Dreams are a doorway to invisible realms that reveal our hidden psychic and shamanic abilities. Consider this classic story of dream research. On the night of March 12, 1964, the renowned psychologist Calvin Hall was monitoring EEG output at Duke University’s Institute for Dream Research. In a nearby room, Robert Van De Castle was the research subject being monitored while sound asleep.
Dr. Hall was understandably skeptical about “paranormal dream activity” as are most psychologists even today. To find out for himself–and probably with the intent of disproving that the contents of his mind could in any way influence the dreams of someone in another location–he performed a remarkable experiment.
When the EEG monitor indicated to Dr Hall that Van De Castle was in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, associated with dreaming, Hall focused his attention on remembering the (Feb 25th, 1964) boxing match between Cassius Clay–now Muhammad Ali– and Sonny Liston.
In addition to imagining the fight, Calvin Hall dramatized the experience by throwing a few punches in the air himself–at a very safe distance from the actual fight, and from the dreamer. Who would expect that such an activity could be perceived by a person sleeping in another room? Imagine Hall’s shock when he awoke Van De Castle after the REM phase and asked if he had any dream material and his answer included these details:
“There was a boxing match going on. There were two young lightweight boxers who were fighting and one of them was doing much better than the other. It seemed his opponent became vanquished and then another lightweight contender got into the ring with him. The new contender now started to give a pretty savage beating to the other boxer… I remember standing up and throwing a few punches in the air myself because I was so involved with the action in the ring.” (Our Dreaming Mind, Van De Castle, 1994)
It is noteworthy that the boxing scene interrupted a dream about unrelated material. As if a television channel had been changed, the boxing scene was inserted as noises that we hear in sleep sometimes are; the original dream then resumed. But what was inserted here was not something like a train whistle (the external sound most likely to work its way into your dreams).
These intrusions were thoughts occurring in another person’s mind–who was not even in the same room! This “private” mental activity was “overheard” and inserted into Van De Castle’s dream. This is how attuned we are in sleep and how capable of mind to mind (M2M) communication humans are.
It is amusing that the fighters were dreamed as lightweights when they surely were not… but in the endless humor of dreams, this detail might be a result of the fight being filtered through a scientific researcher’s psyche. While Hall may have been a “heavyweight” in dream research, he would have been a real lightweight in that fight!
The dreamer is identified with observing the fight just as Hall was but the dreamer experienced Hall’s standing up and throwing punches as if it were his own action. He lived out the physical actions as dream experiences while viewing the mental images as an observer. This is a complex, stereophonic mind-to-mind transmission. How often, you might wonder, are our dreams, which we presume are inwardly originating, actually transmitted by the actions and/or thoughts of another?
Calvin Hall attempted to send telepathic messages to Van De Castle on 17 different occasions: “He concluded that some representation of the intended target material was detectable on thirteen of those occasions, for a success rate of 76%” (Our Dreaming Mind, 1994). If this was an attempt to disprove mental telepathy in dreams it was a pretty stunning failure! Hall repeated these successes with five other dream subjects and later published “Experiments on Telepathically Influenced Dreams.”
Dreams not only carry meaning and guidance from within, and from other human beings, they reveal to us the fuller capacities of mind with which we are all endowed.