A while ago, I sent out an e-mail notice, inviting dreamers to a party. There was to be a waking event that folks could attend in the physical world. But for those who couldn't go, I proposed they drop by anyway, after they fell asleep. One guest e-mailed me back, asking for directions to the party. I was a bit nonplussed. Sure, I could tell him how to get to Mountain View, California, if he was planning to come in the waking state. But he wasn't. He wanted to visit in his dreams. How can you point out a place in hyperspace when there isn't any "there" there?
A Place in Hyperspace
The notion that a journey in psychic reality is like a trip in physical reality comes from first-hand accounts of the out-of-body experience and its cousin, remote viewing. The idea is that, even if you don't take your material body along for the ride, you can nonetheless travel to or tune into a specific location in the physical world. Or, if you journey beyond the material world, you will travel in a world as stable as physical reality. This notion of a fixed traveling space has persisted throughout the ages.
However, in recent times, folks have begun to take a second look. And a third. The long-term spiritual seeker will start to notice that physical reality isn't as solid as it's cracked up to be (this is called "enlightenment"). The truly intrepid explorer will persist long enough to realize that he has had illusions about hyperspace, too (I call this "endarkenment"). At least in private, such explorers are reluctantly admitting that hyperspace is neither essentially fixed nor does it perfectly adhere to the laws of the material world.
In retrospect, this should be obvious. If hyperspace were as fixed as we'd like it to be, there'd be no need to prove psi. You could have verifiable experiments that would be replicated with predictable results that no skeptic would question. And if hyperspace were fixed, there would no longer be umpteen descriptions of the spiritual far reaches. The otherworld would be so concrete, you could map it or give literal directions: shimmy up the world pole, ferry across the River Styx, take an elevator to the 3rd astral plane, hang a right at the pearly gates ...
A Slip in Time
A good contender for the most stringently controlled psi experiments of the last century is that type of waking psi called remote viewing. Viewers were directed to perceive places in the physical world. Originally, experimenters used actual latitude and longitude for target locations. They soon discovered that any coordinate would do the trick. "5.5 by XYZ" allows you to tune into New York City, as long as you have the intent to go to New York City. In fact, you might as well drop coordinates altogether. It's the intent that counts.
One of the most literal perceivers, Pat Price, once remote viewed a building and reported that it contained a lot of beds and many injured people. There weren't any: the building was being used an embassy. So Price's attempt was considered a "miss." A miss, that is, until someone bothered to look up the history of the location and discovered the embassy had been a girls' school dormitory prior to World War II. It had also been used as a hospital during the war. It was as if Pat picked up the "echo" of the previous tenants of that world-space. It's interesting to note that these sorts of "echoes" can come from the future as well as the past.
So when I read that famous explorer Robert Monroe had gone out-of-body to the house of OBE researcher Charles Tart, I wasn't surprised to hear that Monroe had envisioned some people in the room who weren't actually there at the time of his journey. They may have been past or future echoes, instead.
The Energy of Meeting
Since hyperspace is slippery in time and space, it can be difficult to conceive of a connection there. Where do dreamers focus? And when? Use of a known place and date satisfies the needs of the waking self for orientation. But the dreaming self isn't magnetized by space-time so much as it is attracted by hyperspace energy. The intensity of a place, person or event is often the determining factor in order to recall a spontaneous psychic dream. If it works for spontaneity, why not for intentional dreaming?
And that's exactly why I suggested that people who weren't coming in the waking state try to come in the dream. There was going to be a lot of human energy at the party location and a better-than-average opportunity to attract psychic attention. Even if dreamers didn't dream up Mountain View, per se, they might still get corresponding dreams. A guest's dream activities might match the events of the day, or of the dream of another dreamer, whether that person attended the physical party or not.
It wasn't necessary to dream at a particular time. Some dreamers, who were planning to attend in the waking state, had dreams of the party the night beforehand and brought them to the party to share with other guests. They might find that their dreams were precognitive. Dreamers not present at the party could also dream the night afterwards or take an afternoon nap while it was happening. Because hyperspace isn't fixed in time, it really doesn't matter when you download your corresponding dream. Remember, when an e-mail notice "happens" in cyberspace and when you retrieve it are often two different times. When a dream "happens" in hyperspace and when you retrieve it doesn't have to be the same time, either.
And by the way, exactly "where" in cyberspace is that e-mail notice, anyway?
References
- Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies (NY: Dell Publishing, 1997), pp. 179-180.
- Tart, Charles. "Out-of-the-Body Experiences." In Mitchell, Edgar D. Psychic Exploration/A Challenge for Science. John White, ed. (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974), pp. 349-373.
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(Dream Flights)
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