I’ve been deeply interested in dreams my whole life. I’ve been equally interested in extrasensory perception and the paranormal. Sometimes I wonder why. Is it my 8th house stellium or the fact that two of my grandparents were born in the sign of Aquarius? Is it because my dad watched a lot of Star Trek when I was a kid? Is it because I may have seen a ghost in my bedroom when I was 6 years old?
I don’t know the reason why some of us are more curious than the rest of society about “edge science” or taboo topics. But over the last few years it does seem as if the rest of society may be catching up, and that’s exciting to me, both personally and professionally, as a dreamwork practitioner with a special interest in extrasensory perception.
I published an audio chat on Patreon recently in which I shared my motivation for researching more in-depth the neurobiology of “dream ESP”: my own capacity seems to be evolving, and more dreamers have been reaching out to me sharing their own experiences with dream ESP and asking questions.
In the audio chat, I share how my personal dreamwork practice over the last many years seems to be having an influence on my ability to receive information, feelings, and sense perceptions in dreams that seem to come from elsewhere in space and time. For those of you who don’t already know, my journey as a dream researcher began many years ago when I realized I was having dreams that seemed to be precognitive. (You can read more about that here and here.) Along the way, I also became interested in the therapeutic potential of dream images and dreamwork, and studied that, as well, and became a Certified Natural Dreamwork practitioner.
I didn’t expect the two would overlap, but they did and do.
As I spent time working with the images and feelings coming up from my subconscious in dreams — fully focused on uncovering, processing, and healing old wounds for the purposes of personal growth — I was surprised to discover along the way I was becoming even more open to receiving images that didn’t seem to “belong to me.” Not always, but sometimes.
Precognitive dreams are relatively easy to validate since we eventually live into some of those images. However, telepathic dreams — dreams in which you are essentially receiving information from another individual’s first-person felt or sensed experience — are less easily validated. They usually appear as “coincidences,” deja vu, or unexpected communications between you and a friend who just happens to share with you a perception or feeling she had recently that lines up with a recent dream you had. For instance, two nights ago I dreamt I babysat a friend’s dogs. The next day a different friend I haven’t spoken to in weeks apologized for her absence and explained she had been away, dog-sitting her sister’s dogs.
One of the many reasons why studying the science of dream telepathy proves challenging in a lab setting is because validating these types of telepathic events is near impossible to plan and document. Instead, scientists have used more suited-to-the-lab types of tests (ie. skilled psychic individuals separated in different rooms; one views an image and attempts to send it to the other sleeping) that I believe are problematic for proving telepathic abilities in the average person.
Frankly, I’m less interested in scientists proving in a lab that dream telepathy is possible, and more interested in what seems to me the correlation between healing the nervous system and the development of extrasensory awareness. Or, perhaps “development” isn’t the right word; rather that there seems to be an “unmasking” or “defogging” of our experience of reality that includes extrasensory perceptions once we start clearing out our old emotional junk. There also seems to be a correlation between nervous system disability and proclivity toward ESP. (This seems contradictory, but isn’t. I won’t be diving into that today, but hope to in a future article.)
I think we all have a basic capacity for extrasensory perception but that our emotional reactivity, hyper-vigilance, and/or nervous system overwhelm masks that capacity. Engaging in inner work, nervous system regulation, and embodiment practices may clear the way for perceiving more of the “hidden,” if we so choose.
I didn’t start working with dreams to become more psychic. Yet, the more I’ve worked with dream material, the more psychic I seem to be. In parallel to dreamwork, I have also been working to heal my own nervous system.
As I mentioned above, there seems to be an overlap in therapeutic benefits.
I believe the overlap may have something to do with strengthening the right brain through working with images and feelings, as well as increasing our capacity for empathy once we are no longer in a highly dysregulated survival mode of functioning (more on that here and here.)
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Through my regular dreamwork practice and thanks to the insights offered me by my dreamwork practitioner, I have become much more aware of just how emotionally reactive I have been and can be and which types of scenarios tend to trigger me into fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. With this knowledge and practice, I have become a little less reactive over time, and have learned how to slow down my processing of encounters, both in dreams and in waking life. This slowing down allows me more time to experience what I am sensing and feeling in the moment, rather than quickly determine in my mind what is happening based on my anxieties, opinions, established beliefs, or old stories. It’s very subtle work, and not easy. I will likely be working on deprogramming my conditioning for the rest of my life or at least for the next 50 years as it took that long for my brain to program all those stories, anxieties, and beliefs into my system.
