Lucid Dreaming Part 14

Two features of this OBE report are particularly suggestive. One is that upon "leaving his body," the astral projector walked around "his bedroom" and looked into "the kitchen." This, added to the fact that he expected to find his own sleeping body in bed upon his return, indicates that he conceived of himself as being in a non-physical ("astral") body, but in an environment identical to the physical world. It is exactly this kind of contradictory and confused mixture of mental and material elements that is also characteristic of the pre-lucid or naive dreamer. Secondly, note the projector's failure to consider the possibility that if his physical body wasn't in the bed he was looking in, that might not be the real bed he was looking at, or the real bedroom, or the real kitchen, either.

These kinds of minor lapses of rationality, and the failure to question the anomalies that confront one, seem to me quite characteristic of non-lucid dreaming and OBEs. Here is an account by Keith Harary, a person who has impressed me in the waking state as quite rational and of superior intelligence, and who is, as well, unusually proficient at inducing OBEs:

One night I awoke in an out-of-body state floating just above my physical body which lay below me on the bed. A candle had been left burning on the other end of the room during the evening. I dove for the candle headfirst from a sitting position and gently floated down toward it with the intention of blowing out the flame to conserve wax. I put my "face" up close to the candle and had some difficulty in putting out the flame. I had to blow on it several times before it finally seemed to extinguish. I turned around, saw my body lying on the bed and gently floated back and back into it. Once in the physical [body] I immediately turned over and went back to sleep. The next morning I awoke and found that the candle had completely burned down. It seemed as if my out-of-the-body efforts had affected only a non-physical candle.9

The fact that Harary considered the other objects as physical, and the candle alone as non-physical, is similar to the way in which normal dreamers account for anomalies occurring during a dream.

In addition to the anomalies that people tend to accept in OBEs, there is another similarity to dreaming. During the OBE, they are convinced that what they are experiencing is actuality. For example, the gentleman with the "astral mother" testified that he had learned through his OBEs that "the real Me is apart from, and working through, my physical body. I now know for sure that we have two bodies."10 This feeling of knowing "for sure" is quite characteristic of the tenacity with which people cling to the conclusions drawn from their out-of-body experiences. Wherever else they may differ, persons who have had out-of-body experiences are quite unanimous in being certain that these were not dreams. Yet, during ordinary dreams, we are usually convinced of the actuality of what we later discover to have been delusions.

An example of one of my own experiences is, I believe, especially revealing in regard to the similarities between dreaming and OBEs. Previously, I had had several lucid dreams in which I dreamed I could see my "sleeping body" in bed. I refer to them as lucid dreams rather than OBEs because that is how I interpreted them at the time. In my opinion, lucid dreams and OBEs are necessarily distinguished by only one essential feature: how the person interprets the experience at the time. The primary qualification for an OBE is the sensation of being outside the body. Perhaps it would be less misleading to describe this experience as an "out-of-body sensation" (OBS) rather than an "out-of-body experience." So, if you believe, in some sense, that you are "out of your body," you are having, by definition, an "out-of-body" experience. This definition sidesteps the question of whether or not you have actually left your physical body. However, no experience guarantees the actual existence of the thing in question. In the dark forest, one may experience a tree as a tiger, but it is still in fact only a tree.

According to the traditional psychology of Tibetan Buddhism, all of our experiences are subjective and thus, by their very nature, no different in substance from what we call "dreams." This is also the point of view of the cognitive psychology of the modern West. Granting this premise-and scientifically speaking, it is impossible to argue with it-it would be difficult to name any experience that was not a sort of dream.

