We’ve talked about dream interpretation before ( Episode 129 and Episode 53 in particular are a good place to start) and we’ve discussed the idea of dreams as parallel universes. Of course, we’ve talked about the Succubi and the demons of our nightmares as well. And trying to control your dreams through lucidity was our second episode ! Dreaming is the the ultimate looking inward, it’s us actually living inside our own thoughts.

For millennia, humans have considered the dreamstate to be something mystical. After all, it’s a place where anything can happen. Dead loved ones can appear to you, friends can return, you can imagine what life would be like if you had made a different choice, and it all feels real. The thing about dreams is that it feels just as real as regular waking life.

You might not meditate, drop acid, or take magic mushrooms, but you experience an altered state of consciousness every night. When you fall asleep, you dream. Even if you don’t remember your dreams, you still dream when you enter REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep.

And if we believe that paranormal experiences happen to us in an altered state of consciousnesss, when are they most likely to happen except for the altered state that we naturally go into every single night?

What if we don’t have to be alone while we dream? What if someone can communicate with us, or even join us?

Inception was the latest movie to use this idea, but of course, we’re also big fans of Dreamscape ( one of our friends even worked in the art department for that Dennis Quaid classic! ) So, when it comes to dream telepathy, we’re trying to find out what is real and what isn’t, what scientists have proven and what they haven’t.

In this episode, we’ll talk about the most famous dream research, from Sigmund Freud (he’s the man who really introduced dream interpretation into the modern era with his “talking cure”) to Dr. Stanley Krippner, who did dream ESP research for decades, to the latest studies that prove there’s actually something significant (even if it’s only statistically right now) more to our dreams than just a “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of underdone potato”! Here’s what we cover:

• Scientists who were able to induce certain kinds of dreams in mice (real-life Inception ) and how they were able to do it
• The history of dream research and studies done in the Victorian Era
• How Montague Ullman at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory developed their research methodology
• Stanley Krippner’s original experiment of Dream Telepathy at a Grateful Dead concert
• Our own experiment trying to recreate Krippner’s work at the Wisconsin State Fair
• The very cool recent study showing that healthy people can correctly identify sickness in others through dreaming by just seeing their photos

Welcome to See youe on the Other. Side, where the world of

the mysterious collides with the world of entertainment.

A discussion of art, music, movies, spirituality.

The weird, and self discovery. And

now your hosts, musicians and entertainers

who have their own weakness for the weird. Mike and

Wendy from the band Sunspot. Episode

263 Dream Telepathy.

We're going into your head while you sleep and

trying to talk to you. Wendy, how are you doing today? I'm doing

great, thanks. How are you, Mike? I am hanging in there

on a long Monday night. It is 9pm September

9th, you know, so it's

999-2019.

So I believe this is a Lucky 9 podcast. All right,

cool. And it is my. It is Allison

Jordan's birthday today. Happy birthday, Allison

sister. We were trying to get her to come on at nine nine nine, but

she's at a sweat lodge today. So she's doing something

cool in there. She's like, oh, I'm a swell. All right, have fun.

I hope she sees something unusual in all the

heat and everything and has a spiritual experience herself. That'd be awesome. It

would be awesome. All right. But today we

want to talk just a little bit about dreams. Wendy,

when's the last time you had a dream? You remember last night? Okay,

well, I don't really remember all of it. My dreams tend to come back in

bits and pieces. And the weirdest part of the one that I

remember from last night was just a hot air balloon

crash landing in my. My childhood home

front yard. So analyze that.

All right, That's a. How about you? I had a dre last

night that we were gonna play a show,

and it was at a venue I didn't like.

Actually, it's a venue that didn't exist. But in my dreams I'm like, oh, this

dump. I hate playing this place. Anyway, I

wasn't gonna get dressed until before the show, so I was completely

naked setting up. Awesome. And it really was weird.

Nice work. I was just like. Cause I was like, oh,

no. I just. I was trying to make it like,

well, I don't want people to see my show outfit

or whatever beforehand. But like we were setting up and everything and

I was just naked. And it was like that dream when

you go to school and you're naked. Yeah. Like, or you show

up for a public speech or something like that. Right. But it was like that.

And then. But nobody seemed to think it was a big deal except for me.

Interesting. In the beginning, I thought it was a good idea, and then I was

like, oh, man, I'm sitting here at this bar, like trying to get a

beer before, you know, but while we're setting up or whatever. So, like sitting there

like, I'll get a beer before this or I'll buy a picture or something and

I'm just buck naked. Well, I'll tell you what, Mike,

as your bandmate and a good friend, I promise I won't let that dream come

true. All right. Thank you. If I see you without clothes, I'll give you a

heads up to. To do something about that. Throw a show blanket on me.

Do something. Be like, right, we got. There's going to be a blanket in the

van. Just throw the blanket on me and be like, there you go.

Anyway, so that. Yeah. So you had hot air balloons crashing.

Yeah, And I was. I mean, that's a classic kind of

dream that you could interpret as maybe I felt unprepared

to play. Yeah, sure. Or I felt

naked and vulnerable. Cause we're playing at a place that was a dump that I

never wanted to play again. But if we, you know, if we stopped playing at

places that were dumps that I never wanted to play again, we wouldn't play shows.

Our career would be over. Right. We wouldn't have a music career, period.

So. But it's that kind of interest in dreams. Like,

we're sitting there going, what can they mean? What can, you know, what can they.

What can they be about? And I mean, I think the modern

scientific interpretation of dreams is that they don't mean a damn

thing. You know, it's just random neurons firing.

Or maybe sometimes you are trying to figure something out in your head. We've

talked about lucid dreaming before and I've gotten much better at

lucid dreaming lately. Oh, yeah. Well, what

happens is you might be able to hear one of my cats moaning in the

background here of where I'm talking. Oh, okay. That's. I was wondering if I

was hearing some kind of a paranormal. A paranormal beastie

signal coming through. Right? I wish it was. No, it's just. It's an actual

beastie. It's an actual beastie. But what happens is since

my wife wakes up early in the morning to go to the gym or whatever,

and I wake up a couple hours later. When our three year old

wakes up, what happens is once she wakes up to go to the gym, in

walks in the cat and then just meow,

meow, meow, like right next to me, like on the pillow, on her

pillow, will just sit there, meow at me until I Wake up, pet him

for a few minutes and fall back asleep. But he's like a

lucid dreaming clock. Oh, cool.

