of the target person. What can account for these differences except for the fact that the dreamers are focusing on the individual attributes of the target person?

Sometimes, this type of difference can be critical to the healing potential of the ceremony. For example, Henry once was in a group dreaming for a woman whose problem concerned her repeated failures in career. The dreams for her contained repeated references to aggression, assaults, forbidden sex, young girls and daughters. The target person revealed suspicions of being sexually molested as a child. One of the group's dreams correctly envisioned the suspected circumstances of this event, in the cellar of the home. The central theme of the group's ensuing discussion had to do with how self-doubt and feelings of shame (in the target woman's case, related to the incidence of sexual abuse) contribute to blocks in creativity, an issue with which several people in the group were actively struggling.

Meanwhile, by way of contrast, Bob was in a different group, dreaming for a woman whose question concerned the fate of her dead son. He had died under unusual circumstances and suspicions had been cast upon a person within the family unit. Although no evidence was ever obtained, and the death was ruled accidental, the cloud of doubt had persisted over the two years since the event. None of the dreams for this woman contained any images whatsoever of aggression, assault or foul play. Instead, there were several dreams involving tripping and accidents, and many references to natural disasters, but no sexual dreams were reported. The majority of the dreams also contained references to sons (but none to daughters), and there were references to crying and grief, questionable evidence, fires to put out and poor communications. What this group concluded was that the ruling of accidental death needed to be accepted so that the family could renew open communications and go on with its life.

When our two groups met together to compare notes, Bob's target person was much impressed by the noticeable differences in the two sets of dreams. Whereas in Henry's group there were many instances of aggression and foul play, not a single dream reflected that theme in her group, where accidents and natural disasters predominated. That comparison helped her accept the validity of her group's suggestion that her son died accidentally.

Another way of telling if the dreams are helpful, or if we are simply spinning webs of illusion, would be in the long-range impact of the ceremony upon the target person. In Mary's case, for example, she wrote back a year later, indicating that she had found an apartment for herself. She was now on a special diet and off medication. She had lost several pounds. Most significantly, she was in a therapy group with her mother to work on their relationship. Her successful application of the ideas given in the dreams "proved" their worth.

In the case of the woman whose child died under mysterious circumstances, she wrote a letter to Bob indicating that she felt a great load had been lifted off her mind after the ceremony's conclusion. When she returned home she discussed the matter with the family, for the first time since the death two years ago, and they were now on the road to recovery from this tragic accident. This type of feedback seems to support the validity of the type of help that comes from the ceremony.

Dream Helper is a useful group exercise in several respects, as suggested by the results of one study, based on observations of a month-long residential group.¹² The experimenter collected all dreams from the month, totaling 450, and analyzed them for content. The results indicated that Dream Helper orients the dreams of the group toward the group members. On any other night, references in dreams to other group members averaged 8.2 occurrences. On the evening that dream helper was conducted, there were 48 dream references to members of the group! 

The ceremony also stimulates dream recall. On the average, 37 dreams were produced each night. On the evening of the ceremony, 57 dreams were produced. 

The ceremony also focuses the group's dreams toward specific themes. On the night of Dream Helper, there were, for example, five images of seafood in the 57 dreams, which is ten times as frequent as that found in normative samples.8

But does the Dream Helper ceremony really demonstrate dream telepathy? The distinct and focused set of correspondences in the collection of the group's dreams could certainly be scored as "hits," or apparently accurate psychic perceptions. But are these correspondences more than coincidental? Traditionally, scientific parapsychology would focus on a statistical answer to this question. The number of "hits" in a collection of dreams for a target person would be compared, for example, to the number of "hits" in a collection of dreams that were actually unrelated to the target person.²⁵ In fact, positive, significant results have been obtained with Dream Helper in this manner.

In this experiment, 244 dream helpers were recruited through the mail and served as remote dreamers to avoid any sensory contact between them and the target persons. Four months in advance of choosing the target persons, the helpers were asked to submit their most recent dream. These dreams were later used as control dreams. Two target persons were recruited in the experimenter's locality and randomly assigned to the dream helpers. Each dream helper received the name of the target person and was asked to try to dream something helpful for this person, who had a specific (undisclosed) problem. The resulting "helpful" dreams, and the control dreams, were typed on index cards and coded. The target persons were each given a package of these dreams, containing both their helpers' "helpful" dreams and the control dreams produced by those same helpers. The target persons were asked to decide for each dream whether or not it contained any resemblance to the question being asked ("direct hit") or to any aspect of the target person's life ("indirect hit"). An independent judge was also asked to perform the same task, looking for "direct hits" only. When the number of judged hits for the dreams of the experimental night were compared to the number of judged hits for the control dreams, the "helpful" dreams were favored to a significant degree for one target person, whereas for the second target person, "helpful" dreams and control dreams were equally likely to be judged as "hits."

The experimenter followed up the statistical analysis by determining if any of the "helpful" dreams were actually helpful to the target person, who was suffering from a skin ailment. On the morning of the interview with the target person, the experimenter dreamed of the target person, saw that her rash had healed, and asked her if she had noticed all the dreams that dealt with diet. Upon interviewing the target person, they examined the "helpful" dreams, and found 14 that dealt with diet. She agreed to work with her diet, returned in another month, and her rash had cleared.²¹

Taking the traditional research approach to investigating Dream Helper, especially if that were to mean focusing on statistics at the expense of working with the dreams themselves and trying to gain help from them, may not be the most fruitful avenue of discovery. Ullman and his colleagues, for example, found that as they focused on achieving a statistical effect, there was a significant decline in their enthusiasm for the dream connection and the telepathic effect suffered as a consequence.²⁴ Indeed, whereas typical telepathy experiments increase people's ego-involvement by focusing their attention on scoring statistical "hits," we had followed the advice of Edgar Cayce and others that more meaningful telepathy would occur if we were to create a more ego-transcendent orientation by focusing on putting the ESP into serving the needs of others.⁷ The ceremony does provide an excellent experience in "transcendent" ESP; i.e., psychic dreaming motivated by a concern beyond the self.⁷ Dream Helper consequently does reveal a larger, holistic pattern of cooperative telepathy in the service of mutual problem-solving.

One of the most lasting effects of our participation in Dream Helper ceremonies, as conductors, as dream helpers and as target persons, is to question the limits we usually place on the interpretation of dreams. To discover that your "ordinary"" dream actually contains meaningful and significant images from another person's experiences makes you wonder just how personal and private your dreamtime actually is. Although our dreams nevertheless serve our own personal needs, we may be intertwined while we dream more often than we would ordinarily suspect.

Rechtschaffen gives some examples of striking correspondences that he obtained when one subject (agent) was hypnotized and told to dream about a specific topic and the percipient attempted to dream about the agent's dream. He carried out one project involving six pairs of subjects that yielded 47 pairs of dreams.¹³ Rechtschaffen noted that "When they were hits, they were were quite good" and a refined technique was not needed to detect them. He went on to observe that "a hit does not reveal the degree of the hit. A simple matching procedure does not take into account the very unlikely probability of such a specific correspondence". Rechtschaffen found that his early results were very exciting and "We thought that maybe the question is not so much what do dreams mean, but whose dream are you having?" (pgs. 89-92).