Consequently, my a.s.sumption that OBEs are necessarily a certain species of dream made the following experience all the more startling. Aware that I was in a dream, but with the image of what I had been dreaming about fading, I tried to hold onto it. Throwing myself into the darkness, I found myself crawling down a dark tunnel on my hands and knees. At first I could see nothing, but when I touched my eyelids I was able to open them, and I suddenly found myself floating across the room toward Dawn, who was sleeping on the couch. I looked back to see my "body" asleep on the living room floor. Somehow, I was completely convinced that this was not a dream, but that I really was seeing my sleeping body. Dawn awoke and started to speak, and I felt myself magnetically drawn back into the body asleep on the floor. When I arrived, I got up in this body (which I took to be my physical body) and excitedly said to her, "Do you know what just happened to me? An out-of-body experience of the genuine kind!" After this I was looking through a stamp book, when I found myself flying (like Superman) in the air over Germany.

I was shocked to awaken a few minutes later in my bed and realize that I had been sleeping all along. By now my brain was working well enough to note the general implausibility of my previous interpretation of the recent events. I could see, for instance, the inconsistencies implied by my belief that the body I had seen asleep on the floor, and entered from my supposed "other body," was actually my physical body. Were it not for the physical impossibility of traveling to Germany once I had opened a stamp book, and the waking testimony of Dawn, I might still be convinced that what had happened was not a dream. And this in spite of all "reason" to the contrary. What we know "for certain," reason is powerless to doubt. When you see your hand in front of you, can you really doubt it is your hand? Actually, what we know for certain only means what we a.s.sume or believe we know. My "out-of-body experience of the genuine kind" serves as a reminder that we can be totally mistaken about what seems indubitable.

The lucid dream is sometimes considered an inferior form of the OBE. But I believe the opposite may be the case, as may have already occurred to readers who remember the progression of stages through which children develop an understanding of "dreaming." To review briefly: at the earliest stage, children believe that dreams take place in the same (external) world as the rest of their experiences. Having learned, mainly through their parents, that dreams are somehow different from waking experiences, they next treat dreams as if they were partially external and partially internal. This transitional stage gives way to a third stage in which children recognize that a dream is entirely internal in nature-a purely mental experience.

These developmental stages refer, of course, to the conceptual terms in which children think of the dream after awakening. While dreaming, children and adults alike tend to remain at the first stage, implicitly a.s.suming that dream events are external reality. Likewise, "astral projectors," who explicitly believe that what they are experiencing is external reality, are at this same stage. However, most typical OBEs, with their somewhat contradictory mixture of the mental and the material, would seem to provide examples of the second stage. Only with the fully lucid dream does the dreamer arrive at the third stage of conceptual clarity: realizing that the experience is entirely mental and clearly distinguis.h.i.+ng the dream from the physical world.

In support of the notion that OBEs are generally the result of misinterpreted dream experiences, let me offer a personal observation. In about one percent of the lucid dreams in my record, I felt I was in some sense out of my body. In every case, when examining the experience after awakening, I noted some deficiency in either my memory or my critical thinking during the experience. In one such situation, I tried to memorize the serial number of a dollar bill to verify later whether I really had been out of my body or not. When I awoke, I couldn't recall the number, but it hardly mattered. I remembered that I hadn't lived in the house I thought I was asleep in for several years. In another instance, I was floating near the ceiling of my living room, looking at some photos that I knew I hadn't seen before-on top of a cabinet-given my habitual confinement to walking on the floor rather than on the ceiling! My hopes of verifying this paranormally gained information evaporated in a flash when I remembered upon awakening that I hadn't lived in this house for more than twenty years!

In contrast, during most of my lucid dreams I can remember where I am sleeping (if it matters) and usually have as accurate a notion of the date as I normally have while awake. Frequently, I know what time it is to within a few minutes.

From this I suggest that imperfect brain function during REM sleep may at times give rise to incomplete lucidity during dreaming. This state is characterized by partial amnesia, inadequate reality testing, and interpreting the experience as being out-of-body rather than dreaming.

