By Maria Carla Cernuto © 2014

The Challenge

 

Lying quietly in bed in a darkened motel room near the San Francisco airport, I kept repeating my psi dream intention: ‘Tonight I desire to experience and recall a dream that clearly presents the central image, or the one closest to the center, on the designated target page. I desire the dream to be as accurate as possible and very little, if any, extraneous material.’

 

Since I presumed the target was a picture in one of the many pages of a magazine that was in a sealed envelope, I intended for the psi dream to access only the picture on the right side of the page when the magazine was opened.

 

The magazine had been selected by a colleague and inserted into an opaque envelope that was tightly sealed and placed out of sight on a shelf in my motel room. A thin marker had been carefully and randomly inserted inside the magazine without opening it to specify the location of the psi target page. There were about 150 pages in the pictorial style magazine.

 

That night, this dream occurred:

 

Silver Shell

 

I am in a dark room, talking with someone I cannot see. I hear this unseen presence say, ‘Here is a long silver spoon that is used for fishing.’ I do not see anything, but then a portion of the room becomes lit and I realize that I am in a dream! The only item that I can see is a large square table. I approach the table and see, in the center, an object that resembles a large seashell. It appears to be silver or silver-white, and has a 3-D concave circular shape with fan-shaped grooves, a small hole, and thick edges.

 

I am impressed by its luster and think of it as being very beautiful. I pick it up, and to my surprise, feel that it is heavy. I now know that it is not a seashell. I place it back on the table. Then, on impulse, I raise my hand and swiftly strike hard on the object‘s edge! I am amazed to see it flip up high, rotate over and over, and slowly fall back toward the table.

 

I hear a loud clang when it hits the table. It wobbles, slows down, and becomes motionless. I say to the unseen presence nearby: ‘No fish is big enough for that silver spoon; it could be better used as a large tray or a plate.’ The silver tray or plate is very shiny and seems real. I begin to wonder if I am actually awake in the room standing at the table, and not in a lucid dream.

 

Then my awareness shifts to being in bed. The room is dark; I had not been walking around. I turn on the bed light. There is no table in the room. There is no silver tray or plate on the desk at the end of the room… I had just returned from an exceedingly vivid lucid dream!

 

The lucid dream seemed to have the desired characteristics of a very clear central image, was brief, and had no extraneous material. The act of striking the dream object seemed to be an attention calling act signifying ‘hitting’ the target. The act of feeling and lifting the object called attention to the object‘s characteristics of what it was and what it was not. But was this the correct image?

 

Immediately after waking up, I carefully sketched the dream image and recorded the lucid dream scenario. Later, in a high state of anxiety I grabbed the sealed envelope, tore away the tape, removed the magazine, and flipped it open to the page at the marker. There it was, the silver shell dream image! In the exact center of the target page was a pewter plate on a display case with a design exactly like a seashell. My sketch was nearly identical to the plate.

 

The curved lines and hole I had sketched resembled a portion of an overlapping image, a candleholder, in the target picture. The entire page was an advertisement for Gorham Pewter items: forks, spoons, plates, cups, and the like. There was a caption at the top of the page: ‘Gorham makes today a beautiful day for pewter.’

 

Below this caption in small print were several sentences with words extolling the pewter‘s ‘mellow glow,’ its ‘distinctive hand-polished patina,’ ‘classical elegance,’ and the ‘full beauty of this timeless metal.’

 

On the left is the sketch as recorded in my dream journal and on the right is the actual silver plate shown in the exact center of the target picture.

 

 

Silver Shell certainly made my night beautiful. It gave me confidence for the formal experiment I was participating in a few days later as part of my official involvement with remote viewing and psi research. In 1977, I was involved in research monitored and evaluated by physicists exploring the potential of psi communication with a submarine at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California

 

The Sub Communication Experiment

 

The submarine communication experiment had two aspects. The experiment would explore the potential for contacting a submarine from land in a shore-to-sub mode and contacting land from the sub in a sub-to-shore mode. For the shore-to-sub mode, two remote viewers would attempt to remote view sites in the San Francisco Bay area while onboard a deep diving submersible (the ‘sub’) while it was at sea in 500–1,000 feet of water near Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, 500 miles from San Francisco. The sub would remain at sea for two days.

 

For the sub-to-shore mode, someone on shore would attempt to either remote view or psi dream the content of randomly selected target pictures in sealed envelopes that were onboard the sub. I was the psi participant selected for the sub-to-shore portion of the sub communication experiment.

 

Coded printed messages were associated with the Bay Area sites and the on-board target pictures. If a correct site or picture description could be matched in a corresponding codebook, then its associated printed message would have been transmitted and received. The onboard sealed target pictures would remain unopened until the research team returned to SRI several days after the sub returned to port. The experiment yielded positive results; we had demonstrated the potential for psi communication with a submarine.

 

Learning from Silver Shell

 

The Silver Shell lucid dream provided more than confidence in double blind psi dream protocols. It may have provided hints about how lucid dreams can represent waking state reality. For Silver Shell, I interacted with a dream image to obtain accurate information about the three-dimensional characteristics of the object represented in the center of the picture.

