Since I was a young child, I have suspected a link between extrasensory perception and dreams.
The YA books with paranormal themes I loved and voraciously read as a kid strengthened this conviction.
Nonetheless, it would be many years into adult life that my unsupported theory (and wishful thinking) would show any evidence of truth.
My journey into dream research and my decision to become a dreamwork practitioner began with a psychic dream. It wasn’t the first psychic dream I’d ever had, but this particular dream’s resonance with waking life events the following day was strong enough for me to finally believe there was some significance to the experience.
In the 12 years since that dream, through independent research and direct experience, I’ve arrived at a moment that 8-year-old me would be super excited about: Extrasensory perception is a part of my own personal experience.
I believe dreamwork is to thank for the increase in occurrence, the expansion of my skills, and most important, the awareness and self-confidence required to know when I am “using” these abilities, and how.
It’s a funny statement that last sentence, isn’t it? The idea that I would not know when or how I am using these abilities?
Psi abilities often show up unexpectedly and, if you grew up in a Westernized country or culture, you may very well have been conditioned to ignore them, taught they weren’t real, and potentially, you were ridiculed for even believing in their existence, let alone attempting to hone your own skills.
I’m so sorry if that’s been your experience.
I believe that most humans have the capacity for psi abilities. I don’t know for certain what predisposes one particular human being to precognition and another to telepathy. I don’t know for certain if some human beings are, for instance, predisposed to psi abilities due to genetics, or, alternatively, acquire them as a result of childhood hypervigilance or trauma. Perhaps, some of us are simply more open to the possibility of ESP and therefore more aware of it when it happens.
One working theory I am actively researching is that dreamwork — the intentional nurturing of dreaming and recall of dreams — primes us for perceiving information differently than we do in our typical waking life interactions.
Through dreamwork — especially when the work occurs in a caring, warm, and non-judgmental relationship with a practitioner — we become differently aware of our environment, relational tendencies, sensory experiences, and feelings, both emotional and kinesthetic.
In our dream lives, some of us are already capable of special abilities or superpowers, whether it’s flying, levitating, or magic. In dreams, we may even take these abilities for granted — they just are. We indulge and delight in them. Isn’t it wonderful when that happens?
When I used to wake up in the morning after a flying or levitating dream, I did so with such glee, and then disappointment that I wasn’t able to achieve those feats in waking life.
In a dreamwork session, we might slowly and intentionally re-enter such a dream experience, and while there, purposefully notice our sensations, feelings, and images. We linger in those sensations and feelings. We ask ourselves where do we experience similar sensations and feelings in our waking lives.
You’d be surprised that you do. When we work such dreams, we start to realize — typically, through synchronicity and uncanny experiences during the day — that there is actually more of the magic in your waking life than you realize.
Dreamwork tunes us in.
The top 3 psi abilities you may develop if you decide to take your dreams seriously are:
Precognition
This is often the first psi ability awakened, realized, and developed through dreamwork. Once we start recalling and tracking our dreams, we have evidence for what many of us have likely experienced at one point or another already: a waking life experience that is very familiar … because something uncannily similar already occurred for us in a dream.
Telepathy
Have you ever woken up in the morning and shared your dream from the night before with your partner or friend only to realize that the two of you had either a similar dream or ones with similar themes?
This is the way telepathy gently awakens for people who are interested and aware. The more dreams you recall and the more you share them with others who actively recall their dreams, the more instances of this you will find. It happens more often than we realize simply because dreaming and dreamwork aren’t practices that the average person takes seriously or documents.
Bilocation
This is a psi ability that is a bit more complicated and requires a little more time and practice to become aware of in your dreams. Bilocation is when your conscious awareness is “inside” or from the point-of-view of another person, not “You.” One early manifestation of this is when you have a dream in which you believe you were in a time period, not this one, or in a place to which you have never travelled, but is vividly detailed in a way you couldn’t possibly have imagined just by watching movies or YouTube videos of that place.
When I started working my dreams, I began to realize how many overlays existed in my dreamscape; specifically, overlays of people I knew from waking life or places I was familiar with. In Natural Dreamwork, we slow down the dream, and we get curious about what we believe, at first, to be the story of the dream.
Was that really my mother in the dream?
Was that for sure my childhood home? How do I know?
Was she, for sure, mad at me? Or did her facial expression trigger me into believing that?
Was my dad really standing behind me? Did I see him? Did he speak?
Once you start questioning the stories you tell yourself about the dream characters and dream encounters, you realize how unsure you actually are of the dream content. A dreamwork practitioner comes to learn your emotional blindspots, too, the way a therapist might. She can ask you questions about the dream content, and the two of you can begin to peel back the layers of reactivity that may be impacting your clarity when recalling the dream.
The next step is questioning who we are inside our dreams. Are we our now self? Our child self? Are we even experiencing the dream from inside our own waking-life “I” perspective, or someone else’s?
Over time, you may start to realize that some dreams are dreams in which your consciousness has been transferred and you’re witnessing the world through the lenses of someone else, somewhere else, or in some other time. Some people eventually are able to develop this skill in a way that they can direct their consciousness elsewhere. There is overlap between this and remote viewing.
More than a decade of research and experience into dreams and dreaming has made me even more certain that dreams are a gateway to developing our psi abilities. It’s a journey I’ve very much enjoyed being on, filled with excitement and mystery.
What I didn’t realize at the start, however, was how much healing dreamwork would provide me, and how integral the healing is to the development of any extrasensory abilities.
It’s a theme woven into mythology and superhero stories: the wounded / traumatized/ lonesome hero who possesses or develops a superpower, but who discovers the superpower is not enough; that what he really desires and needs is healing. He requires love, belonging, and a feeling of being seen and known. He needs integration and wholeness. Dreamwork takes us on such a hero’s journey.