So what'll happen is when I fall back to sleep immediately,

that's what I'm going to have a dream. I remember that's when I'm going to

have a. It also helps if I'm not drinking the night before because

alcohol interferes with our delta. Well, when you

first fall asleep after you're wasted or whatever,

you immediately fall. Into that deep, deep sleep you do. For a couple hours.

But you don't get the healthy REM sleep where we're dreaming.

That's like the rebuilding kind of sleep anyway.

And then after a few hours, you wake up and have trouble falling back asleep.

But so if I've not tippled the night before,

then it's not too bad to fall back asleep after I pet the cat for

a couple minutes. And that's when immediately I'll go into a dream.

Like, it'll be something I remember. And

because I knew I was just awake and because

this has happened now at our. At the house we've been at for the past

five months now, it feels like. Because it's like, okay,

I'm dreaming. You're aware as you go back in, right? And so

like today, like halfway through the dream, when I was buck naked

at the show, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm

dreaming. Because I'm not usually this stupid. And also,

if I was sitting there naked ordering a beer, the bartender would be like,

hey, you know, yeah, hey, you know,

I can see your jobs and get out of here. Yeah, right. This is

not. We don't live in some hedonistic. This isn't. This

isn't Europe. We have to wear clothes when we play. It's funny you said that

it's been within the past like five months because I've also had. Within the past,

you know, six months to a year probably. I've also gotten. My

lucid dreaming has gotten much better, seems like, because

I. I hit snooze a lot on my alarm. Sure. Hey, no shame in

that game. And I don't know, has changed, but I just started noticing that

when I hit the snooze button, I go back to sleep. I've been

returning into the dream that I was having beforehand. And

so same as with you, after this happening a few times,

then I started becoming more conscious of it and paying closer attention as I was

like, oh, I wonder if I can get back in there and see what's going

to Happen, you know, when I do wake up. So it's kind of fun. I

haven't really done anything with it other than to notice it and

kind of. You haven't tried to fly or anything yet? I haven't yet,

but maybe I'll make that a goal. Yeah. Give it a shot. Whenever I figured

it out, I try to fly. This last dream, I didn't try to fly because

I didn't want my wang blowing around the wind or whatever. Oh, my gosh.

So I was like, oh, that's gonna be uncomfortable. That's great.

At least get a cup or something if I'm gonna fly. Yeah. Not very

aerodynamic. No, not at all.

So I just like, I'm not gonna fly on this one, but usually I try

to fly to something cool. And then there's the whole idea of when you kind

of are feeling yourself coming out of the lucid dream and going to awake,

you try to spin yourself around and spin yourself around. And

that's supposed to keep you.

That's supposed to keep you inside the dream, because a lot of times

when you know you're dreaming, your body will try to wake you up.

You know, these are the kind of things that they talk about at one of

the places we're going to be discussing today, the Maimonides Institute.

It was a sleep institute that was developed in the

sixties in New York City. And they had done

experiments in lucid dreaming, dream

telepathy, originally, because they want to understand

the state of dreaming better because it's, you know, because everybody's

sleeping, it's hard to study it.

But also they have nightmare therapy there.

So they do things where they try to help people work through people that

have horrible nightmares, especially people that have

ptsd, you know, post traumatic stress disorder. And they've got horrible

nightmares where they keep on reliving the experience. Oh, gosh, yeah, that would

be difficult. So now it's cool that they developed a whole,

like, nightmare therapy. And you could tell that

especially when that institute was developed,

well, there's going to be a ton of guys with PTSD because of how many

people served in the second World War. So you have guys that are

10 years later, I mean, shell shocked and still having the same dreams

about fighting the Germans or the Japanese. And so

this idea of helping people kind of

control their dreams, understand their dreams better, that, you

know, the next step in that is that if we can start figuring out what's

going on in our dreams, we can start figuring out if there's any kind of

paranormal activity in there. Mm, cool. So

you remember Inception? Yes, I do. You know, it's kind of old

now. Like it feels like an old, like I think about it does Inception. You're

like, oh, that's kind of an old movie. It's not, it's not that it's not

even 10 years old yet, but that was one of my

favorites. I think of the. Even the past 20 years,

not only because of the special effects were awesome in

was just such a cool idea. Yeah.

The idea that not only could you suggest

dreams to people to make things happen, but you could

also go in there and convince people

to do things inside their dreams. And

also I think it's one of the first movies I saw that really got

into the time dilation that happens when you are dreaming.

Ah, okay. Yeah. So this idea that,

you know, a half an hour in the dream world can be five minutes in

real life kind of thing. Because I remember realizing that as a kid,

I'd have the radio on next to me when I was

sleeping. And so sometimes

in the dream I would hear a song and I would hear the

entire song through the dream. Wow. Sing along

to it or hear the entire song. And when I. And then when I woke

up, like so let's say this is one of those days in sixth grade or

something where I was snoozing, you know, and last 10 minutes I'd fall

back asleep and when I woke up, like the song would just

be on the first verse or something. Huh. So I'd hear the

entire song and go through the entire song in my head. Wow, that's cool.

And then when I woke up, I hear the song again, I'm like, ah, this

thing again. Doesn't this station play anything else?

Same crap like, come on now. But Inception really

got that right, I think where time happens differently in

dreams. And it's because our consciousness, you know, when you think about

the way our consciousness experiences time, you know, there's some

theories about it, but you know that when you're in a fight or flight

kind of situation, the first thing people say, or people are in a

car accident, they're in something where they're in some kind of life threatening

incident. The first thing they say is it was like time slowed

down and they go into.

They felt like 15 seconds was 10 minutes

kind of thing. And so the way your brain,

not just your brain, but your consciousness processes time

is different depending on the neurons

that are firing, depending on the adrenaline that's shooting through you.

And so there's no reason then that we think of

when the consciousness is not interpreting

external stimuli, but interpreting internal stimuli,

that it will process it at whatever speed it wants to process it.

