1) Dream Telepathy: Searching for an Operational Mechanism to Explain Telepathic Dreaming

My life and interest in a science of consciousness became inextricably linked with Stanley Krippner's and Montague Ullman's investigations of dream telepathy 20 years before first meetig Krippner and 40 years before first meeting Ullman when, in the fall of 1964 I had an experience of dream telepathy. I drempt a female companion was suffering an appendicitis attack, a cry for help that my prior (telepathic) knowledge of this event would have been powerless to change had her dire circumstances not have had a happy ending.
http://www.issc-taste.org/arc/dbo.cgi?set=expom&id=00073&ss=1

A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: SEARCHING
FOR AN Operational Mechanism TO EXPLAIN TELEPATHIC DREAMING

Believing this dream was a call to investigate these kind of anomalous experiences I began searching for a way to understand the operational mechanism of telepathic dreams. My initial insight toward understanding this operational mechanism came to me shortly after I had this experience in 1964, although I am still working out the details. In a naive sort of way I conveived of consciousness as an infinite number of logic gates or points of decision. Visually we can compare this to the image of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome with its interlocking matrices spreading out in four-dimensional spacetime, whereby each branching pathway of this matrix would be a point of decision. This insight regarding the operational mechanism of telepathy is most likely incorrect. Still, in terms of our theoretical understanding of consciousness, this insight may provide us with a vision of hope, even if my thesis concerning the negative or shadow (in the Jugnian sense of the word) consequences of a science of consciousness turns out to be correct. We shall return to this image, and its hopeful insight, later in this blog.

In many ways my years of inquiry searching for an operational mechanism to explain telepathic dreaming has taught me little about this art and more about the political, social, economic and psychological motives that distort our present materialistic worldview and subsequently dominate EuroAmerican science. Transpersonal psychologists are not only familiar with this critique, but have often been the surgical victims of Occam's razor. Learning from this ideological surgery that investigations of alternate, transpersonal or shamanic states of consciousness are only tolerated as onominalistic fictions, which, to be valid (and thereby not beyond necessity), must be reduced to an epiphenomenon of the neurobiological information processing of the brain. This is because shamanic states of consciousness are only real to philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists as "social facts, or as "descriptive narratives," that are subsequently associated with the belief systems of prescientific populations. Hence we learn not to discuss these transpersonal or shamanic experiences with our conservative friends and colleagues unless,

1) We preface our statments of inquiry that we know alternate or shamanic states of consciousness are not physicall real. Or, risking confrontation, we are,

2) Prepared to present and discuss the empirical evidence (as their eyes glaze over.

Thus avoiding conversations like this saves uf from serving as a barrister in our own defense. Only two centuries ago our silence would have kept us from the garrote, the gallows, or becoming tied to a stake and set ablaze as a religious heretic. Consequently facing job insecurity, perpetual debts, ridicule and social isolation is today a great leap forward.