When you start doing dreamwork (especially Natural Dreamwork which is an embodied approach to working with dreams), you begin to realize how much of your experience of your dreams is filtered through made-up stories in your mind. Then you realize how much of your experience of LIFE is filtered through the stories made up in your mind. (Sigh.) Another name for these stories is “assumptions” or “things I just know because” or “known facts about this type of person” or “ways I wish people acted.”
We have fogged up our sensory system with mental stories. We assess, decide, behave and respond from those stories more than we do from what we are actually perceiving with our five senses. We do this for good reason: to make sense of a fast-paced world, to protect ourselves from perceived harm, and to position ourselves powerfully or strategically in interpersonal relationships for our own safety or gain.
Yet, we do it too much, to our detriment. We are ruining relationships with our stories. We are burning out our nervous systems with our stories. We are training ourselves to become robots who never experience the world around us as new, because we already know how the world is, and we therefore shut ourselves down to sensing it.
A simple example: Yesterday, I heard a series of noises on the roof my house. I felt my heart rate increase significantly. Over the last few years, I’ve had various stressful issues with my roof. I felt my body tense up, concerned that this noise indicated yet another roof issue. I noticed the physical responses in my body as well as the story beginning to play in my mind about an animal in the crawl space. I caught myself doing this and purposefully slowed my breathing. I decided to just wait and listen for the noise. When the noise came again, I walked around the room, listening and looking, engaging with my senses rather than the nervous system response to the story in my mind. Soon, I noticed the open window and felt the breeze coming in. I smiled. I remembered something. This happened once before. About six months ago I hung a tapestry up in my bedroom. It’s attached to a wooden rod. When I open up the windows in my bedroom on a windy day (something I don’t do except for in early spring or early fall), the rod bangs against the wall. Mystery solved. Disaster averted.
Except it was never a disaster to begin with. That was just a story based on my anxiety about the roof.
Ok, nice story. But what does any of this have to do with ESP?
If you are seeking to expand your extrasensory perception, you have to start by becoming more aware of your five known senses. This is a crucial first step. One must notice how quickly our mind hijacks our sensory processing. We must learn to slow down the processing by engaging more deeply with our senses, what we are truly seeing, hearing, touching, etc. We must learn how to interrupt the stories of the mind and instead allow our senses to inform us.
Once we learn better how to do that — interrupt the story and sense into the experience — we find that we may feel differently about what we are perceiving with our senses.
Extrasensory perception is even more subtle than our five senses and it’s even more likely to be obscured by emotional reactivity and overwhelm. The first step to perceiving more of the “hidden reality” is engaging differently with the revealed reality, that which we can perceive with the five senses.
I have found for myself and my clients that dreamwork provides a container for becoming more aware of one’s own tendencies toward reactivity, as well as a training ground for engaging in a more deeply sensed and felt way with environments or material that previously seemed to activate their reactivity.
It can be easier to uncover and face our most tender wounds at first via a spontaneous dream experience; especially if that uncovering happens with an empathetic other who is able to deeply listen and guide you. It can also be easier to re-learn how to experience the world around us as new (with our senses), slowly, in a dreamwork session once a week than at the office, while engaged in a heated debate with your boss.
Then we take what we learn in the dreamwork session out into the waking life world to practice.
So, maybe the title of this article seems a little like click bait. It’s not. It’s true that dreamwork expands your capacity for ESP, but it takes time, effort, and a willingness to first engage with some very difficult personal material. It often happens by-the-way, and unexpectedly, as a kind of side benefit to a desire to engage in deep inner work. Maybe even better than expanding our capacity for ESP is the fact that dreamwork expands our capacity to be in meaningful relationship with other humans, animals, and nature.
Of course, there are shortcuts to developing your own ESP, but I don’t recommend them. What I have learned for myself and what the teachers I respect most also seem to say is that consciousness expansion takes time, maturity, discipline, and humility. It may, in fact, be the reason why we are alive, so it makes sense that it could potentially take a lifetime to realize.
