Dream telepathy experiments traditionally use pictures as their targets. One person serves as "sender," concentrating on the picture prior to sleep, with the intent to create a mental broadcast for receptive dreamers to pick up. Participants in the experiment go to sleep with the expectation that they will serve as "receivers" of the incoming information in their dreams. When they wake, they record their dreams and send the reports to a facilitator who reviews all dreams, compares them with the target and writes a summary of the results. Often, the facilitator and sender are the same person. Such was the case when, late one October, I invited folks to dream with me (the participant names in this article are pseudonyms).

Since I had used plenty of picture targets in previous experiments, I thought this time I would try something new. It was my birthday week and I'd already been inundated with a bonfire of small cake candles, so I selected a larger candle from the family room to continue the theme. I carried it upstairs, where I watched the flickering firelight as I sat in my bed. Simple concentration on the target became boring, and I didn't want to zone out while staring at it. So I decided to write a poem from the impressions I gleaned while seeing, smelling, touching and trying to hear a sputter from the lighted candle. In additional to sight, I was attempting to involve as many of my senses as possible.

When the dreams came in, I found that nobody had focused on my poem and the descriptions of the candle were very oblique. Lisa and Gwen noted eggs in their dream reports and Henriette's dream talked about the moon. These symbols might be considered subtle references to the candlewick's round, glowing aura. Genevieve came closest when she perceived a bowl (the candle had a holder) and a gold safety pin (both candle and holder were shades of gold). In addition, her report mentioned "a receptacle that looked like it was going to hold liquid...basking in...light".

Actually, the greatest number of references weren't to fire at all. Most dreams talked about water instead. Why the elemental switch? Simple. The dreamers weren't just concentrating on the candle; their psychic viewscreens were wider than that. For instance, their dream pictures could expand to include the person holding the candle. Namely, me.

After writing my poem, I held up the candle to gaze at it once again. When I reached to place the candle back on the bedside table, I spilled melted wax on my right arm and shoulder. It stung but did not burn me. I was upset over having to get up and change my pajama top. Henriette perceived this scenario the best, although she substituted black shoe polish for the golden candle wax. "...she's made a mess. I'm mad and start cleaning it up," read her report. She also talked about getting "splashed," but by water. The liquid in the candle mouth had made a greater emotional impression than the solid stick of wax or even the lighted wick. It also made a literal impression on my skin, one I could feel acutely, until I cleaned it off. So was emotion the carrier of information or sensory experience? Or both?

Dreamers didn't just open their inner camera lenses to take in more space. As with most psychic information, their perceptual range includes an expansion of time, backwards and forwards.

Earlier in the day I had been working with my Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Like traditional targets, these were pictures, and very evocative ones at that. Lisa dreamt that Gwen brought her to a psychic reader who had Tarot cards. On her part, Gwen dreamt, "Linda is up in front and she is telling us about our correspondences in dreaming." A numbered list of the correspondences was tacked to her dream wall; Gwen especially noticed numbers 8 and 18. In Tarot, #8 is the card of Strength, which had been the central focus of my reading. #18 is the Moon card. Henriette dreamt, "I see all the phases of the moon from new to crescent to last quarter to full." The Rider-Waite rendition does seem to illustrate more than one moon phase, collapsed into a single symbol.

Tarot cards can be packed with personal significance, but it wasn't just the archetypal characteristics that caught the dreamers' attention. Their shape and the tactile action involved in the reading did, too. Laura simply dreamt of "cards being passed around." Tammy awoke with an image of boxes with "numbers and symbols...2 or 3 per box and I am arranging them." Tammy made a sketch of her "boxes" and, to me, they look like cards all in a row. They have the right rectangular proportions: longer vertically than width-wise.

The connections with my life went farther into the past. At the beginning of the month, I'd been interviewed by a reporter from our local paper about dream symbols and how they might relate to the California Lottery (it was a tongue-in-cheek piece). The newspaper article with my interview appeared on my birthday and someone took it seriously enough to call me on the phone. At 6:00 in the morning. Ugh. The folks at a San Francisco station, KWSS, woke me up to ask me to...dream the winning lottery numbers!