All in all, the quality of reasoning during OBEs seems to resemble Nietzsche's description of the reasoning typical of primitive humanity, and also of dreamers today: "The first causa which occurred to the mind to explain anything that required an explanation was sufficient and stood for truth."11 This uncritical state of mind is like the one in which many pre-lucid dreamers accept implausible proof that they are not dreaming. I believe a similar state of mind characterizes the reasoning whereby people convince themselves that they really are out-of-body.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that the manner in which OBEs are typically initiated makes the out-of-body interpretation seem almost beyond questioning: the person finds oneself awake in bed, and then, with no more notice than a feeling of vibration or melting, one finds oneself "peeling," "stepping," or "floating" out of the body. Most people accept uncritically that what seems to be the natural explanation is the true explanation of the experience.

In accordance with Nietzsche's contention above, "leaving one's body" is the first causa to occur to the dreaming mind, and it is accepted on face value as the explanation. One of the reasons people might be likely to label such an experience as out-of-body rather than dreaming is that it seems to happen while they are awake. Obviously, if they are awake, they can't be dreaming, and if they aren't dreaming, they must be doing what it seems they are doing-traveling "out-of-body."

This all seems straightforward enough, except for one awkward fact: in a variety of circ.u.mstances, it may be extremely difficult to determine whether you are asleep or awake, only dreaming or really seeing. These states of confusion are especially likely to occur during the sleep paralysis, a condition that sometime results when a person partially awakens from REM sleep and finds himself unable to move. This occurs because the part of the brain that prevents him from acting out his dreams has for some reason temporarily continued to function even though the person is otherwise "awake." Although the physiological basis for sleep paralysis has only recently been uncovered, the state and the hallucinatory experiences a.s.sociated with it have been known for many years. For example, Eleanor Rowland described some of her experiences during this confusing blend of dream and reality in a 1908 paper ent.i.tled "A Case of Visual Sensations During Sleep":

It often happens that dream persons issue from behind a real door, a dream hand moves along a real wall, and a dream figure sits upon the real bed. Since my vision is so accurate, I cannot rea.s.sure myself by being certain that I am asleep. Nor am I in a slumber deep enough to accept any dream that comes without comment. My reasoning powers are active at such times, and I commune thus with myself: "No one can have opened the door, for you know you locked it." "But I see a figure distinctly standing at my elbow, and it has knocked on the door twice." "You are probably asleep." "How can I be? I see and hear as distinctly as I ever do." "Why, then, don't you push the figure away?" "I will. Here I am doing it." "No-you are not doing it at all, for you can see that you have not moved an inch." "Then I am asleep after all-the figure is not there, and I need not be afraid of it."12

The lesson to be learned from all this is that it is not always easy to determine which world you are living in at any given time: telling dreams from reality is no easy matter. Neither biological nor cultural evolution has prepared you to any significant extent for this particular task. Distinguis.h.i.+ng one state of consciousness from another is a cognitive skill learned in exactly the same way you learned, as a child, to comprehend the gibberish of sounds that became your native language-by practice. The more practice you gain in lucid dreaming, the easier you will find it not to be fooled into thinking you are awake when you are dreaming. The more experience you have had with recognizing false awakenings, sleep paralysis, and other phenomena a.s.sociated with REM sleep, the more likely it is that when you "leave your body" you will recognize it as a lucid dream.

This, in fact, is what we have observed with most of our experienced oneironauts. They quite frequently describe lucid dreams initiated from brief awakenings within REM periods as "leaving their bodies," even though we all agree that while this terminology effectively captures the way the experience actually feels, it does not presumably describe what really happens.

As an example of the peculiar form taken by these experiences, consider one of Roy Smith's laboratory lucid dreams. While lying on his right side, he began turning to the left and felt as though he had "left his body." He saw a scene of a field, and signaled lucidity about seven times. Next appeared a glowing reddish light, so he turned to the right toward it, and flew down an alley. At this point, he resumed signaling although he was later unsure of exactly how many times he had moved his eyes-it might have been nine. In any case, he continued to fly down the alley until he saw the moon-full and strikingly luminous. Upon seeing the stars above, he decided to try to unite them with the moon. But it was too late. Already he felt his body paralyzed in bed. He wanted to wake up and signal someone, and after what seemed like a very strenuous effort, he succeeded in awakening and pressed the call b.u.t.ton.

