Psi Dreaming 101
©2007 Jean Campbell

Last year when we asked for comments at the end of the PsiberDreaming Conference, one of the few complaints was that there was nowhere in the conference for someone to go if they were totally new to the subject of psi dreaming, or had a question about some type of dream not covered by the conference presentations. This seemed like a valid complaint. So the purpose of this workshop is to give a brief overview of psi dreaming, and to provide a place to discuss or ask questions about those strange dreams we all have had at one time or another which seem to defy categorization.

I am not really going to put up any workshop exercises, but exercises may develop as we go along. This particular conference workshop will be available not just for the next two days, but throughout the conference, as questions (and dreams) come up.

In order to even understand the conversation around the Physics of Psi Dreaming, let alone participate in the discussion, it would probably be useful to have a brief overview of the history of psi dreaming in IASD and some definitions of terms.

Ten years ago or so, when Ed Kellogg, Richard Wilkerson, Rita Dwyer, Linda Magallon and I first began talking about the idea of an online conference, psi dreaming was looked upon as fairly rare and quite  unusual by some people in IASD, though others were familiar with it, some of whom had been presenters at our annual conferences in an effort to educate others about this aspect of dreaming. In fact, at that time, dreams which involved precognition, telepathy, lucidity or any of the aspects of dreaming which seem to expand beyond ordinary time/space boundaries, were called paranormal, anomalous, extraordinary, or just plain strange. But a few of us argued that, since we seemed regularly to have these types of dreams, they deserved the same attention as other types of dreams which are included under IASD's multidisciplinary approach. For example, Rita organized a conference panel discussion titled, "Psi Dreaming: Normalizing the Paranormal", and Ed created the Paranormal Forum, which can still be found on the IASD web site at https://asdreams.org/telepathy.

In this forum, records are kept of past Dream Telepathy contests initiated by Robert Van de Castle in 1985 and hosted by him and Rita ever since at annual IASD international conferences, but there is also a Paranormal Phenomena FAQ, written by Ed, which defines some of the many terms relating to psi dreaming, such as precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc. This FAQ, written in the clear, precise language of someone who both studies and practices phenomenology, can be an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to understand psi dreams.

Not long after I began to moderate the IASD online bulletin board in 1996, I noticed that by far the greatest number of questions posed to the bulletin board, particularly by young people as well as by people who were not IASD members but simply had questions about dreams, were questions about the so-called paranormal. And I began to argue that, as an organization IASD needed to do more to address the subject of psi dreaming.

Then came September 11, 2001, and it was no longer possible for us to ignore the fact of precognitive dreaming. On the day that the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan were destroyed by commercial jet liners, precognitive dreamers from all over the world posted dreams to the IASD online bulletin board. So many of these dreams were recorded, not only on IASD’s board but on other online venues as well, that dream researchers such as Kelly Bulkeley, Ernest Hartmann, and Dale Graff began collections of these dreams in order to study them.

Another result of this large number of precognitive dreams was that many people began to discuss on the bulletin board the question of whether dreaming something in advance of an event meant that it is possible to influence the outcome of the event itself. And now you begin to see why the question of the physics of psi dreaming is important. There was so much discussion of this subject, in fact, that I wrote a paper, “Dealing with Precognitive Dreamer Guilt”, which addresses these questions and is still available online at

http://dreamtalk.hypermart.net/campbell/dreamer_guilt.htm.

There are numerous implications of psi dreaming which, assuming we accept the validity of such occurrences, become important to how we see the world and act within it. One is what psi dreaming implies about the nature of time and space. Another is what psi dreams might reveal to us about the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness, it appears, is much more plastic and has much more potential than has commonly been taught.

One type of psi dream not discussed to any great extent in Ed Kellogg’s Paranormal Dreaming Forum is mutual dreaming. Yet the group dreaming research which I conducted starting in the 1970s, under the title Dreams to the Tenth Power, indicated to me that not only do people often share the dream space, but that people who shared dreams from the perspective of lucid dreaming also often remembered this dream sharing when they awoke. If you are interested in learning more about this type of dreaming, you can read a couple of chapters of my recently published book Group Dreaming: Dreams to the Tenth Power online at:

http://worlddreamspeacebridge.org/groupdreaming.htm.

In Group Dreaming I devoted a chapter to the subject of the language surrounding psi dreams. Because Western culture has spent a long time denying the existence of psi dreams, we do not necessarily have the words to describe some psi dream experiences. You may have had dreams that do not fit into any of the categories mentioned in any of the literature I’ve referred to here.

If you decided to click on the above link, while you are at the World Dreams Peace Bridge web site, you might want to take a look around. The Peace Bridge, which began as a response to the events of 9/11, but is not an officially sponsored IASD group, has grown to include over one hundred dreamers from around the world who share the belief that dreaming together toward the creation of a peaceful world might actually be a way to deal with war and violence.

The purpose of this Psi Dreaming 101 Workshop is to explore the spectrum of consciousness and all of those things we might call dreaming. So bring your dreams to the table; bring your ideas to the table; and let’s begin to explore.

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