Karl resonated with this incident the best. He dreamt that he was on a break at work in San Francisco (he didn't live or work in the city). "...there is something odd about my job: (it) somehow includes the job of "producing dreams." Karl stops by the house of an old friend because he thinks the friend can help him "produce dreams." Instead, the friend "wants to talk about this other project or experiment going on: a radio station something like KPFA is broadcasting some kind of sound or wave..."

Laura time-traveled backward even further. She zeroed in on the emotional turmoil that characterized the dreamworkers meeting at which I had first met Genevieve. "...a feeling of Gothic and intricate family intrigue and history" was a good summary of the undertones of the event. She picked up more specific characteristics, like the fact that I had become quite angry.

Both events - the dreamworkers' meeting plus the abrupt wake-up call and subsequent challenge - involved intense emotions. I suspect both incidents were still "etched" in aura, the aura that surrounds my body, that is, not the candle's. Telepathic dreamers don't just about perceive the surface of reality. They delve beneath, like a Tarot reading, to perceive information floating in hidden psychic wave bands.

There definitely was a trickster in the group (Gwen dreamt about a "sacred clown"). It was Laura. Along with her dream report, Laura sent along a clipping from a San Francisco newspaper. The clipping turned out to be yet another target, which neither I nor the rest of the group saw until after the official sending date. It was an interview column: a reporter had gone into the city streets to ask questions of passers-by. The question of the day was "Do You Have Happy Dreams?" Most of the interviewees had replied in the affirmative. The lone dissenter had ended her description of a nightmare with the phrase, "Luckily, that's when I woke up." Perhaps that's why Lisa dreamt about a "Lucky's" grocery store. Another interviewee had mentioned that one of his happy dreams was a "picnic."

Gwen was the one who best honed into Laura's target. Right smack in the middle of the column, a woman responded "yes" to the inquiry about happy dreams. "They're almost vacations," she said. "Always something to do with the ocean and water. I think it means I should do my calling and find a job as a scuba diver." The woman is described as a "temp office worker/scuba diver." I have been both. In fact, I learned to scuba dive on vacation in Hawaii. In Gwen's dream she is making a comment about Hawaii. A woman responds that "you get free food (lucky groceries again) and one week vacation when you start a job over there." Furthermore, Gwen is offered a part in a play...as an *airtank*!

Three other participants dreamt about beaches, another reflection of the Hawaiian theme. One beach had a pier, perhaps because the interviewees were being questioned at the San Francisco waterfront.

Since I didn't know about the newspaper column, I joined the rest of the group as a psychic reader. I had a dream whose phraseology strangely paralleled Karl's dream. In both cases, we noticed discrepancies in our dreams, but neither became lucid. Karl recognizes that his "dream mother is white, whereas the real (woman) was black." My dream says, "I realize that (our cat) has tiger markings, unlike waking life, where she is black." The scuba woman smack dab in the middle of the column was Black. And, believe it or not, her last name was *Tiger*.

Speaking of critters, Karl dreamt of a dinosaur. So did I. Was Karl dreaming my dream or was I dreaming his? Sometimes, it can be hard to say. But in this case, I nominate my own dream (I'd also been thinking and talking about dinosaurs...in terms of dream symbols). As sender, my dreams of the night served as yet another target for inquisitive participants.

Okay, let's see where we are now. In a dream telepathy experiment, participants can dream of the sender's target, the sender's life and the sender's dreams. Conversely, the sender can dream of their lives and dreams. Both may ignore the "official" target for spontaneous alternatives, probably because they are more interesting!

The opportunities for psychic "hits" in a dream telepathy experiment are many-fold. Nowadays, I never limit myself to looking for correspondences with the official target. There are far more possibilities than can be discovered through that limited peep-hole. Psychic dreams don't dream like the old radio analogy: tuning into a single station for news. They've joined the Interweb generation. They dream wide-band.

I haven't even mentioned other networks, like connections with friends, family and member of other concurrent dreaming projects. And retrocognitive links with past projects. And precognitions of things to come. And, most of all, the multitude of links between participants, including some that seem to have no connection with waking life at all. Truly, there's a huge field of dreams in the world of psi.

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(Dream Flights)