Before I offer an explanation for what I believe may actually be happening in experiences of this kind, I would like to describe one of my own wake-within-REM-initiated lucid dreams. It was the middle of the night, and I had evidently just awakened from a REM period since I effortlessly recalled a dream. I was lying face down in bed, drowsily reviewing the story of my dream, when suddenly I experienced a very curious sensation of tingling and heaviness in my arms. They became so heavy, in fact, that one of them seemed to melt over the side of the bed! I recognized this distortion of my body image as a sign that I was reentering REM sleep. As I relaxed more deeply, I felt my entire body become paralyzed, although I could still seem to feel its position in bed. I reasoned that this feeling was most likely a memory image and that actual sensory input was cut off just as much as motor output was. I was, in short, asleep. At this point, I imagined raising my arm and experienced this imagined movement as if I had separated an equally real arm from the physical one I knew to be paralyzed. Then, with a similar imagined movement, I "rolled" out of my physical body entirely. I was now, according to my understanding, wholly in a dream body in a dream of my bedroom. The body I had seemed to leave, and which I now dreamed I saw lying on the bed, I quite lucidly realized to be a dream representation of my physical body; indeed, it evaporated as soon as I put my attention elsewhere. From here, I flew off into the dawn. ...

I would say that having awakened from REM sleep, I was (as always) experiencing my body image in a position calculated by my brain. Since this calculation was based on accurate information about the physical world obtained through my awake, and therefore functional, senses, the body position I experienced corresponded to my actual position of lying in bed. Since during sleep (particularly REM), sensory input from the external world is actively suppressed, my sensory systems at the point when I returned to REM sleep no longer provided my brain with information regarding the physical world. Thus, my brain's representation of my body image was no longer constrained by sensory information concerning my body's actual orientation in physical s.p.a.ce and I was free to move it in mental s.p.a.ce to any new position that I chose. With no sensory input to contradict me, I could freely "travel" anywhere in mental s.p.a.ce.

Let us consider, for comparison, an alternate theory: OBEs as astral projection. The idea of the astral world was brought to the West and popularized by Madame Blavatsky in the last century. According to her doctrine of Theosophy, the world is composed of seven planes of existence, and each plane is made up of atoms of varying degrees of refinement. The physical world is the coa.r.s.est of all. On the next level, the "etheric" plane, we find a second body-but this is not yet the "astral body," only the "etheric body" normally attached to the physical body and serving to keep all seven bodies in communication. The next plane is the "astral one," where we find the body we have been looking for. The astral world is made of astral matter, which is superimposed on physical matter, and everything in the physical world has its counterpart in the astral world. However, there are more things found on the astral plane than on the physical, including a menagerie of spirits, elementals, and discarnate ent.i.ties of all sorts. What is more to the point here is that the astral body is supposed to be able to travel on the astral plane, free of the physical body, and since the astral world is supposed to contain a copy of everything in the physical world, it would seem an easy matter to gain information from distant places by speedy travel there. (There are many difficulties with the astral-projection theory of dreaming and OBEs. Just to name one, I can recall lucid dreams in which I viewed a dream representation of my bedroom that was missing a good deal of "astral" matter: a whole wall and window, in fact!) But my intention here is not to expound the theory of astral projection, rather to translate their terms into mine.

What occultists have termed "astral travel," I am calling "mental travel"; instead of "astral world," I say "mental world." As for the mysterious ent.i.ty elsewhere referred to as the "astral body," "second body," "double," or "phantom," I regard it as an experiential reality that I have identified with the body image, but the most straightforward term for it may simply be "the dream body."

This dream body is our mental representation of our actual physical body. But it is the only body that we ever directly experience. We know, by direct acquaintance, only the contents of our minds. All of our knowledge concerning the physical world, including even the a.s.sumed existence of our "first" or physical bodies, is by inference.