 

I had sensed the dream ‘object’ visually-its shape, color, and dynamics. I heard the clang the ‘object’ made when I struck it. I manipulated the ‘object’ by feeling, touching, lifting, and hitting it. The image in the dream also invoked an aesthetic sense of the object‘s beauty

 

But how did I see the target picture in that opaque sealed envelope? I could not have accessed the information telepathically from someone else‘s knowledge, because no one knew the target picture‘s content. There was no sender. If the dream image was not of the real target, it had to be a representation of it.

 

This realization led me to suspect that a duplicate of consensus or wakingstate reality exists, somewhere, in some type of global or universal information dimension or domain outside of ordinary three-dimensional reality. This information source probably has holograph-like attributes. It is as if an intention creates an alignment, a resonance, or a frequency matching, with this duplicate or virtual representation of three-dimensional reality and a search or scanning process is initiated.

 

When a correlation between an objective or intention and an appropriate element is located in this hypothetical ‘representative space,’ the associated information is presented to sensory and memory regions of our mind and reconstructed, perceived, and understood. In Silver Shell, I interacted with something like a virtual image to extract information about the picture‘s central image.

 

I wonder if incidents labeled as psychokinetic (PK) illustrate how intention can, in certain circumstances, interact and manipulate three-dimensional reality. Perhaps the effect occurs through a highly focused objective and emotional alignment between the intention and virtual representation of the object.

 

Shifts occur in an information-frequency domain, not in space-time. Energy and momentum are not actually involved; they only appear to be. Some forms of psychic or spiritual healing, including lucid dream healing experiences, may also involve shifts of appropriate information elements of an individual‘s ‘mirror image’ in such a holographic representation.

 

Silver Shell did not have a PK aspect…or did it? Something that may be related to PK, a synchronicity, may have occurred. I thought it was unusual that such a clear and unambiguous target image would be on the exact center of the target page, as desired. When I paged through the entire magazine several days after the experiment, I could not find any other page that had a clear image in the exact center.

 

About a third of the pages contained only words and the other pages had small pictures off-center or large pictures with no distinct image at the center. So I wonder, did my strong intention for a clear image in the center of the page create a ‘field resonance’ that influenced the individual selecting the target magazine, and the random placement of the thin marker at perhaps the only page in the magazine that could result in a clear and unambiguous dream image?

 

Did a retro-causal effect occur involving the subconscious cooperation and actions of others? If so, was this an example of synchronicity involving the manipulation of ‘real’ space-time in how the best page came to be randomly selected? Did the dream become lucid in order to more directly interact with the appropriate aspects of a representational domain of three-dimensional reality?

 

As I reviewed Silver Shell, I wondered if it could be an example of precognition. Psi perception of only an object‘s visual appearance may not provide sufficient information for accurately knowing what it represents, or its meaning. Something additional is needed: appropriate clues on the target page. These could be the setting or the context of the picture‘s elements if perceived accurately.

 

Clues could also be available if there are printed words on the target page that can be read along with psiperception of the picture‘s image. If precognition is the operative psi mode, then words on a target picture would be seen and read during the future feedback phase. Since words are not the focus of psi experiments involving pictures, the potential effect of these words, even if on the pictures, would not be discovered.

 

When I examined the actual target picture, I realized that it had printed words. This gave me an opportunity to see if the words may have assisted in improving my understanding of the target image. The words in the advertisement focused on metal objects and beauty. Both of these attributes were emphasized in the dream.

 

My original perception of the image in the dream was a seashell, which became corrected as the dream dynamics progressed. This shift in meaning is suggestive of reading the words at the time of feedback and hints of precognition as the psi mode for this lucid dream. Even the actual dynamics at feedback may be relevant when I flipped open the magazine to the page at the marker. In the dream, I hit the silver shell and see it ‘flip up high.’

 

It seems that the sequence of my visual activities during the feedback phase had a role in how the dream was presented. When I opened the magazine to the target page, I was initially aware of the structurally dominant long silver-handled forks on the left side of the picture. I quickly shifted my gaze to the center and stared at the silver shell plate.

 

The recognition of my dream silver shell as the desired target image created an emotional shock. After a few moments, I scanned the entire full-page advertisement and only then read the words on the page. This flow of attention is similar to how the dream content unfolded.

 

This similarity, I believe, provides a strong hint that precognition was the primary psi mode during this lucid dream. It as if my future actions, physical and emotional, fed back into my dreamtime to enhance the connection and accuracy of the psi dream. This observation tracks the findings of Daryl Bem, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, as described in his paper, ‘Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2011).

 

The words ‘long silver spoon that is used for fishing’ spoken by the unseen presence at the beginning of the dream probably resulted from some of the target picture‘s objects, long silver handled forks, being perceived and subconsciously associated with memories of similar looking fishing lures referred to as silver spoons. These objects were not presented as images in the dream, probably due to my desire to have only the central image on the target page enter the dream‘s field of view.

 

 

The unseen presence may have represented a non-visual communication mode linking with the linguistic processing part of my mind. Maybe the presence was symbolic of an aspect of me that can shift between the seen and the unseen, between different levels of reality, and between the real and the representational.

 

Silver Shell was more than a confidence inspiring lucid psi dream. Silver Shell is still very much alive in my subconscious, and continues to inspire new dreamtime exploration. This lucid dream connected me with deep regions within my own psyche and with unknown sources of information beyond.

 

Dale E. Graff

PSI- SEMINARS-INITIATIVES

Email: [email protected]

Web Site: www.dalegraff.com