An energetic conduit seems to exist between our astral body and our physical body—the silver cord—and it may be sending visible images from distant locations directly into our pineal gland, not unlike a fiber-optic cable. Floating piezoluminescent crystals in the pineal gland may then release these images in a three-dimensional matrix of light. The retinal tissue in the pineal gland might be capturing these photons and sending them to the brain, where they are unscrambled into visual images if they remain stable enough. Ancient mystery schools and religions seemed singularly obsessed with pineal gland symbolism—and believed that awakening this gland was the ultimate key to spiritual advancement. Many people continue to be able to observe their environment and think normal thoughts while they are clinically dead, showing no brain waves whatsoever. Some people have appeared in a ghostly form to their loved ones while having a near-death experience, and both people report the same sequence of events afterward. Dr. Michael Newton found remarkable consistency in reports from the afterlife among thousands of people he had hypnotized into a superconscious state. Dr. Ian Stevenson identified over three thousand children who gave specific, detailed and accurate memories of past lives—and even looked like the people they claimed to have been before.
There does appear to be a parallel reality out there that we all have access to—at least on some level. Is there any way you can travel into this alternate world and experience this unbound awareness for yourself—without actually dying? Are you already doing this every night when you dream? Is there a way you can bring your conscious awareness with you and become lucid—so you have full control over your experience? I believe there is—because I’ve done it myself. Certain techniques do allow you to recognize you are dreaming while it is actually happening, “wake up” in the dream, and take conscious control of your experience. After having had enough of these experiences personally, I can’t help but wonder if the real world behaves more like a lucid dream than we ever imagined—thanks to how interconnected we are in the Source Field.
This adventure started when I was still a high school student, and I read Lucid Dreaming1 and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming 2 by Dr. Stephen LaBerge—from Stanford University’s Sleep Research Center. Dr. LaBerge was able to scientifically prove that you can be fully conscious in a dream, while being physiologically asleep and dreaming at the same time. Dr. LaBerge also works with Dr. William Braud, who performed many experiments proving our mind-to-mind connections—as we already discussed in chapter 2.
In 1952, Dr. Eugene Aserinsky found that in the lighter stages of sleep, we all experience rapid eye movement, or REM. If we get awakened from this state, we usually report having just experienced a vivid dream. By 1973, Dr. Montague Ullman and Dr. Stanley Krippner published ten years of pioneering experiments in dream telepathy at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, with more than one hundred participants. In these groundbreaking studies, ordinary people could concentrate on specific images while awake, and send them to people who were dreaming. The dreamers then experienced symbols and events in their dreams that were obviously similar to the senders’ message.3
Drawing upon the experience of over nine hundred lucid dreams of his own, Dr. LaBerge developed exercises that would allow you to wake up, or become lucid, while you were dreaming in his lab. Once you achieved the lucid dreaming state, you would signal Dr. LaBerge by repeatedly moving your eyes back and forth—since the rest of your body could not move due to sleep paralysis. By signaling LaBerge with your eyes, counting to ten and signaling again, he was able to confirm that your physical time and dream time are just about the same. LaBerge also reported on cases where people seem to share the same dream—although this has not been investigated as rigorously as dream telepathy.
Accounts of “mutual dreaming” (dreams apparently shared by two or more people) raise the possibility that the dream world may be in some cases just as objectively real as the physical world. This is because the primary criterion of “objectivity” is that an experience is shared by more than one person, which is supposedly true of mutual dreams. In that case, what would happen to the traditional dichotomy between dreams and reality?4
In his book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert Waggoner gives a variety of compelling examples in which people shared the same dream environment, and reported the same experiences, in isolation, after they woke up. This again implies that dreams are not merely psychological artifacts, but are occurring in a parallel reality, of sorts—where more than one person can have experiences and interactions with others at the same time.5 This idea was popularized in Christopher Nolan’s highly successful 2010 film Inception.
The key to Dr. LaBerge’s technique, which he called Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming, or MILD, was that after you wake up naturally from a dream—which might be in the middle of the night—you say, internally, “Next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember to recognize that I’m dreaming” as you fall back asleep. At the same time, you review the dream in your mind, but then change the ending, by imagining yourself becoming lucid—realizing that you’re actually living, walking and breathing in a dream. LaBerge also said the best way to tell if you were, in fact, dreaming was to simply look at something, look away from it and then look back again. In dreams, the “before” and the “after” view will always be different enough that you can easily spot the changes.
I did not succeed right away when I began practicing Dr. LaBerge’s techniques, but I kept on trying . . . and eventually struck gold. In a lucid dream you can fly, levitate objects, walk through walls, and manifest anything you want to see or experience—even change your entire environment with the snap of a finger. I remember one time I was in a department store, and I levitated a whole series of big gray plastic garbage cans and started orbiting them around each other like a little solar system. Everyone in the store stood there in awe. Some were even moved to tears. The experience is so fantastic and awe-inspiring that if you haven’t actually done it yet, there really are no words to describe it. However, Dr. LaBerge cites a great quote from Hugh Calloway’s report of a lucid dream he had in 1902, at age sixteen, which began his research into consciousness.