Just because our knowledge of external reality is indirect, it should not lead us to conclude that mind alone exists or that the physical world is merely an illusion. Due to its representational nature, it is our mental world that is the illusion. Our mental experiences can be compared to watching television. The televised events are merely projected pictures having only the semblance of reality. Whether or not the events we see on TV have any correspondence with actual events is another matter. When, for instance, we watch a news program, we trust we are witnessing the depiction of events that actually occurred. If we see a man killed we expect him to be, in fact, dead. In contrast, when we see an actor "killed" on a TV melodrama, we consequently expect him rather than his widow to collect his paycheck!

In both of these cases, what we experienced were illusions, in the sense that the events that apparently took place on our TV set were only the images of events that may or may not have actually occurred in external reality. This is the necessary condition of all of our experiences: as mental representations, they are the images of the things they represent-not the things themselves. It is informative to specify the relation between the image and the thing it represents. Our two examples represent opposite degrees of possible correspondence. In the case of the actor, there was no relations.h.i.+p between the theatrical "death" and actuality. In contrast, the news program showed us the image of an event that precisely corresponded to the occurrence of an actual event. Thus we accept the news as accurately expressing reality. One can easily imagine TV productions possessing degrees of truth anywhere between the two extremes we have considered, such as a dramatic enactment of a true story, or a news program mistakenly reporting that a man has been killed when he has in fact only been wounded.

Now imagine a person confined to a room; his entire experience of the outside world is limited to what he or she sees on television. Such a person might well regard TV as the primary reality, and "the outside world" as a derivative and unnecessary hypothesis.

I am suggesting by this metaphor that we are all in a very similar situation: the room we are confined in corresponds to our minds, and the TV programs to the news and fantasies of the external world brought to us by our senses. All of the foregoing references to television images equally apply to the mental images out of which we construct our worlds.

In the terms I have proposed here, being in the body means constructing a mental body image. Because it is based on sensory information, it accurately represents the body's position in physical s.p.a.ce. While dreaming, we are out of touch with our bodies and consequently liberated from the physical constraints imposed by waking perception. Thus, no awkward sensory facts are present to limit our movement in mental s.p.a.ce, and we are free to move out of the spatial orientation defined by "being in the (physical) body."

The part of us that "leaves the body" travels in mental, not physical s.p.a.ce. Consequently, it would seem reasonable to suppose that we never "leave our bodies" because we are never in them. Where "we" are when we experience anything at all-OBEs included-is in mental s.p.a.ce. Milton's famous phrase, "The Mind is its own place," goes not quite far enough. The mind is not merely its own place, the mind is its only place.

We are now ready to address an empirical aspect of the OBE phenomenon. Persons undergoing OBEs frequently believe they are paranormally perceiving happenings taking place in the physical world. Unfortunately, in most cases, this belief takes the form of an untested a.s.sumption. Like the events we see on TV, what we see during OBEs could have any degree of correspondence with physical reality.

The generally unquestioned a.s.sumption underlying OBEs is that the person is actually situated, in an unexplained way, somewhere in the physical world other than his or her physical body. An implication of this is that what the persons sees while "out-of-body" ought to be an accurate reflection of physical reality, entirely a.n.a.logous to ordinary perception. Rarely are either of these a.s.sumptions subjected to a rigorous test or, for that matter, to any test at all. These are empirical questions that can and should be settled by scientific experiment.

Are there any scientific data that might allow us to arrive at a verdict on the claim that OBE vision is valid? In fact, a good deal of relevant evidence is available, along with a number of studies of OBE vision that meet the standards of rigorous control required by exact science.