So, like, if I'm talking to you and

you say some words to me in the physical, material world,

we're out here, and plus, we're dealing with one

thing beyond consciousness. We're dealing with computers talking to each other

over distance, and then our consciousness processing that. So

I have to wait till your words go through the computer and

they hit my eardrums or whatever before I can figure out what you're talking

about. But if it's. If we're all producing

these things ourselves, then our consciousness just. It

processes it as fast as it can. And so that's why

dreams have a completely different. Something that can feel hours long in a dream

or. You know, sometimes I feel like I wake up from a dream, and

I feel like somewhat like a character I created in my head or whatever is

someone that I knew my whole life. Oh, yeah. For, you know, a half an

hour. Right. And when you dream up a person and they.

It really can. Like, you can create someone in your head, then you wake

up and you like, oh, I'll never see that person again. And you miss

them. Isn't that funny? Right? Like, I'm missing someone

that's not even an imaginary friend. Yeah, I'm a

loser. I've got real

friends. And here I miss the fake one. So I think

Inception really kind of gets that. And it's funny that

the guy that wrote Inception, Christopher Nolan, he originally came up

with that idea, like, 10 years before he made the movie.

And they didn't have the technology he didn't think was

there to make it. And it took him,

like, 10 years, and he made the Batman movies in between or whatever to kind

of. To get the whole idea together and then put

the movie together. So they not only do things in that.

Like, they. They show that consciousness processes time differently what

people dream, and then it shows that dreams

can be suggested. And, you know, people. They use, like, the

science fiction device of, like, this little box.

Oh, yeah. That helps suggest people's dreams. And then they can go in there with.

So that's. That's the real science fiction y part.

Not only that you can suggest a dream to someone and it'll happen,

but then you join them in it. Mm. And that

wasn't the first movie to do that. We've talked about Dreamscape before,

which is the first. Like, the first PG13 movie,

or it was one of the first PG13 movies, but it was also

that, you know, showed us the idea of other people being

able to invade your dreams. Right. And to go in there and join you.

But the thing is, like, Dreamscape wasn't the first movie that came up

with that idea. I mean, people have

been this idea that Dreamland

is somewhere where we can talk to people.

It's a world, basically. Yes. It's somewhere else we're

visiting. You know, when we talked to a dream

expert last year, I mean, he was going off and saying, like, well, every time

you go to a dream world, you're going to a parallel universe. And that

got a little much for me because I'm like, all right,

well, then all these, like, I have plenty of nightmares. So. These parallel

universes suck. Yeah. You wouldn't want to be visiting that world.

You would choose to go elsewhere to a different world. That's nine unpleasant.

And it's completely, you know, against modern science, this

idea that when you're dreaming, you're actually going somewhere outside of your

head and not just dealing with

internal desires and troubles and maybe just your

neurons firing randomly. In fact, speaking of

neurons, this is. We'll stick with the. The hard

science portion of this for a second before we start moving into

the ESP research that they've done where they have tried to

create shared experiences with people dreaming, and

they've tried to use dreaming as a altered state of consciousness to maybe

make you more open to esp. Not you particularly,

Wendy. Not yet. We're still going to work on that. We're still going to

give that a try. Disappointed. But

just the idea of, like, okay, well, here's the

stuff we can prove, and then here's the stuff that we're still working on.

So this is from a couple years back, and

actually, so 2015. And it's an

article that's like, studies show that inception is possible, at

least in sleeping mice. And so I thought that

this looks like a fascinating study. And the

industrial physics and chemistry higher education institution in Paris,

what their scientists did was they placed electrodes into a part of the

mouse in the hippocampus. And the

hippocampus has electrical signals in specific

places that represent

specific places. So if I'm in

my bedroom, my hippocampus has a cell that

fires when I'm in that place. It's for location.

It's for, like, knowing where you are. It's for familiarity.

And so you have a specific neuron associated with it.

I'm in my basement right now because that's where cool guys

hang out. No yeah, oh yeah, for sure. And

no, I'm in my basement right now because that's the least echoey part of my

house. And I'm still working out the details in the house to figure

out a good room to record in Studio. Right. To turn

it into a big party studio where.

Where I can record alone. No, but the, the

idea is. So we have these parts in our brain that will fire when

we're in certain locations. And then. Hippocampus. The hippocampus.

And so what they did was they would monitor the mice that have electrodes in

their brain and monitor them when they were in a specific area.

And so the scientists were able to locate the specific cells that fired

in those locations. So they knew that these cells

would only fire when they were in this certain place.

Alright. So when the mice were sleeping, the

electrodes in those certain place,

cells, which they called them, would still fire.

So they were showing that the mice were dreaming about these specific places.

So what the researchers did was they would use the electrodes to

then send a reward signal to a different part of the brain

when specific locations they were dreaming about.

While they were dreaming about those locations, they would fire off the reward

signal. Okay, that's cool. So what it would do is, would create the

positive association with that place while they slept.

Okay, so if they were watching your brain, Mike. Yes. And

they saw you go to the refrigerator and take out a beer,

they wouldn't even. They wouldn't even have to fire, right? Oh, no, no. They would

just see you go to the refrigerator. Just. You go to the refrigerator.

And they would observe which. Where in your brain that showed up. And then

while you were sleeping, when that area activated,

they would give you a beer. Pretty much. They would. That's

exactly right. They would send positive reinforcement.

Okay, gotcha. So while that, While the refrigerator cells were

firing my hippocampus, they would send the, you know, the positive

area of the brain or whatever. They throw in

some dopamine. They would just excite. I see. And give you a positive.

So they would technically give you an electrode beer

when I went to the fridge. Got it. So when the mice

woke, they ran directly toward the place

that was associated with the reward signal. Interesting.

That's cool. Yeah. So, I mean, so they were affecting.

The theory is that they were affecting what was happening in the dream

from external. Yeah.

And then, I mean, obviously the mice can't talk and be like, oh

man, I was dreaming about the fridge. Unless it's Mickey.

Right, Mickey. I was dreaming about the fridge. I really Needed a beer, cuz Donald.

Was a jerk today. No, but I mean

that just idea, you know, that

that's possible. Us while we're sleeping, they can find out what we're

doing, you know, what we're dreaming about and then they can pop stuff in

there. Right? Now you can't do that to humans because

if you put an electrode directly on the brain, you're going to have

to like, you know, cut off the top of somebody's head.

Like I remember at University of Wisconsin, that was something we

had to check out was a mouse with an electrode, with electrodes, you

know, plugged right in their brain and it was fairly unpleasant.