Then the solution flashed upon me: though this glorious summer morning seemed as real as real could be, I was dreaming. With the realization of this fact, the quality of the dream changed in a manner very difficult to convey to one who has not had this experience. Instantly, the vividness of life increased a hundred-fold. Never had sea and sky and trees shone with such glamorous beauty; even the commonplace houses seemed alive and mystically beautiful. Never had I felt so absolutely well, so clear-brained, so inexpressibly free. The sensation was exquisite beyond words, but it lasted only a few minutes and I awoke.6
Indeed, many of Dr. LaBerge’s own participants ended up concluding that they had “never really been awake before.” This may be what will happen to you when you experience a direct awareness of the Source Field, and your greater identity within it, for the first time in your conscious, waking life. And of course, no drugs or occult rituals are required to do this—just a consistent effort to practice Dr. LaBerge’s technique.
In one particularly fantastic lucid dream, I was soaring high over the treetops, gliding through impossibly vibrant colors in the sky and connecting with a gorgeous woman who kept appearing along the way. I desperately wanted to write down everything that was happening to me, as I knew I would probably forget most of it otherwise. So, I took a break, landed on solid ground, and manifested a pen in my right hand and a notebook in my left. In my dreaming trance, I somehow hoped, or believed, that I could bring the notebook back through with me, and it would show up there next to me in bed. I frantically scribbled down what was going on. Eventually I went back and read my notes—but they were all in French. I had studied French in high school, but I was nowhere near good enough to have written anything like this. And yet, I absolutely knew that everything was written properly. I could read it back, out loud, and I kne
w exactly what I was saying. My thoughts still felt the same, but now they were coming out in French. I could speak to anyone in French, at any speed—and I knew it would be perfect. It was very, very strange. When I woke up, the papers were gone, of course, and my French was no better than usual. But what if, I wondered? What if I could somehow bring that new ability back “through the veil” of dreaming?
In 2007, an eighteen-year-old Czech motorcycle racer named Matěj Kůs got knocked out in an accident. Before the crash, he only knew the most basic phrases in English, but after he woke up, he was speaking perfect, fluent English with the paramedics. Peter Waite, the promoter for the Berwick Bandits, his racing team, was quite surprised.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was in a really clear English accent, no dialect or anything. Whatever happened in the crash must have rearranged things in his head. Before his crash, Matěj’s use of the English language was broken, to put it mildly. . . . Yet, here we were at the ambulance door listening to Matěj talking to the medical staff in perfect English. [He] didn’t have a clue who or where he was when he came round. He didn’t even know he was Czech.7
Sadly, Kůs quickly lost the new ability, and could not remember anything that happened during the accident, nor for the next two days afterward—just as if he had been in a hypnotic trance. This was not the only case, however. On April 12, 2010, the U.K. Telegraph featured the story of a Croatian girl who awoke from a coma speaking fluent German, even though she’d only just started studying it in school—and she no longer could speak her own native Croatian. Psychiatrist Dr. Mijo Milas explained his view on this intriguing phenomenon:In earlier times this would have been referred to as a miracle; we prefer to think that there must be a logical explanation—it’s just that we haven’t found it yet. There are references to cases where people who have been seriously ill and perhaps in a coma have woken up being able to speak other languages—sometimes even the Biblical languages such as that spoken in old Babylon or Egypt.8
In a lucid dream, out-of-body experience, remote viewing session, hypnotic trance, coma or near-death experience, our thinking minds may be using the Source Field much more than when we are conscious. This appears to give us much greater access to the information stored within the Source Field—including the ability to speak various languages. Many people don’t realize that Edgar Cayce, while in a hypnotic trance, could give people funny little sayings or even have complete conversations with them in their own language—despite being unable to speak anything but English in his waking mind. He is estimated to have spoken over twenty-four different languages while in trance.9
Dr. LaBerge believes that every landscape, every object, every character and every situation in the dream represents some aspect of yourself. A dream is a message from your subconscious mind and/or “astral self,” and the language is symbolism. In a dream, you are presented with various problems from your waking life, but they often appear in disguise. If someone is abusing you in your waking life, they may become a monster in your dream, as one example. Everything in the dream is symbolic, and every symbol is some part of who you are—or some situation that is happening to you in your waking life. The basic aspects of this symbolic language are commonly understood among dream researchers.10 Nothing is more frustrating than watching people share dreams in which the earth is being destroyed, and then treat it as a prophecy of real events that are about to happen in the world—rather than a reflection of some massive change that is about to happen, or has already been happening, in their own lives.
