Lucid Dreaming, Telepathy and the Movie, Inception by Robert Waggoner (c) 2010 All Rights Reserved
Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Inception, fictionally explores the radical idea of a lucid dreamer consciously interacting with another’s mind in the dreamscape. At first, that sounds ridiculous – how can a lucid dreamer influence another dreamer? It all happens in your own head, right? Not so fast.
Experienced lucid dreamers have explored this and discovered that dream telepathy seems to exist. They have company. Even the twin pillars of Western dream work, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, privately conceded that telepathy appeared to exist. According to various sources, Freud held “a favorable prejudice in favor of telepathy” (as he wrote in a letter to a colleague) and elsewhere opined the “incontestable fact that sleep creates favorable conditions for telepathy.” Freud notes that he, his daughter and Hungarian psychoanalyst, Dr. Sandor Ferenczi, had actually conducted informal experiments on “thought transference” with intriguing results.
As Christopher Nolan suggests, lucid dreaming potentially allows the lucid dreamer to seek out other dreamers and interact in the dreamscape. But do actual examples exist to show this? I definitely believe so. In my book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, you can read an entire chapter on instances of telepathy in lucid dreams – lucid dreamers consciously aware and intentionally seeking out unknown information which they can later verify in the waking state.
Let me give you one amazing example from my own lucid dream on Nov 24, 1998 (you can read the complete story in my book, p. 182-3):
[After a near collision on a highway, I think about the oddness of it and achieve lucid awareness, as I pull up to a restaurant] I’m inside enjoying a feeling of lucid euphoria, when I see my friend Moe come inside. She’s wearing a white T-shirt and black pants. I ask her if she realizes this is a dream. She seems just a little bit alert, so I walk her around a bit. Then I decide to hold her and levitate (to convince her we dream). I keep saying, “See, we’re floating! This is a dream!”
Trying to make some impact on her, I get the idea to make a peace sign with my fingers. Putting them in front of her face, I say, “Look, Moe, do you see this peace sign? Every time you see it, it can make you become lucid – you’ll know you’re dreaming.” Again, I put the peace sign right in front of her face. I wake.”
About four months later on a trip to the West Coast, I call up Moe and ask if she would like to meet for lunch. She agrees on a time and place. I don’t tell her about this lucid dream.
Arriving at the restaurant early, I wait outside in the sunshine. At last I see Moe walking down the sidewalk towards me. As she walks up to me, she gives me a curious look – then suddenly reaches up and puts a big peace sign right in my face!
I feel completely stunned. I had never mentioned the lucid dream to her, but she had apparently gotten the message. Composing myself, I ask her, “Why did you do that?” She just shrugged her shoulders and said nonchalantly, “I don’t know. Just felt like it.” For me, this Inception moment reinforced the empirical knowledge that lucid dreamers could communicate with others in the dream state. When lucid, information can be obtained from another or passed on to them.
In my book, I have collected other examples of lucidly seeking information, discovering it, waking with it, and most importantly, later verifying its correctness. Consider this: a university student writes me to ask if I really believe a lucid dreamer can obtain unknown information. Instead of loading him down with the history of dream telepathy research, I ask him to do something more evidentiary: devise a lucid dream experiment in which he seeks out unknown information, and then see what the results suggest. He does exactly that.
Talking to another student in the dorm, they consider this problem. She suggests the next time he finds himself consciously aware in a dream that he should find her in the dream state and discover the location of the really strange freckle on her back. They agree, and later that week, he becomes lucid, remembers the experiment, but can’t make it to her dorm room, and wakes up frustrated. So he tries again a few nights later, but this time when he becomes consciously aware in the dream, he intends for her to come to his dorm room, and she does, whereupon she turns around and he can see the really odd freckle on her back.
Waking with this information, he goes down to her dorm room, and tells her that he found her weird freckle in a lucid dream. She tells him that she will turn around and he should place his finger on her shirt, precisely where he saw the freckle. He places his finger on her shirt. She pulls up her shirt and his finger touches the freckle’s exact location. He has an Inception moment, feeling totally blown away.
Consciously aware in the dream state, it does seem possible to interact with others, as Buddhist dream yogis, Western para-psychologists and some dream researchers have maintained for years. These few examples of lucid dreamers interacting with others strongly suggest this possibility and point to revolutionary implications for physics, consciousness and science.
Note: Author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert Waggoner, taught himself how to lucid dream in 1975 (before its scientific validation) and has had a thousand lucid dreams since that time. He has spoken on numerous radio shows, like Iowa Public Radio, Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and DreamTalk Radio with Anne Hill. Read more about his book at www.lucidadvice.com.