Yeah, that does not sound nice. Yeah,

it wasn't like a, you know. It wasn't like you just put a little hat

on it. No, no, it's definitely not like a little

hat. Unless that hat revolves. Removing the skull cap. Oh

yeah, no, right. So it's that kind of idea

that, you know, that something we know we can do, you know, we

know that is possible by finding out what parts of the brain are

firing. Well, they're already doing that also with parts of the

brain associated with speech. And so as they're finding

where words are associated in people's heads,

they're using that to help people who like, you know, people

who are paralyzed, to help them speak, to help them

communicate. And, and that's been something they've been

working on now for several years. And every once in a while you'll see some

kind of article that comes out and like blows your mind. It's

like person in wheelchair can speak through a computer and hasn't been

able to talk in 20 years kind of thing. And so they are doing this

kind of research in people. Not quite as invasive as

the mice or whatever, but they are able to tell like

speech centers, the words that people are thinking. Huh.

Which we should all be very worried. Yeah, it's scary, but cool,

right? Because you know, I'm thinking about wearables, you know

what I mean? Like we have these smart wearables now, like

an Apple watch. You're wearing a, you're wearing a smart watch.

People have Fitbits and stuff like that all the time just in their watch. And

they wanted to make the glasses cool. Right. And then that just didn't

quite work. I don't know why, because it seemed like to me that was a

great idea. Yeah, I know. I want Google Glass. Never took

off. Yeah. You know, that they have

already. I mean, think about Stephen Hawking. Like he was able to

Type things by just moving his eyes around.

Amazing. So they already have

stuff that's able to detect, you know, small things in. In

human, physical. Like, as soon as we start, figure out a way to detect where.

Like, where the electrical impulses are going off in the brain. And they can already

do that a little bit with a home EEG kit.

We're going to talk about that in a little bit too. So when the

technology gets good enough to get super precise

about where things are going off in our brains, they're gonna be able

to read our minds pretty quick. Yeah.

So it's not just privacy that I'm worried about. It's that people

will. Well, people will know what I think about them. Right.

And then I will have no friends. You'll know the truth, Mike, as soon.

As they're like, oh, my God, you know,

and. Or people know what I think in general. And I will have no friends.

So technology is not that far off, but the idea of us being able

to share a dream together, now,

that is still pretty far off. So the world of inception, where you just,

you know, you get a suitcase in the same room and sneak into somebody's

dream, or in dreamscape, they just did it through massive ESP powers,

that's not quite there yet. That doesn't mean that people

haven't believed they've been able to share dreams.

You know, for all of history, the. The

Maori, the people of New Zealand, I mean, they

believe the dreamer's soul could travel to the. To the land of the dead

and talk with their friends who'd passed. The indigenous

people of Borneo, they had special spirits of the

dead who came to visit them during their dreams. And

a lot of North American Indians, too, also had this idea

that they could connect with other people at faraway

distances through their dreams. Now, these things weren't done in

any kind of scientific thing. It was just this idea that. That sometimes

you'd see somebody who you knew in your dream if they were dead or

alive, and you felt like you were connecting with them

beyond the usual dreamscape. Okay. So

especially shaman and medicine men, who were more connected with the spirits and

more connected with the idea that the soul can leave the body. Had

this idea that you could have dream telepathy.

And so if you guys don't know what telepathy is, you're listening to the wrong

podcast. Nice. If you don't know telepathy. We do

talk about it a lot, right? It's this idea

that you can talk to people with just your thoughts. So

telepathic means when you're empathic,

it means that you can detect another person's emotions. When you're

telepathic, it means you can directly communicate what they thought. So

it's like telephone talking on a telephone,

but your telephones are your heads and you're not using your voices.

And so, you know, that's been mostly

all anecdotal evidence through time. The society

of psychical research, that's the. Basically the people that

invented parapsychology in the modern era.

That was something that they tried to

broach in their book Phantasms of the Living.

And they've got 149 cases of dream telepathy.

And they called it extrasensory communication of impressions of any

kind from one mind to another. But

everything was very anecdotal.

So, like, here's an example that they use in Phantasms of the Living.

My brother and father were on a journey. And I dreamt I saw father driving

in a sledge, followed another by my brother. They had to pass

a crossroad in which another traveler was driving very fast, also on a

sledge, with one horse. Father sent it to drive on without

observing the other fellow who would have driven over my father if he had not

made his horse rear. So that I saw my father drive under the hooves of

the horse. Every moment I expected the horse to fall down and crush him.

And I called out, father, Father. And woke in great fright.

And the next day he discovered that his brother and father were

on a journey and they did pass a

crossroad and his dad almost got hit by the horse.

Interesting. So, I mean, that's what most of the stuff they

talk about in Fantasm to the Living is all anecdotal things. Yeah.

Not verifiable. Right. I mean, we've had like an anecdote like that in my family

where, where my cousin or the man who's married

to my cousin, all my

cousins are a lot older than I am because My mother was 20 years

younger than her sister and she had

kids 20 years after, 20 years later than when her sister did.

So my cousin, he told me this story

probably when I was maybe 16 years old or something, and he was

already in his late 40s

and he was talking about how his father had passed.

And, you know, I was talking about how, like ghost stories and things, and he's

like, well, I didn't really see a ghost, but

the night before my father died, I had dreamed

that I was, you know, in this white room with my father

and my brother. Was there, and my father was telling us it was okay

that he passed and that,

you know, he was no longer going to be in pain. And he, you know,

told us to take care of ourselves and he'd always look over us kind of

thing. The kind of thing you usually hear about when you think about a comforting

apparition of someone who dies saying goodbye.

And when he talked to his brother the next day, his brother brought it

up and said, you know, I had a dream about you both last night. We

were in a white room, and dad was talking to us, and he was saying

it was okay. And he was, you know, that we should take care of ourselves,

whatever, and that he would watch over us, blah, blah, blah kind of thing.

And I'm like, oh, man. So not only did they have, like, a

ghost dream, they both had the same dream. So it was

like a shared dream with their dad. Like a shared dream.

And that's the kind of stuff that people talk about in the phantasms of the

living book. Because it's, you know,

usually the characteristics are. Number

one, it's someone in imminent danger. So it's very much like a

crisis apparition. A crisis apparition is when people

will see a ghost of someone they love

who is maybe far away, but they see them during

when something horrible happens. A lot of people will talk about

crisis apparitions happening when their mother's in a

car accident or something, or their sister, and

they'll see a ghost of that person in their house. Or

they'll see the person pass through their house when they shouldn't be there.