So when you run into terrifying, threatening and aggressive characters in a dream, don’t think of it as a nightmare. You can train yourself to recognize that such frightening situations must be dreams, and then use them as triggers to become lucid. Dr. LaBerge says those evil characters ultimately represent some aspect of yourself that you have not forgiven and accepted. If you learn the art of lucid dreaming, you can quickly turn your worst nightmares into the greatest triumphs. Dr. LaBerge shared his own experience of how you do this:I dreamed that I was in the middle of a classroom riot; a furious mob was raging about, throwing chairs and trading punches. A huge, repulsive barbarian with a pockmarked face, the Goliath among them, had me hopelessly locked in an iron grip. . . . At this point, I recognized I was dreaming, and remembering what I had learned from handling similar situations previously, I immediately stopped struggling. . . . I was absolutely certain about the proper course of action. I knew only love could truly resolve my inner conflict, and I tried to feel loving as I stood face to face with my ogre. At first I failed utterly, feeling only revulsion and disgust. He was simply too ugly to love: that was my visceral reaction. But I tried to ignore the image and seek love within my own heart. Finding it, I looked my ogre in the eyes, trusting my intuition to supply the right things to say. Beautiful words of acceptance flowed out of me, and as they did, he melted into me. As for the riot, it had vanished without a trace. The dream was over, and I awoke feeling wonderfully calm.11
As LaBerge and others have said, the dreamer often experiences blinding white light as the villainous character merges back into them—and he or she awakens in tears. I have had multiple experiences like this, and was very deeply moved.
Nearly every day, I hear a story that people are becoming more aware . . . more attuned to the consciousness of the world and its effects. I believe this is no accident: It appears that our thinking minds are being energetically transformed by outside forces that are affecting our entire solar system, as we will explore in later chapters. And this raises an intriguing question: Is it possible that the rules of the dream world could also apply to the physical world? If we all share a collective consciousness, are there practical things we can do to improve the world, by nothing more than the power of our own thoughts? Could we improve the lives of others by improving ourselves? Can we change the dream when we change our own minds? There is rigorous evidence that we have much more power to improve the overall health of the people on earth than we ever believed.
Heal the World by Healing Yourself
Over a two-year period, groups of about seven thousand people gathered three different times—and during these meetings, they were able to reduce all acts of terrorism, worldwide, by a phenomenal 72 percent. Obviously, the tactical value of such a winning strategy would be of massive importance to national security. Were these people diplomats, politicians or military planners plotting out the next offensive? Were they peace activists, diving down into the trenches and rescuing people in a hail of gunfire? Were they protestors, gathering in front of government buildings and demanding change? What exactly did they do?
The answer may well change everything we think we know about the way the Universe really works. These people got together and meditated—with thoughts of love and peace. Bear in mind that this was a scientific study, published and accepted in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. They ruled out cycles, trends, weather, weekends, holidays and all other variables—the 72 percent reduction in terrorism had to be caused by them meditating, and nothing else.12 In another example, violent crime in Washington, D.C., was decreased by up to 23.6 percent over a two-month period in the summer of 1993, as the number of participants rose from eight hundred to four thousand—despite the fact that violent crime had been increasing before they met. As soon as their meetings ended, the crime level started going back up again.13 The likelihood that this effect could have been caused by a “chance variation in crime levels” was less than two parts per billion, and all other factors—including temperature, precipitation, weekends, and police and community anticrime activities—were ruled out.14
As of 1993, fifty different scientific studies had rigorously proven that this effect really works—over the preceding thirty years. They were published in mainstream peer-reviewed journals and showed the meditators had created improvements in health and quality of life, as well as decreases in accidents, crime, war and other such factors.15 I propose that this effect works because we�
�re all sharing the same mind, to some degree. There appears to be a balance between private thoughts and information we acquire directly from the Source Field. Let’s not forget the Institute of HeartMath’s experiments, in which those people with the greatest coherence affected the brain wave patterns and biorhythms of others who were close to them. If seven thousand people can reduce worldwide terrorism by 72 percent, this suggests the Source Field is significantly biased in favor of positive emotions rather than negative ones.
Therefore, any time someone tries to tell you it’s hopeless, that “we’re all going to die,” that some dream or prophecy said we have no ability to control the outcome of our future here on earth, I highly recommend you don’t fall into the trap of indulging in such faceless fear. We can scientifically prove that by simply focusing on a positive attitude in your own life, you are helping to reduce war, terrorism, suffering and death. There is also compelling evidence from Russia that severe weather, earthquakes, volcanic activity and the like can also be reduced by the effects of consciousness, as we will see.
Dr. LaBerge thought the ogre attacking him in his dream was really someone else: the villain, the enemy, the other. However, once he became lucid, he realized the ogre was just a mirror of himself—and love was the key to solving the problem. Now we know that simple meditations on love and peace can actually change the behavior of people out in the world—ordinary folks living their lives, apparently making free will decisions. These are people we will never see, never meet, never know. When even a small number of us move into a state the meditators called “Pure Consciousness,” there is less death, less terrorism and less warfare. According to Saint John of the Cross, from sixteenth-century Spain, “a little of this pure love is more precious to God and the soul and more beneficial to the Church, even though it seems one is doing nothing, than all these other works put together.”16 By “works” he means anything we normally would do in our attempts to help the world. In a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, a revered English priest in the fourteenth century referred to this same state as “Pure Contemplation,” and said, “The whole of mankind is wonderfully helped by what you are doing, in ways you do not understand. . . . It is more profitable to your friends, natural and spiritual, dead or alive . . . [and] without it all the rest is virtually worthless.”17
The Source Field Investigations Page 10