There are two ways of broadly viewing the results of these studies. First of all, we have the summary of Karlis Osis, Director of Research at the American Society for Psychical Research. This society, in an effort to produce evidence for survival after death, undertook an extensive investigation of OBE perception.13 In the course of the study, approximately a hundred subjects, all of whom believed they were proficient in inducing OBEs and possessed paranormal perceptual abilities during OBEs, were tested under controlled conditions. While confined to one room, the subjects induced OBEs and "visited" a distant target room, attempting afterward to describe in detail what they had "seen" while there. A comparison of their reports with the actual contents of the target room revealed, in all but a few cases, absolutely no indication of any correspondence whatsoever. In other words, in the great majority of these cases, there was no evidence supporting accurate OBE perception or the validity of the subjects' convictions that they had actually left their bodies. Moreover, these subjects were described by Osis as being "the creme of the claimants" of OBEs. I believe the results of this study strongly support my "OBE as misinterpreted lucid dream" theory.

As for OBE vision, in the words of Dr. Osis, "the bulk of the cases seem to be a mirage." At best, OBE vision seems a highly variable and unreliable mode of perception "ranging from fairly good (i.e., clearly distinguis.h.i.+ng some objects) to complete failure (i.e., producing very foggy or totally incorrect images)." Moreover, Osis added, "of those individuals in our studies who have shown some signs of OBE perceptual power, we did not find a single one who could see things clearly every time he felt he was out of body."

The great majority of alleged cases of OBE vision apparently show no greater degree of perceptual ability in regard to the external world than we would expect from ordinary dreams. This might, by itself, suggest that the nature of OBEs would require no additional explanation than that already offered.

But the existence of even occasional accurate OBE perceptions is a fact that still needs to be explained. The traditional explanation holds that OBE vision is a form of direct perception by means of the senses of a non-physical body. But there is an alternate explanation that is philosophically sound, economical, and (most importantly) in agreement with observation. It does not, in the first place, a.s.sume a condition of unvarying accuracy during OBE or lucid dream vision. Instead, it suggests that like all other mental imagery, this form of perception may be relatively more accurate at some time than others. Mental experiences can be ordered on a spectrum ranging from little or no relation to external reality (e.g., "hallucinations") at one end, to near perfect correspondence with actuality (e.g., "perception") on the other end. Moreover, there can be any degree of relations.h.i.+p in between, and it is somewhere in this middle ground that dreams and OBEs generally fall.

What I am proposing is that the select minority of accurate OBE reports are simply cases of dream telepathy. To some people, this may seem like explaining the mysterious in terms of the more mysterious. Dream telepathy is a fact only barely established and in no way satisfactorily understood or explained. A question for future research is whether lucid dreamers and OBE-ers are more liable to experience telepathy than ordinary dreamers.

Taken together, the out-of-body experiences with which we have become familiar do not seem to have lived up to the claim that they would "challenge our most basic a.s.sumptions concerning the nature of reality." I have saved for last what may be the most mysterious of the reality-shaking phenomena of the world of dreams: I am referring to what are variously called "mutual," "reciprocal," or "shared" dreams.

These are the perplexing experiences in which two or more people report having had similar if not identical dreams. In some of these cases, the reports are so remarkably alike that one is almost compelled to conclude that the dream sharers have been present together in the same dream environment. If this does occur, it would imply that at least in certain cases, the dream world-and likewise the dream bodies within it-can possess some sort of objective existence. On the other hand, we may only share dream plots in mutual dreams, not the dreams themselves. Let us examine a cla.s.sical account of ostensible reciprocal dreaming.

In Elmira, New York, on Tuesday, January 26, 1892, between 2 and 3 A.M., Dr. Adele Gleason dreamed that she stood in a lonesome place in the dark woods and that great fear came over her, at which point she dreamed that John Joslyn, her attorney and friend, came to her and shook a tree by her, causing its leaves to burst into flame. When the two friends met four days later, Adele mentioned having had a "strange dream" last Tuesday night. John stopped her at once, replying, "Don't tell it to me. Let me describe it, for I know that I dreamt the same thing." At approximately the same time on Tuesday night, he had awakened from a no less strange dream of his own and written down the following remarkably similar account: He had found Adele in a lonely wood after dark, "apparently paralyzed with fear of something I did not see, rooted to the spot by the feeling of imminent danger. I came up to her and shook the bush, upon which the leaves that fell from it burst into flame"14