And they realize at the same time that was happening that

the person was in the car accident or whatever. Or they'll get a phone call

from them and they'll just talk about nothing for a second. Like the person just,

like, just wanted to check in on you. Like, okay, everything's cool. Like, okay,

well, I'll talk to you later then. And that will be some kind of, like,

regular phone call they'll get. But that person will have been

either in the accident at the time or in the ambulance.

Yeah, that's spooky. On the way home. So, you

know, it's usually the dreams concern something of death.

It's somebody who's related or a friend of them. And

usually a lot of times it's people who don't have

psychic abilities or experiences in other parts of their life.

So to them, this is a big deal because they're not someone that

usually has a psychic encounter.

So they've been Studying dream telepathy. It started in the

1800s. It's kind of when they first got in there. That's probably the first time

they called it telepathy. Sigmund Freud talks about it

in 1921. He writes like an entire

thing on the occult and psychoanalysis

and he's got a paper on dreams and telepathy and he was going to

lecture, actually delivered as a lecture, but he

never actually did, but he did write it up. And so

Freud was obviously interested in dreams because

he's basically our modern guy for

dream analysis. So the idea, when Freud developed

psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud did it in the early 20th century.

He's saying that we can cure people who are mentally ill by

talking about their problems. They called psychoanalysis the

talking cure. And when

in the past, when people had mental illness, they just, you

know, they shoved him in a, they gave him a

lobotomy or they shoved him in an institution, or

they considered it weakness, they didn't consider it a sickness in that

kind of way that could be. They didn't consider a sickness that could be cured

through talking. Now the idea of talking to a therapist or

whatever is normal because we've had a hundred years of Sigmund Freud.

So. Well, actually now the psychiatrist is

not gonna talk to you. He's just gonna give you drugs, right? But that's because

they don't have time to talk to you anymore. The budget only has that much,

right? So here's a chemical shortcut,

right? Here's your beer when you go to the fridge.

But Sigmund Freud, he didn't necessarily believe in

telepathy and dreams, but he thought it couldn't be

proven or disproven because he talked to people about their dreams

constantly, because that was part of his cure was what are you

dreaming about? And then he'd always related to sex because that's what Freud did.

Because everything to him, every problem that people had was

had to do with some kind of sexual dysfunction or some

kind of desire, sexual desire that wasn't being

satisfied. Or so I mean, he based most of his talking

cure on, well, we got a sexual problem here,

but your dreams aren't be any different.

And so he himself said

that he had two potentially telepathic dreams.

One was the dream of the death of his son and the other

was the dream of a death of his sister in law. But

he said, well, you know, I don't think they're

telepathic because I just think that I was expecting

them to die or worried that they were going to die, and then they died

shortly after. So your mind was already kind of working on that

while you were asleep. Right. If you dream

about the death of someone that's terminally ill, you

wouldn't necessarily call that a psychic dream. You would just say, I'm dreaming about

somebody who's terminally ill. But I mean, he did think this. So he

talks about this. He wrote a paper on it. I mean, people still study

Freud. I studied Freud in college. And,

you know, we would have professors who were

psychoanalysts who grew up in the Freudian tradition.

And so this idea that he was down at least

with thinking, the idea that telepathic dreaming and

it could happen that people could communicate with each other through their dreams,

you know, he's at least okay with it. Whereas if you talk to a

psychiatrist today and he tries to write

something up about telepathic dreaming, they're not going to publish

that in Psychology Today, let's say. So Freud brings it up,

then in the 1940s, they start studying it

again. In fact, there's some

studies done in the 1940s that people are

seeing, as in the lab, they're saying that

people were able to actually accomplish

telepathic dreaming and that they were able to send

messages to each other and interact in the dreams.

But the papers didn't really,

like, the papers weren't really respected. Like, they were accepted by a couple of different

journals. But the fact that they became more controversial

than anything and nobody was able to replicate them.

So, you know, the biggest thing that they were able to do was start

using REM monitoring.

Like, this is the best thing that came from those studies, even though they weren't

really able to prove anything when it came to, like, obviously

the idea of a study is not necessarily to prove that you can

do psychic crap in your sleep, but

they were useful in saying that, okay, when people are in this rapid

eye movement state, that's

when they're probably dreaming makes sense. So then, you know, these studies in

1940s, they started being like, okay, well, here's how we actually

study how people dream. So in the past,

you would just have the Freudian way of, I'm telling

Sigmund about my dreams, or you're telling a psychical researcher

in the 1850s or whatever. You'd be like, oh,

yes, sir, I had a dream that my father was going to be run over

by a horse. And then the next day I found out that it was

really happened. So it's not

like when you study REM because In rem, you can see, okay, the eyes are

going. They're dreaming. You can wake them up right after. So you

start eliminating that whole day where also you can

forget your dreams. Because they always say, if you want to be a better dreamer,

not necessarily a lucid dreamer, a better. Well,

I guess if you have a lot of nightmares like I used to have, then

being a better dreamer would be not being attacked by things in. Your dreams

or also maybe being able to remember your dreams better.

Because we don't know if there are nights where you wake up and

you don't remember dreaming. That doesn't mean that you didn't dream.

Right? Right. No, that's exactly right.

It's just. It's just because my dad, like, I'd be like, hey, dad, you know,

what do you dream about? And he's like, nothing.

He just straight, like, like nothing. I'm like,

well, don't you. He's like. I'm like, don't you remember your dreams? He goes, I

don't dream. Come on. He's like, no, I just.

I don't remember any of them. And so

it's got to be the kind of thing where you got to write it down,

you got to practice it. So they always say to remember

your dreams better or to be more involved in your dream life. Like, let's say

we talked about the Aborigines before and the rich life that the

Australian Aboriginal people have in their dream that's

developed from a young age because they are taught how to remember their

dreams, to talk about it, to treat their dream life like it's a.

Like it is a different world that you visit. And whether or not it's a

different world you visit, it's still cool to be able to do stuff in your

dreams. Yeah, it's fun. Or even if it's not just

horrific, even if it's not just you naked at a bar

and feeling self conscious, even if I could just

manifest some underwear, it would have been better. There you go.

