6) Dream Telepathy: Hope, Renewal and What I Have Learned From This Investigation

The methods and actions we must engage in to prevent the creation of dangerous 21st century technologies and mind-control devices will necessitate a transpersonal evolution, or metamorphosis in humankind's ethical responsibility to resist the creation of this knowledge and its technical application.

In resume` I now realize that my experience of dream telepathy in 1964 was a transpersonal experience, because it involved a connection with the consciousness of another person. I had received a cry for help and tried to answer it. This is indeed the correct response for a transpersonal psychologist or 21st century shaman. But the culture I was born into refused to acknowledge my experience of dream telepathy as something real, which redirected my focus. I began to investigate my experience of dream telepathy as merely anomalous. "Anomalous experiences," as Krippner points out in his autobiography "Dancing with the Trickster," "are uncommon and/or inexplicable episodes in one's life" (Krippner: 5, 2003); whereas "transpersonal experiences are those experiences that bring the cognized self into question" (Krippner: 3, 2003).

In choosing to focus solely on the physical or objective aspect of my experience of dream telepathy, I turned away and thereby missed investigating its transpersonal aspect, failing to bring my cognized self into question and explore my healing vision. Through the years my unconscious continued to try to get me to see the light, or rather the shadow side of my experience. But I was too thick headed or stubborn or full of youthful exuberance to understand what my unconscious was telling me even though the answer was being given to me every night in an 11-year recurring dream I began having in 1973.

In that dream I wandered from classroom to classroom searching for where my class was being taught. After checking every classroom, I looked in the library for a book that could help me to further understand the answers I was seeking. But I could not find any book that spoke to my concerns. Again I was sent wandering, eventually finding myself in the basement. There in the darkness I met my shadow, my damion, my guardian, and I ran from it. Refusing to look at it, refusing to confront it, confer with it or accept it. It would take me another 30 years to have the courage to acknowledge my shadow. Indeed I have been running from my shadow for 40 yesrs, and this is why my experience of dream telepathy has eluded me.

Only now are my thoughts coming together. Only now as the work of integrating my shadow begins has my odyssey of transpersonality finally started to awaken within me an understanding of transcendence and the social responsibility of the telepathic dreamer. I was prevented from grasping the meaning of this dream in 1964 for two reasons. 1) I mistook it for a call to investigate and explain the mechanism of dream telepathy, as well as unify science and religion, missing its intended transpersonal message as a gift to be shared with my community. But where was this community? I experienced no sense of communion with this gift. Instead I was sugjected to suspicious persecution, and/or well intended efforts to cure my delusional psychosis. And, 2) my friend in this dream did not die because her father (a medical physician), rescued her, creating a happy ending. Had I lived in another time or another culture, my friend might have died, a tragic experience that would have awakened within me the relization that I needed to hone my visionary experience so that I could have greater forethought to prevent future events like this from occurring.

Reference

Krippner, Stanley. (2003). "Dancing With the Trickster: Notes for a Transpersonal Autobiography." International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 21, 1-18.