Although these two dream reports are remarkably similar, they are not quite identical. For example, Adele made a tree of what for John was only a bush; the leaves burned on her tree, while his turned to flame while falling. The original reports show other discrepancies as well. I would interpret this as an instance of shared dreaming as caused by Adele's telepathic transmission of an SOS, along with highly charged dream imagery to her friend. John, for his part, responded to his friend's call for help by telepathically initiating and sharing a visionary experience strikingly reminiscent of Moses' burning bush. This is a truly amazing tale of two dreams, yet it does seem to me more strongly supportive of the hypothesis of shared dream plots rather than shared dream worlds.

A somewhat more convincing anecdote is provided by Oliver Fox. "I had been spending the evening with two friends, Slade and Elkington," wrote Fox, "and our conversation had turned to the subject of dreams. Before parting, we agreed to meet, if possible, on Southampton Common in our dreams that night." Later that night, Fox claimed that he dreamed he met Elkington on the common "as arranged." So far, so good, "but Slade was not present." According to Fox, both he and Elkington knew they were dreaming, and commented on Slade's absence, "after which the dream ended, being of very short duration." Fox tells us that that when he saw Elkington the next day he asked him whether he had dreamed. "Yes," Elkington replied, "I met you on the Common all right and knew I was dreaming, but old Slade didn't turn up. We had just time to greet each other and comment on his absence, then the dream ended." This, to Oliver Fox's mind, "perhaps accounted for" Slade's "inability to keep the appointment." What happened to Slade? Fox was able to settle the mystery to his own satisfaction. When the two friends finally found Slade and asked him what had happened, he replied that he "had not dreamed at all."15

Intriguing as this particular case appears, it is marred by Fox's failure to report the exact time of occurrence of the two lucid dreams. Although the dreams are described as occuring on the same night, if they happened at different times (that is, if Fox and Elkington were not in REM sleep at the same time), it would favor the hypothesis of shared dream plots rather than a shared dream. In any case, Fox was unable to repeat "this small success" in mutual lucid dreaming and expressed the belief that "it is an extremely rare occurrence for two people to share approximately the same dream experience."

The examples we have so far considered were both once-in-a-lifetime experiences for the dream sharers. In contrast, there are suggestions that mutual dreaming abilities have been cultivated to a high level by a number of Sufi mystics. Aside from various stories of Sufi masters being able to appear in the dreams of anyone they choose, there is the report of a group of dervishes who explored the world of dreams on the island of Rhodes in the sixteenth century. The dervishes were presided over by a sheikh, "a certain Hudai effendi" who not only "practiced all the virtues, cultivated all the sciences and read books in the majority of Cla.s.sical languages" but "devoted himself to the cultivation of collective dreams." In an isolated monastery atop a small hill on the island, "master and disciples purified themselves bodily, mentally and spiritually together; they got into an enormous bed together, a bed which contained the whole congregation. They recited the same secret formula together and had the same dream."

A remarkable story is told of an encounter between this dream master of Rhodes and Suleiman the Magnificent, the sultan of Turkey. One day, during a military campaign in Corinthia, Suleiman found himself in a seemingly impossible dilemma, and none of his advisors could devise any plan of action whatsoever. Fortunately, the sultan remembered that Hudai effendi's emissary was still in his camp. Since the dreammaster had helped him in the past out of no less difficult circ.u.mstances, Suleiman summoned the dervish and, providing him with travel expenses and safe conduct pa.s.ses, asked him how many weeks he would need to journey to Rhodes and return to the imperial camp with the sheikh.

"The dervish gave an involuntary smile. 'Sire,' he replied, 'I thank you for the travel expenses and the safe-conduct. I have no need of them. True, the vulgar the island of Rhodes is far from here, but the venerated Sheikh Hudai is no distance from Your August Highness's camp. I undertake to summon him tonight, even before morning prayers.' "