Like a Speedo would be fine. It would still be less awkward

than just having the bait and tackle out there.

And that the thing is, is that if you can.

If you can. If you can start doing that a little, it becomes your

dreaming experience can be more pleasant. Yeah. And you can even work

on things in your life that you want to contemplate. Or, you know, they say

if you can get a handle on the lucid dreaming, it's a place where you

can do that that might give you some insights that you wouldn't Normally have in

your waking life. Yeah. Because people have been able to write songs

in their dreams. Like, I have yet to write a song in the dream. I

have had, like, snippets of a rhyme.

Nice. And I'd write that down.

Or I'd have a song title, and I'd be like, oh, here's our. Here's our

new song. And then I'd be like, oh, that's a cool name for a song.

When I woke up, I'm like, I write that down. Forget it. I have

melodies for sure. I wake up with a melody in my head

sometimes. And you can just sing it. And that's a. That's a. I mean, very

famous people have done that. Because your mind's still working.

Right. And, you know, I don't want to solve problems all the time in my

dream because I'm sick of, like, solving problems in my day life.

Yeah. That I want to be like, oh, God, the dreaming is the only time

I can be naked in a bar. Yeah. But there's a difference between. You know,

it's kind of how they say meditating helps you with that kind of stuff too,

because it's like. That's right. A clear place. It's. You're out of your daily.

The daily problem solving type situation. And then that can allow you

to look at things maybe deeper or. I don't know. That's right.

No, I agree with you there. And you're also completely looking

inside. Right. So when we talked about

psychic experimentation before, the most

repeatable results have happened during

what's known as the Ganzfeld procedure. And they even do this

when they talk about the. This, this. Was it called the Stanley. Is it the

Stanley method? Oh, yeah, right. Where you. It's sensory

deprivation. You put the ping pong balls over your

eyes. I don't know why it's always ping pong balls and not just a blindfold.

I think it's because they look creepier. They do look creepy.

Yeah. No, actually, it might be. It might be so that, you know, it kind

of diffuses the light, makes it like an even. Instead of just having

darkness over your eyelids, there's still, like, light coming in, but it's

even. I don't know. Well, no, that's right. Because, you know, a lot of times

in the. In the Gansfeld, they'll actually. But when the ping pong balls also

have a red light over. Oh, okay. So there you go. So

it's no, like, real visual sense because

you're just getting one color of everything. And maybe also so you don't have to

shut your eyes so hard and think about it. But the idea is

that sensory deprivation, and we talked about this in the whole episode of Flotation,

and the sensory deprivation tanks, which I highly recommend because

they're totally awesome. But putting people in sensory

deprivation to this idea where you don't have any external stimuli

to distract you. That's the

idea, is that puts you in a better state to be receptive to messages.

And when are you more internally stimulated,

I suppose, to say, than when you're sleeping.

Right. Those synapses firing, the only thing that's. Firing at what's in your head, and

it's only coming from the stimuli that you create or

are influenced. You can't be influenced by anything that's outside your body.

And so now in the 60s, that's when they really start

getting into dream experimentation. And so there's a

guy named Montague Ullman. Tracy Ullman's dad. No,

it's not Tracy Ullman's dad, but

Montague Ullman, first of all, is a great name for a scientist. That is pretty

sweet. And he starts working at this Maimonides Institute,

and he's, you know, he starts getting into using EEGs

and seeing how the brain waves are going, what

parts of the brain are firing, you know, during sleep.

So they start being able to use EEGs as a way to

find out where people are in the dream cycle. Yeah. And

so they can be like, okay, this guy is in rem. How do we know?

Is it because we sit there staring at him? Right. You have something that's

measurable, that you can take a note of. Right.

And remember, the 60s is a really groovy time, too.

I don't remember. Okay, but when we're Talking about the

60s, we're talking about an era where, you know, people

are. It's. The new age is upon us. We're coming upon

the age of Aquarius, the Summer of Love. And

not. You know, we talked about hippies in,

I guess, this summer, specifically because we were talking about Charles Manson a bunch.

We've talked about them in a pretty negative light because, you know, the

proto hippie ended up being a murderer.

But also, hippies were great because they helped

us see things from a different perspective, introduced new

kinds of spirituality into. Society and made it kind

of almost acceptable. Right. And these new ideas were able to

get in there. So, okay, so Montague Ullman starts working with

Dr. Stanley Krippner, who. He's still. Stanley Krippner is Still

alive. And he's got a great episode of Joe Rogan

if you got three hours to listen to it or whatever, where he

talks a little bit about this. But Dr. Krippner, that he's. First of all, Dr.

Krippner from Wisconsin. So know, Shout out, even though

he lives in Oakland now, did most of his research in New York, but

they start doing these dream experiments. They start getting in

telepathy, and they actually do

research with the Grateful Dead. All right, now we're

talking. Yeah. So it's funny because, you know,

he was, like, friends with Mickey Hart, the drummer, the Grateful

Dead. So Stanley Crippen was friends. And when they were doing some of these

sleep experiments, at the same time, people were also doing experiments

with lsd. Yeah. And a lot of these bands

were doing lsd, number one. Because, I mean, acid

rock, that's where. I mean, that's where the ad name comes from.

And it's also legal, so it's not. I mean, you could buy LSD in the

back of magazines. So when we think about this now, if you were doing LSD

and embarking on a. Some kind of

psychedelic experience, like the DEA wasn't gonna blow your

door down because it was just like drinking a beer or

whatever. Well, except you might spend eight

hours in a fantasy land or a nightmare,

right? And the Grateful Dead were really into

psychedelics. Obviously, that was like their name. They came up

with their name while they were all,

like, tripping or whatever. Like they were. Their name was the

Warlocks or something. And so they were all one of the

guys houses. And they needed to find a new name

other than the Warlocks. And this guy had a big Oxford

dictionary. They opened it and then they saw the words

Grateful's dead, like, juxtaposed. And I don't know how they saw

it juxtaposed because G and D are different.

But several of them at the same time saw

the Grateful Dead. And it looked like big black letters. He said,

big black letters edged all around the gold man,

blasting out me. Such a stunning combination. So I

said, how about the Grateful Dead? That was

it. Okay. And so they were used to these kind

of, you know, experiments. And so what

Stanley Krippner wanted to do is because he knew these guys, and he was also

friends with this medicine man who was kind of controversial because

he might not be a medicine man, but he was born

in Oklahoma and claimed to have Native American heritage.

