Part 3 Krippner: Field Theories of Consciousness, Dreams and Reality

Field Theories of Consciousness, Dreams and Reality
Krippner: Thank you for giving us that background, Mark. Now the Consciousness Project I just mentioned has been running for a couple of years, and they are finding out when there are major world events, these events in some way affect these radioactive devices and their emissions. But this also happens when, or just before there is an especially dramatic event, or an especially tragic event, thereby giving us clues that some kind of shocking world event is going to happen a few hours or a few days in advance. For instance, before the 9/11 attack occurred, the coherence of these machines increased; and the day the attack occurred the coherence was at its peak. This, of course, was an event that affected people throughout the world. Still I’m not claiming that this is an established scientific fact. There have been questions about the statistics, the reliability of the machines, the way the averages are being computed, so this is still a matter of some controversy.
The latest wrinkle to this is that after the 9/11 attack people began having an increased number of nightmares. A group I belong to, the International Association for the Study of Dreams, set up a free 800 number so that people could phone in and talk about their nightmares. This service was especially useful for parents of children who were having nightmares about being attacked. It is interesting that these nightmares are clustered and are effecting or coincide with the data of the Global Consciousness Project. We need to ask if there is a connection between these clusters of nightmares and the unusual behavior of these radioactive particles and some either triumphant or tragic event that is taking place. Once again this leads back to your question about a unified field of consciousness, Mark.2
I think that there is such a field of consciousness, but this is not something that is original with me. Even before William Roll started to talk about it, David Bohm was talking about the implicate order. This was a physical connection between all the events in the universe; and this is very different than what Bohm refers to as the explicate order.3 Consequently people that are advocates of field approaches to these strange phenomena are now suddenly having a lot of new ammunition or data that might hold up and show that something is going on that will help to explain some of these anomalies.
Schroll: Earlier this morning you mentioned the idea of the dreamtime from indigenous cultures, suggesting that some native tribes believe during the act of dreaming that we do enter another state of consciousness or another dimension. And you just now mentioned the work that is being done with these radioactive particles, and the peak events such as children’s nightmares. Has anyone done any research on the idea that this field of consciousness we have been talking about is where our dreams are actually taking place—that is, we are connecting with this larger field during our dreaming, or at least sometimes when we are in altered states of consciousness?4
Krippner: That would be a wonderful project. I don’t know where we would get the money for it. But there are certainly some dreams that give us a glimpse into the future, or far into the past. And you could make the case that these dreams are enabling the dreamer to make the connection with this global consciousness and that this is what enables these glimpses to take place. Sometimes people simply dream about what a loved one is doing at the time of the dream, all of that could be explained by this global consciousness field. I think that the instrumentation could be developed to study the effect.
The problem is it takes so much money to do work like this, and yet there is really nobody with money who wants to subsidize it. The nightmare project could be connected with the global consciousness concept for about $2,000. This is just a drop in the bucket in terms of significant research. Most of the parapsychology laboratories that were active when I entered the field back in the 1960’s are now out of business. There are so many projects that need funding—in the meantime well meaning people that have money really do not see topics like this as having a very high priority. Even though it would change the way that we look at the world, and the implications are tremendous for any number of scientific fields. So I like your idea. I think your model makes sense. Theoretically I think that some experiments could be done that would at least start to demonstrate whether or not you are on target.5
Schroll: Would it then be during particular times of dreaming, maybe during REM, when we enter into more—when we would be most likely to interface with this field of consciousness? You may remember when I recalled my own dream telepathy experience at the 21st Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness spring meeting6 and afterwards suggested one of the working metaphysical proposals I have used to get a cognitive grip on the mystery of psi:
If physical sense data and cognitive phenomena are invariant equivalents, what tells us that memory is stored within the neuronal activity of the brain and not within the electromagnetic wave frequencies external to the brain? That is, what tells us that what appears to be the storage of superimpositions of resonating neuronal patterns within the brain may be nothing but a reflection of these same invariant resonating process pervading the quantum potential wave forms representing the motion of the universe as a whole? It is our metaphysical assumptions founded on dualism supported by monistic materialism that tells us memory is stored inside the brain and not outside the brain, and nothing more (Schroll: 250, 1987; Schroll, 2001a).
In other words we assume our memories are stored just in the brain; another way to say this is our current paradigmatic assumption that the activity of symbolic cognitive content we associate with dreaming occurs in the brain. But, during fortuitous circumstances, we are somehow able to become aware of this larger field of consciousness. So I guess we would have to monitor people in the laboratory and see when these dreams are occurring, and what kind of brain activity is going on. We could also compare this to other ASC and see if similar kinds of brain activity are going on that allow us to interface with this larger field of consciousness. And who knows, we may need to throw out the idea all memory is inside the brain, and instead it involves a resonance with this non-local field.7
Krippner: These are the kinds of ideas that people in the field talk about regularly and bemoan the fact that there is no think tank where they could be subsidized to do actual work along these lines. So your ideas are creative, but as you know mainstream science is not picking up on these ideas—has failed to embrace this paradigm. Nor is any foundation or philanthropist interested in them. So who knows where these ideas will go? But what you are saying makes very good sense to me.