He had said his name was Rolling Thunder. That's what he

called himself. And so he was always really into these kind

of experiments. And he was also friends with Mickey Hart and Stanley

Krippner. And. And because Stanley was doing this research in

dreams, he wanted to see if they could.

They were just doing stuff where one person was in one room and they were

trying to send a message to a person in the other room. And they were

doing with art. So they were just doing it with interesting art.

And like you have, you know, a few

telepathic receivers and then a few telepathic

senders, and they are distant rooms of the place,

but that's how they were doing their dream telepathy research.

And so they were seeing some interesting

statistical results, which if you guys don't understand how statistics

work when it comes to science, it's a methodology where you

can take, if you have a big enough sample of people,

then you try to run a bunch of numbers to see if you can

apply it to an entire population.

And so, you know, the kind of experiments they were running is.

Here's one example that Krippner writes. So

this, this obtained a statistically significant result. And

you have a randomly selected art print that is the School of the Dance

by Degas, which is a dance class of several young women. You guys would

recognize it if the ballet dancers, right? Yep. And so the receivers,

dream reports included phrases of. I was in a class,

maybe made up a half a dozen people that felt like school. There

was one little. There was one little girl who was trying to dance with me.

And so that. This idea that, okay, like

they had, you know, one person sending this

picture by Degas, and there was the. The people were just writing what

they dreamt about. And so one person dreamt about school with half dozen

people, and the other person dreamt about girls trying to dance with them. And so

once they, like, put it all together with the. The amount of things that

people decided that were statistically significant,

it was like, all right, well, let's try to repeat this experiment. And so

they would have several experiments that actually seem to work.

Still not in the way. That's a home run, like we're talking about. Yeah,

like we want to talk about where. Wendy, you go to sleep tonight, and

I'm trying to send you. I don't know,

at this time of the night. I'm going to send like a lightning strike

bright flashlight in your dream. And then you see the brain light up

at exactly that time right where you think the person

should be perceiving it or whatever. Like, you want something very

measurable, very exact. And that doesn't

Rely a lot on the person's own perception of it.

Right. That's the home run. Yeah. Saying, like

I've dreamed something about lightning is not necessarily the home.

Yeah, well, at least it's. It's something in there. But

so what they tried to do was in

1970, they were having a rock concert

that everybody at the rock concert was the telepathic senders.

And so they had a light show

that accompanied the music. And they had a

projector up there where they could show slides. And

so what they did was they showed a color film about eagles and their nesting

habits on the movie projector. And the program for the

slide projectors featured various birds from around the world, as well as a

phoenix. And then the Rounders were the band who was

playing at this rock concert in March of 1970.

And the song was called if youf Want to Be a Bird. Okay. All

right. So what are they trying to send? Bird, bird, bird, bird,

bird. There's five volunteer telepathic receivers,

each located in a hundred mile radius from the concert's location in Manhattan.

All five of the participants were told the location of the concert and directed to

record their images at midnight, at which time the target material would be

exposed. So one of the receivers had the

impression of something mythological, like a griffin or a phoenix.

The second, third, and fourth research participants reported images of a snake,

grapes, and an embryo in flames.

The fifth participant was Richie Havens, the

celebrated American singer and recording artist. So as a musician, as the fifth

participant. And he reported closing his eyes at midnight

and visualizing a number of seagulls flying over the water.

So two out of the five people got pretty close.

Yeah. Although that's a pretty small sample size. And

a bird is a pretty, like, universal image. It's

pretty like. But they didn't tell him what it was. But, I mean, the fact

that it was a bird. Yeah. And so the next time they try to do

it, in February 1971, they get the Grateful Dead to do it with 2,000

people in the audience. And then they get

two people in there as telepathic receivers.

And one of them is sleeping at the laboratory.

The other woman is. Now she's sleeping at home. But

she was awakened by telephone from time to time during the night and asked

for dream recall. So they would wake her up and then have her

tell her what she was dreaming about. And so this is a cool thing,

is that they've got this six slide sequence facing, you know, the

audience. And the 2,000 people see like you're about to

participate in the ESP experiment, in a few seconds, you'll see a picture.

Try using your ESP to send this picture to Malcolm

Besant. Malcolm Besant is one of the guys. Pick his name,

Right. He will try to dream about this picture. Try to send it

to him. Malcolm Besant is now at the Maimonides Dream

Laboratory in Brooklyn. So they're saying where he is. They're saying

his name. We want you to send it to him. And there's no cell

phones or anything like that. This is 1971. And then they randomly select an

art print to show on the screen. And the members of the Grateful Dead,

they talked about it a little bit, and they told them, send the image to

Brooklyn. And so this idea was, what would happen

if 2,000, you know,

2,000 people were sending the message all at the same time? Would the

guy be dreaming about it? So then what happens is they had the dream

transcripts, and then they gave

several judges copies of the six

art prints selected for use in the study. And

this whole thing, they did this for, like, six different nights. And so

the judges would look at the art prints and then look at the dream transcripts

and see how close they would have gotten. And they said,

well, it wasn't, you know, this great super

example. It was basically, the results

were only one of the knights seemed to be

that close for both of them. So they got close out

of both of them, and it said that maybe the results were 12 out of

100 in chance. So every hundred times they did this, maybe 12 times

that chance would happen that they would both get those

correct, you know, close to the prints in their dreams.

So you really couldn't determine if 2,000 telepathic

transmitters were better than one. Okay. So that's kind of

inconclusive. Inconclusive. And we had the same problem when we

tried our own dream telepathy experiment. Yeah. And

so we tried to do something similar at State Fair this year,

because I was doing a investigation that night. Allison and

I were doing an investigation that night. And it was based around

if someone who was sleeping in a haunted place would see

some extra haunted stuff, or they would see things

or hear things that were related to the hauntings in their dreams.

Well, we tried to do it. We also tried to replicate the experiment. Now, it

wasn't at the same time. It was later on. So we were sending it to

the future during the show. Yeah, that is a different situation. But

during our song about Stonehenge, Mother of Time, we tried to

send this picture of Stonehenge to A girl named Madeline who'd be dreaming. And later

on that night, after, she never hit REM sleep,

like, because of the circumstances. Yeah,

she didn't. Not ideal for the experiment. Yeah. I

don't know if she even dreamed. But we're. This is the first time we tried

it. Right. And that doesn't mean. I mean, the Grateful Dead tried it a bunch

of nights. We can still tell. Yeah, definitely. But I showed her then four different

pictures after she had woken up. And I'm like, which

of these did you dream about? Any of these pictures? And she picked. Instead of

picking out Stonehenge, she picked out a picture of city. And

she's like, the city speaks to me. And I'm like, oh, dang. It's just the

stones that's spoken to you. Yeah.

But that kind of idea that. All right, maybe more

senders aren't better than one sender at a time.

Because it seems like most of the statistically significant data and

research has been done with just one sender to another sender. Yeah,

there was one more interesting study that I thought, now Stanley

Krippner's been doing this for years, and he's super interesting. He's still alive. So we're

gonna beg into the podcast one of these days. Cause he's really

interesting and smart, too. And plus, he's got rock and roll stories from the 60s,

so, you know, he'd be the perfect person to talk to. So

there was a very cool study done in

2013 where they were trying to

see if people could dream information

about other people without knowing who they are just by looking

at their picture. And so what they would do is they were

shown a picture of someone that they did not know.

And they asked them, we want you to go to sleep tonight, and we want

you to dream about a health problem they have. The experimenter

didn't know about the health problem, and the participant didn't know about the health

problem. And so they had a class, like 65 students, and

like, 12 students volunteered to do it. And that was the first experiment.

In the second experiment, I think, like, another 50

did it. So they ended up having, in the end, like,

a, like, 150 students who did this kind of thing

in three different experiments. In one experiment,

they didn't see a picture. It was just this idea of, we want you to

try to dream about somebody with a health problem. In the second experiment, they saw

the picture. In the third experiment, they saw a picture that was

computer generated and the target individual was

fictitious. So they saw, like, a Face that wasn't a real person. Nice,

like an AI created face or whatever, like they do now. And they would go

through and they tried to score their dreams.

And their conclusions were basically

that people who saw the picture of

the person and then tried to

reflect about their health problems the next day in their dreams, or what they saw

in their dreams, the ones that actually did dream about the person that they

were trying to dream about, if they saw the picture,

it seemed like statistically the results they

got compared to chance, which the chance

is very low for something like this because you're just guessing out loud what they

could have. They did find a statistical significance in young,

healthy adults dreaming details about the personal problems

of an unknown individual simply by looking at their target

and then planning to dream about that individual's problem.

And so, I mean, we can get into. I can put a link in the

show notes about the kind of these different rules they have where

they analyze people's dreams. And when you go through. And they have code

for things that happen in people's dreams. So then they can, you know,

they can try to quantify it a little bit. But

just this idea that just in the past six years they had a statistical

significance that just by looking at someone's picture and

planning to dream about them, you can.

More than chance, at least more than probability would.

More than probability would dictate. You can, like, learn

something about it. So dream telepathy exists in the way

of. I mean, science has proven greater than chance,

but unfortunately hasn't proven anything like

that. We can use today. Like, we can't. Wendy, we can't go out and just

work on a song tonight in our dreams, which would be great because it'd make

this whole week a lot faster. Oh, it'd be awesome. It

would be so, so helpful. It would be.

But, you know, speaking of songs, the song for today talks a lot

about dreams, daydreams and fantasies

and the kind of things that you think about when you feel stuck

and you feel like you want to do something more, but you got to pick

up the pace to do it. So this one's off our first album.

And I don't know if we were feeling particularly stuck or it was just

one night. We were talking about, like, the idea of being stuck in a small

town and always wanting to get out. And so this

song is called Running In Place.

Stared at my window for an hour

Read a little bottle and got out of bed

Then I went to work Another for what seemed forever

Nothing tells you I was a man that's raised

past Time has this way with me

moving too fast we danced a tilt down

under endless sky but when I

woke up it had passed me

I'm falling behind in the human race

Cause all of my life I've been running

this the boys with big dreams I just think

of the best fall out of our lives we'll

be running running in place

Running in place

oh this room smells so old to moan and beats

I stared at my ceiling for an hour

when you have too much ambition Then it hurts like no nana

we're gonna pray for a sign that will never come

the dance till two hours the man of three's

best dreams have this way of

unreaching my grand we danced until

down on the heaven lit skies but when

I woke up it had left me back

I'm falling behind in the human race

Cause out of my life I've been running in

this the boys with big dreams have to

pick up the best all out of our lives

we'll be running running in place

I danced two hours the mirrors we

missed Dreams have this way of

unreaching my grass we danced until

down under the sky but when

I woke up it had passed me by

Falling behind in the human race

Cause all of my life I've been running

this the buns with big dreams as you

think of the best for all of my

eyes will be running running in place

Running in place

Running in place is

thank you for listening to today's episode. You can find us

online@othersidepodcast.com until next

time. See you on the other side. Oh

it would be so cool if we could have like a lucid dream

hangout with our Patreon members. Yes, it would be. That would be my favorite thing

to do because then not only would we have to not have to deal with

stuff Skype and it's technical difficulties, Internet,

we'd be able to use the wifi in our minds.

Yes. And we could all be like in a room together. We could all be

flying around together. Think about how sweet that is. I promise I'll wear clothes guys.

I promise I'll wear clothes. Anyway, if you would like to be part of a

Patreon hangout online because we can't do it

in our dreams yet. Othersidepodcast.com donate is

the place where you can become part of our Patreon community and do things

like the cool hangouts. Yes. And we want to thank each and every one of

our Patreon members for being so cool and they really are

fun friends that we've made. Absolutely.

And we want to make sure we thank Dr. Ned. Thanks Ned. He's

at the level of membership where he gets a shout out in every single episode.

We'd love everybody to be at the level where they get a personal shout out

in every single episode. You can do that. Othersidepodcast.com

donate the rest of our patreons are just as

awesome. Yes. And we thank you so much for supporting us

and for contributing to the community that we

have. Right. You know what guys? You make our

dreams come true.

Oh yes sir. I had a dream that my father was going to be run

over by a horse. And then the next day I found out that it was

really happened. I was dreaming about the fridge.

I really needed a beer because Donald was a jerk today. This last

dream, I didn't try to fly because I didn't want my wang blowing around the

wind or whatever.